The District of Columbia’s final reply brief in the Heller case is online now. I don’t know if they’re just getting desperate now or what, but the brief is a comedy goldmine! Basically, they’ve boiled their argument down to three main points:
First, they pretty much admit that the militia referred to in the Second Amendment was composed of the people themselves. All of them. They go on to argue (against who? themselves?) that the keeping arms bit really means that said people would have arms in their possession before they were called into service (isn’t that what we’ve been saying?!). From this they conclude that since everybody is in the militia, everybody has a right to own arms unless they’re not in the militia which they said everybody is already in. Umm, okay?
Their second argument is basically that the Second Amendment only restricts the Federal government, and not the several States or the District itself. If you replaced “controlling weapons” and such here with “controlling slaves” or “controlling blacks,” it would read just like the racist arguments in Dred Scott or Brown v. Board of Education. Do the fascists in DC really want to go there? And, umm, isn’t this type of State/local usurpation of rights precisely what the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent?
Their third argument is that a total gun ban is somehow “reasonable” either way. They arrive at this conclusion from two main concepts. For one, they claim that handguns are too dangerous to use in self-defense in an urban environment, and that people are “permitted” to use rifles and shotguns instead.
Aside from the fact that they’re lying about people being “permitted” to use a rifle to defend themselves, the idea that handguns are more dangerous is ridiculous. Rifles, by their very nature, are far more likely to penetrate multiple walls and hit an unintended target some distance away. Tactically speaking, the whole point of handguns is to serve as a short-range defensive weapon while fighting your way back to the rifle you should have never left behind.
The other main (and most hilarious) part of their third argument is that their ban has a “grounding in Framing-era practice.” And which Framing-era practice do they cite as evidence that the Framers would somehow approve of their gun ban?
Long before the Founding, England banned the use of particular weapons. Near the Founding, Boston enacted storage requirements that effectively banned the possession of loaded firearms within city limits.
Umm, guys, I hate to break this to you, but that ban in Boston is, well, pretty much what started the damn Revolutionary War. If the Framers really liked the idea of gun bans so much, we would still be part of the UK..
Armed and Safe has a rather funny story about some newspaper who asked a bunch of their “authorized journalists” what they would do to prevent mass shootings and such. Between the usual cries to ban everything and stuff come this piece of false, statistical fear mongering:
The gun problem in the United States is huge. Some 4,000 soldiers have died in Iraq during the long war. Virtually none of these were killed by handguns, but by improvised explosive devices, rockets and, on occasion, AK-47s. During the same period, in the United States, 200,000 people have been murdered, the vast majority with handguns.
200,000 people murdered in the US since the Iraq war began? That’s funny, if you start adding up all the homicides recorded by the FBI, you don’t pass 200,000 until you make it back to 1995. Eight years before the beginning of the current Iraqi adventure. And that’s also including fifty or sixty thousand homicides where no firearms were used. To reach 200,000 homicides involving handguns (which is apparently what’s being implied here), you would likely have to go back to before the first Gulf War. But I suppose that wouldn’t sound as scary..
It is decidedly safer to be a solder in Iraq than to simply walk in areas of our cities. More people are killed annually by handguns in the tri-state area alone than all the soldiers killed by handguns in Iraq, ever. The difference? Soldiers are armed to the teeth, and trained to use their weapons. “Bad guys” don’t want to mess with someone who is armed.
Umm, no, the difference is, you’re comparing a single apple to all the orange groves in Florida. There are something like 299,000,000 more people inside the US than there are troops in Iraq. Which means the actual risk (even using the bogus claim of 200,000 murders) is about forty times higher in Iraq.
To put this in some perspective, there were 55,692 Unintentional Fall Deaths in the US from 2003 to 2005 according to the CDC. By the “logic” in the first quoted paragraph, gravity in the US is exponentially more dangerous than a battlefield. Shall we repeal the law of gravity? Or wrap everybody and everything in foam?
Oh, and while we’re looking at CDC numbers, they reported just 35,896 Homicide Firearm Deaths in that same time frame. The FBI, while having a lower total of 29,202 for all homicides via firearm, indicates there were just 22,687 homicides where a handgun was used in those same three years. Either way you slice it, you’re roughly twice as likely to die from an accidental fall than you are to be murdered with a handgun.
Anyhow, I must admit it was cute how he played the ‘not anti-gun, but..’ card before later going on to suggest banning things and turning the country into a total police state where everyone would be subject to random searches at any time..