Dissident Politics: Thoughts on gun safety laws -- most are going to go extinct

Etiquette

DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Thoughts on gun safety laws -- most are going to go extinct

The recent shootings in California raise the well-known issue of gun safety laws. The shooter in Monterey Park used a semi-automatic handgun that has been banned for over 30 years in California. The gun was also equipped with a large ammo clip, also banned. Since the gun and big ammo clips are for sale in some or most other states, California's attempt to impose gun safety is neutered. State gun safety laws are futile.

In the last year or two Chicago tried to ban some hand guns to reduce the murder rate there, but the law was held to be an unconstitutional violation of the right to own guns. Republican propaganda portrays gun safety laws as mostly worthless, which is true.

But, bickering about gun safety laws is going to be moot as a nationwide wave of lawsuits against gun safety laws work their way through the courts. A recent radical right Supreme Court decision renders almost all gun safety laws unconstitutional. That even includes laws that require gun owners to have a serial number on guns so that law enforcement can better trace a gun used in a crime. It is reasonable to expect that in the next year or two essentially all the laws will be nullified as unconstitutional.

The court imposed a new test in the June 2022 New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision. The test for constitutionality of all gun laws first asks if the plain text of the Second Amendment protects the activities the laws try to regulate. The second Amendment prohibits no infringement on the right to "keep and bear arms." That would seem to include any law that imposes any non-trivial burden on gun ownership, e.g., taxes on guns, gun licenses, gun safety training requirements, bans on any guns including machine guns, maybe bans on bazookas and stinger surface-to-air missiles (seriously, not joking), etc.

Since the text of the Second Amendment covers essentially all gun safety laws, then “the government must affirmatively prove that its firearms regulation is part of the historical tradition” that set boundaries on gun use. Back in the 1700s, there were few, if any, boundaries on gun use. I'm not aware of any, but at least one must exist. So, the historical tradition of firearm regulation is almost non-existent.

For example, guns in the 1700s were not stamped with serial numbers. Because of that, a federal law making ownership of guns with serial numbers removed illegal was struck down by a federal court. Criminals and gun sellers rejoiced. They got out their files to file off the serial numbers of guns they wanted to use in crimes or to sell to the public. In view of radical right legal extremism like that, it is not rocket science to see that few gun safety laws are now constitutional. California's ban on that semi-automatic handgun and the ammo clip are unconstitutional.