Saturday, July 19, 2008

What we have here is a failure to communicate


It would seem that the District of Columbia has no desire whatsoever to follow the letter let alone the spirit of the Supreme Court decision to strike down the District’s handgun ban. Though the majority opinion did allow for restrictions on gun ownership, the D.C. Council is taking this allowance for restrictions to its most ridiculous extreme.

The new law, hastily passed by the Council this past week allows for handgun ownership but with conditions. What sort of conditions, you may ask? Well, how about being able to own a handgun and have it in your home except that, said gun would be required to be unloaded, disassembled or secured with a trigger lock, unless the owner was confronted with a “threat of immediate harm”. Oh, and one would also need to pass a written test and take a vision test. And speaking of written tests, we imagine the homeowners would need to provide one for the breaking-and-entering bad guys in order to prove this "threat of immediate harm."

We suppose the good news is that enforcement of these laws would appear to be pretty difficult but still, the idea of being readily capable of protecting yourself, your family and your property doesn’t jibe with the current laws.

The man, Dick Heller (pictured), an armed security guard in D.C. who got this whole thing rolling and guns-rights groups claim D.C. still hasn’t got the message and vow to take the new D.C. gun laws back to court. We see this stretching out for a very long time and rest assured, other cities will be following D.C.’s cue in playing veritable “stall ball” with the guns-rights advocates and the courts.

And in the converse of what we’ve seen with municipalities all across our state who have bent over backwards and tripped all over themselves to comply with the California State Supreme Court’s decision to allow same-sex marriages, not all rights are interpreted equally.

Story here.

4 comments:

B-Daddy said...

Although the wheels of justice grind slowly, I see the District headed for another smack down. These are the kinds of restrictions that the court is most assuredly going to find unreasonable. The DC council members are actually undermining their own position in the long run. The more the courts start ruling that particular restrictions are unreasonable, the more it will erode the natural deference this court gives to elected officials. Soon, even restrictions that might have previously passed muster will get tight judicial review because the courts will not believe that they can trust the elected officials to keep to the spirit of not violating the civil rights of gun owners. (Let's remember that gun ownership, like the right to vote and freedom of speech, is a civil right protected by our constitution.)

Anonymous said...

Keep giving them enough rope....

Dawg

K T Cat said...

I think your handgun should be disassociated into its component molecules and stored that way. One box for the Fe, one box for the O, one box for the C...

K T Cat said...

I meant component atoms, not molecules. Man, can I ruin my own joke, or what?