Court decisions: Police have no duty to protect you
In an opinion column June 30, 2008, in The New York Times titled Guns and Democrats, Dan Schnur (national communications director for John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign) explores the Democratic Party's current reluctance to harp on gun control.Schnur's column offers nothing startling, since it's obvious to anyone who's been paying attention that the Democrats now view gun control as a loser. Bill Clinton himself attributed loss of majorities in the Senate and House in the '90's to Democrats' obstinate obsession with pushing gun-control legislation.
This tactical shift, however, shouldn't lull anyone into thinking the Democrats have abandoned their juggernaut drive for more and more senseless, useless gun laws, because they haven't. Schumer, Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy, both Clintons, Obama and the rest of their gun-hating ilk are as committed as ever to the ultimate elimination of the private ownership of firearms in America. They're just not talking about it right now.
Much more illuminating than Schnur's column was a reader's comment on it posted by Jay Simkin citing court decisions clearly holding that the government has no constitutional mandate whatsoever to protect you from being robbed, raped, injured or murdered by a criminal.
You're on your own for any sort of protection from thugs. Period.
That, of course, is the bottom line pointing to the absurdity of gun control, and argues forcefully that there should be no laws whatsoever legislating who can and can't own firearms.
At first glance that may seem like a radical's formula for chaos, freeing criminals to obtain firearms like candy. Actually, the only effect eliminating all the absurd gun-control laws would have is to relieve law-abiding citizens of the bureaucracy attached to firearms ownership. It wouldn't affect criminals at all, since criminals don't obey laws to begin with and have their own illegal sources for guns — usually simple theft.
The Brady Bill forcing gun buyers to undergo background checks, for example, is a failure and a fraud. It did nothing to prevent the gook who shot up Virginia Tech from legally buying a gun.
Nor did that silly little yellow form that preceded the Brady Bill do anything to prevent Hinkley from buying the gun with which he shot Reagan and Brady.
Mr. Simkin's comment:
Perhaps this opinion shift [Democrats and gun control] has occurred because it has become clear that: (a) "gun control" cannot be made to work, given that there are 250,000,000 firearms in the US, or nearly one for each of 300,000,000 residents; (b) the police cannot possibly protect everyone who needs that protection, or thinks it is needed.
In the United States, police forces do not have a legal duty to defend the average person. The US Supreme Court so decided in 1856. In the modern English of a 1982 Appellate Court decision: "there is no Constitutional Right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen. It is monstrous if the state fails to protect its residents against such predaotrs but it does not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, we suppose, any other provision of the Constitution." (Bowers v. Devito, 686F.2d616 [7th Circuit, 1982]). The Surpeme Court recently affirmed this doctrine — that the average person has no right to police protection - when it decided Gonzales v. Town of Castle Rock, Colorado (545 U.S. 748 [2005]).
These decisions mean that in the United States each person is responsible for his/her own protection. In other countries, the government may have a legal duty to protect the average person. I doubt that's the case: the cost of providing personal protection would be crippling.
Thus, "gun control" has always been deeply subversive of a U. S. resident's duty to look after his/her own safety. "Restraining orders" or "Orders of Protection" have always been a vast consumer fraud, as police have no duty to protect the beneficiary of such an order.
Thus, the Supreme Court did not go far enough. It should have struck down all bans on the ownership of firearms, by law-abiding persons, not just bans on handguns. More litigation will be required to do this.
In the wider world, "gun control" is a necessary precondition for genocide. It is impossible to murder hundreds of thousands unless the intended victims have been disarmed. In Rwanda — a small country in central Africa — 800,000 were murdered in just 119 days (7 April - 19 July 1994). Rwanda had (and, sadly, still has) "gun control" (Journal Officiel, Decree Law No. 12, 7 May 1979). The victims, almost all Tutsis, had been targeted prior to 1994. However, they could not get permits to buy guns. In a few cases, when intended victims did get guns, the murder squads (interahamwe) were forced to retreat.
In short, "gun control" remains an unconstitutional concept in the U. S. and a deeply — indeed lethally — dangerous concept in the wider world.
This is still so. The Black Africans of Darfur are murdered because no one will give them guns — e.g., AK-47 rifles — with which to defend themselves against goverment-backed murder squads (janjaweed). No foreign troops need put a boot on the ground. These rifles could be air-dropped. The janjaweed, finding themselves under fire, likely will run away.
Those who back "gun control" need to face reality. In the U. S. you can "rely" on the police and die. Or, you can become proficient with firearms and live.
Finally, the doings of criminals and lunatics must never set the standard by which the vast majority of law-abiding persons are governed. It is the grossest of moral perversions for the law to dictate that a law-abiding person may not own a firearm simply because criminals or lunatics abuse them.
Incumbents and candidates who do not recognize these realities do a profound disservice to the voters.
