For how long now have we been told that the banning of assault-style weapons would lead to losing ALL of our guns? It\u2019s the \u201cnose of the camel in the tent\u201d threat, right? Scary stuff, the awful Democrats, if elected, will be coming for our guns. Good friends and neighbors of mine at Potlatch have voiced this fear to me. These are country people who, like me, have shotguns and rifles as part of their culture. They shoot predators and hunt deer. They don\u2019t wield AK-47s and engage in gun violence.<\/p>\n
As I wrote recently, we continue to kick the can down the road instead of tackling big issues. We continue to be hostage to the NRA crowd and those driven by the \u201cculture wars\u201d and politics. Electing the \u201cright\u201d people and spreading falsehoods apparently trumps public safety and common sense.<\/p>\n
Paradoxically, this scenario plays out in the face of the fact that most gun owners and others have no problem with reasonable regulation of guns and gun ownership. The problem is clearly in Congress where a minority of the leadership has the leverage and the votes to block gun legislation. By doing nothing they keep getting reelected and retain their power over the rest of us. The \u201cnose of the camel\u201d analogy has served them well; if you ban military type weapons it follows that the government will come for your shotguns! It just makes sense, right? Except it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The Second Amendment does not sanctify gun rights as being absolute. In District of Columbia v. Heller<\/em> (2008) the Supreme Court affirmed the right of individuals to keep handguns in the home for self-defense but clearly signaled that gun rights, however, were not unlimited. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote \u201dLike most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. [It is] not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.\u201d The decision went on to cite \u201cpresumptively lawful laws\u201d that prohibited firearm possessions by dangerous people, forbidding guns in schools and government buildings and imposing conditions on commercial sales of firearms.<\/p>\n It is interesting that in 1939 the Supreme Court in United States v. Miller<\/em> upheld the regulation of sawed-off shotguns which, it might be argued, were the AR-15s of their time, and one of the favorite weapons of bank robbers and criminals. These and machine guns have been regulated at the federal level since the 1930s partly as a result of the infamous St. Valentine\u2019s Day massacre in Chicago in 1929. All of this is a way of saying that we have long recognized the need to regulate and police certain types of weapons for the public good. And in doing so there has never been an attempt to seize the guns of farmers, ranchers, home owners and others who act responsibly.<\/p>\n It is long overdue to do something to reduce the spiraling gun violence and mass killings. We need to try something and it is perfectly reasonable and prudent to require universal background checks for gun ownership and to ban the sale of semi-automatic military style rifles as well as excessive clips and magazines. We know that this action alone will not solve all the atrocities and abuses brought on by people intent on doing evil, but it might help. We need to do something rather than nothing.<\/p>\n *See The Positive Second Amendment<\/em> by Darrell A.H. Miller and Joseph Blocher (2018) for the best up-to-date and comprehensive account of the history, theory and law about gun ownership<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For how long now have we been told that the banning of assault-style weapons would lead to losing ALL of our guns? It\u2019s the \u201cnose of the camel in the tent\u201d threat, right? Scary stuff, the awful Democrats, if elected, will be coming for our guns. Good friends and neighbors of mine at Potlatch have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-robert-fischer"],"yoast_head":"\n