Perhaps this opinion shift [Democrats and gun control] has occurred because it has become clear that: (a) "gun control" cannot be made to work, given that there are 250,000,000 firearms in the US, or nearly one for each of 300,000,000 residents; (b) the police cannot possibly protect everyone who needs that protection, or thinks it is needed.
In the United States, police forces do not have a legal duty to defend the average person. The US Supreme Court so decided in 1856. In the modern English of a 1982 Appellate Court decision: "there is no Constitutional Right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen. It is monstrous if the state fails to protect its residents against such predaotrs but it does not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, we suppose, any other provision of the Constitution." (Bowers v. Devito, 686F.2d616 [7th Circuit, 1982]). The Surpeme Court recently affirmed this doctrine — that the average person has no right to police protection - when it decided Gonzales v. Town of Castle Rock, Colorado (545 U.S. 748 [2005]).
These decisions mean that in the United States each person is responsible for his/her own protection. In other countries, the government may have a legal duty to protect the average person. I doubt that's the case: the cost of providing personal protection would be crippling.
Thus, "gun control" has always been deeply subversive of a U. S. resident's duty to look after his/her own safety. "Restraining orders" or "Orders of Protection" have always been a vast consumer fraud, as police have no duty to protect the beneficiary of such an order.
Thus, the Supreme Court did not go far enough. It should have struck down all bans on the ownership of firearms, by law-abiding persons, not just bans on handguns. More litigation will be required to do this.
In the wider world, "gun control" is a necessary precondition for genocide. It is impossible to murder hundreds of thousands unless the intended victims have been disarmed. In Rwanda — a small country in central Africa — 800,000 were murdered in just 119 days (7 April - 19 July 1994). Rwanda had (and, sadly, still has) "gun control" (Journal Officiel, Decree Law No. 12, 7 May 1979). The victims, almost all Tutsis, had been targeted prior to 1994. However, they could not get permits to buy guns. In a few cases, when intended victims did get guns, the murder squads (interahamwe) were forced to retreat.
In short, "gun control" remains an unconstitutional concept in the U. S. and a deeply — indeed lethally — dangerous concept in the wider world.
This is still so. The Black Africans of Darfur are murdered because no one will give them guns — e.g., AK-47 rifles — with which to defend themselves against goverment-backed murder squads (janjaweed). No foreign troops need put a boot on the ground. These rifles could be air-dropped. The janjaweed, finding themselves under fire, likely will run away.
Those who back "gun control" need to face reality. In the U. S. you can "rely" on the police and die. Or, you can become proficient with firearms and live.
Finally, the doings of criminals and lunatics must never set the standard by which the vast majority of law-abiding persons are governed. It is the grossest of moral perversions for the law to dictate that a law-abiding person may not own a firearm simply because criminals or lunatics abuse them.
Incumbents and candidates who do not recognize these realities do a profound disservice to the voters.
Well said, Mr. Simpkin. Those incumbents must be removed from office permanently and those candidates never elected.
It's high time the American people put a stop to this gun-control idiocy entirely.
And it's high time the people recognized the truth about their cops, often criminals themselves:
The statement To Protect and Serve emblazoned on most squad cars is nothing but a baldfaced lie.
The only one who can protect you in this society is you.
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Court's historic gun ruling affirms our most basic freedom
In the first major decision on gun rights in U. S. history, the Supreme Court of the United States yesterday shot down the District of Columbia's draconian 32-year-old ban on the private ownership of handguns — ruling once and for all that American citizens have an individual right to own guns, not a collective one limiting such ownership to entities affiliated with governments.The District's gun law was among the nation's harshest — and silliest — denying its citizens the right to protect themselves against criminal invasion of their very homes.
Typical of the approximate 20,000 gun laws already on the books across the nation, the District's foolish restrictions did absolutely nothing to reduce crime or protect the law-abiding citizenry.
Washington, D. C., has been for decades, and remains the murder capital of America. That dubious distinction will likely get adjusted downward now that its citizens are allowed to arm themselves against the predators who so far have enjoyed the government's blessing to prowl its streets and suburbs with carefree impunity.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for four colleagues, said the Constitution does not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home."
National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre announced immediately after the decision that the NRA will file lawsuits in Chicago, all its suburbs and elsewhere to eliminate the current hodgepodge of discriminatory gun-control laws.
"This is a great moment in American history," LaPierre said.
"It vindicates individual Americans all over this country who have always known that this is their freedom worth protecting. Our founding fathers wrote and intended the Second Amendment to be an individual right. The Supreme Court has now acknowledged it. The Second Amendment as an individual right now becomes a real permanent part of American Constitutional law."
U. S. Supreme Court Patriot Heroes:
Chief Justice John Roberts
Justice Antonin Scalia
Justice Samuel Alito
Justice Anthony Kennedy (who swung in the right direction)
Justice Clarence Thomas
Dissenting Dolts:
John Paul Stevens
Stephen Breyer
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
David Souter
That latter group of liberal scum doesn't deserve the title "Justice" before their names. They should be vilified and condemned by every fair-minded American for yet another radical left-wing attempt to legislate from the bench.
The high court has managed to pussyfoot around any clearer interpretation of the issue since the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791.
The amendment reads:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual's right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.
Whatever reason the Founders had for prefacing the meat and potatoes of the amendment with that introductory phrase ("A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state..."), it has served for decades as the tenuous toehold for tyrannical gun-control fanatics to argue that possession of firearms is limited to some kind of military outfit rather than private citizens.
Finally, for the first time in American history, Justice Scalia has parsed the grammar and syntax of the Second Amendment into the only meaning that makes any sense, and the nation's highest court has settled the matter once and for all.
Scalia logically reasoned that the "militia" reference in the first part of the amendment merely "announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia." He dismissed any exclusionary aspect of it by reasoning that the Constitution's framers were afraid the new federal government would disarm the populace, as the British had tried to do.
Click HERE for a graphic detailing Scalia's interpretation of the wording, contrasted with the ridiculous flights of fancy from the dissenting Stevens.
The narrow majority highlighted how the nation is split between rational Americans who believe the United States Constitution means exactly what it says, and a large element of liberal radicals who would twist its meaning to their socialist/communist purposes.
The natural right of a people to privately own and keep firearms — not only to defend themselves against criminals, but to take up arms against the government should it become tyrannical — is so basic to the continued existence of human freedom that even the slightest common sense would dictate that this decision should have been unanimous.
Yet it wasn't. It was politically split among liberal and conservative factions, with only the swing vote of Justice Kennedy assuring that common sense and freedom would prevail. That's a piss-poor outcome from what should be a nation's "court of last resort" for determining the quality and extent of a people's freedom.
The very concept that ownership and use of firearms in a free society should be limited to an arm of the government is a rank absurdity that can only be likened to putting a fox in charge of the henhouse.
What the hell were those four dissenting idiots thinking?
They were thinking politically rather than Constitutionally — that's what they were thinking. And in doing so, their petty politics endangered America's most basic safeguard of its citizens against victimization by criminals and oppression by a tyrannical government.
John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter have forever marked themselves as traitors to freedom and the Supreme Court's Dirty Four.
Background
The law adopted by the District of Columbia's city council in 1976 barred residents from owning handguns unless they had one before the law took effect. Shotguns and rifles could be kept in homes if they were registered, kept unloaded and either disassembled or equipped with trigger locks.
Quite simply, the law rendered citizens effectively defenseless in their own homes against criminals — thugs who assuredly would be armed, since criminals don't obey laws. That's what makes them criminals.
Finally fed up with such idiocy, Dick Anthony Heller, 66, an armed security guard, sued the District after it rejected his application to keep a handgun at his home for protection in the same Capitol Hill neighborhood as the court.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District ruled in Heller's favor and struck down the handgun ban, saying the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to own guns and that a total prohibition on handguns is not compatible with that right.
The District appealed that decision to the U. S. Supreme Court, much to the consternation of many gun-control zealots, who feared the high court would concur with the lower court.
Their fears were obviously justified, and point to the logical conclusion that those zealots damned well knew all along that the amendment applied to private citizens. But when did a gun-control nut ever care about the truth? Never.
The issue caused a split within the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney supported the appeals court ruling, but others in the administration feared it could lead to the undoing of other gun regulations, including a federal law restricting sales of machine guns. Other laws keep felons from buying guns and provide for an instant background check.
Opponents of the law made the obvious complaint that it prevented residents from defending themselves.
Astoundingly, however, they put up with such nonsense for 32 years, while spokesmen for the District ventured the absurd claim that no one would be prosecuted for a gun law violation in cases of self-defense — ignoring the fact that the law made the mere possession of a handgun a prosecutable crime.
Anyone who would believe such an illogically hogwash assertion is in serious need of a course in basic reality.
If a law's on the books, no matter how patently stupid it may be, you can damned well know some politically motivated, zealous prosecutor will file charges under it.
And even if he loses, you'll pay the price for defending yourself from a criminal — and a price for defending yourself in court.
Apropos to the current political season, conservative talk radio temptress Laura Ingraham neatly summed up in her daily Laura's E-Blast newsletter what is no doubt the nation's gun owners' pleasure with the decision:
"ARMS ARE NOT JUST FOR HUGGING! Justice Kennedy blew the Gitmo and child rapist cases but at least went the right way on the Second Amendment in the Heller case. I love how the anti-gun crazies are now contending that they, too, have always believed in the right to have a gun in the home for self-defense. Meanwhile, Barack Obama continues to be the candidate of presto-chango! One minute he thinks the D.C. gun ban is constitutional, the next he's giving moderate praise to the Supreme Court for striking it down. I am celebrating the Heller ruling by heading to the gun range today!"
You'll not likely be alone, Laura, as thousands of other gun owners joyously celebrate likewise.
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