Taricco the yid
Vital Champions League
Holy shit. ******* crazy, shooting concert goers from the mandalay bay hotel room.
[youtube=75dApF-yb7A]
[youtube=zodiGpCdBzQ]
[youtube=75dApF-yb7A]
[youtube=zodiGpCdBzQ]
Shooting in las vegas
- Thread starter Taricco the yid
- Start date
Greavswasthegreatest
Vital Football Legend
Awful...ordinary people out having some fun and a luney takes over 50 lives and hospitalises over 400....unthinkable, and because the coward then killed himself we will never know his direct motives.
Taricco the yid
Vital Champions League
10 rifles in his room.
He had been there since 28th sep. Waiting for that concert it seems. Terrible.
He had been there since 28th sep. Waiting for that concert it seems. Terrible.
CanadianSpur
Vital Squad Member
Tragic. Thoughts and prayer to all affected.
Sadly I'm not shocked by this in the America of today.
Sadly I'm not shocked by this in the America of today.
Greavswasthegreatest
Vital Football Legend
You need to build a big wall along your border Canadia.....with zero gates...
CanadianSpur
Vital Squad Member
Apologies if I'm in a foul mood. Since my original post I've learned my co-worker lost her son in the shooting.
Greavswasthegreatest
Vital Football Legend
Condolensces
Nick Real Deal
Vital Football Legend
He took 10 suitcases to his hotel room. Apparently in Dubai each case is scanned by metal detector in hotels. In the USA there is no data base registry to record who owns guns ? He had at least 41, some of them obviously not for hunting deer !! The gun laws are too relaxed . They are even considering allowing silencers being legal I heard ? Making stealth killings easier. Also this nutter was active for over an hour from start to going back to top himself in his room.
Nick Real Deal
Vital Football Legend
23 guns in his hotel room.
Spursex
Alert Team
Another young life needless snuffed out, but tragically the Amercians will never ever change.
The GUn lobby simply owns the politicians from almost all sides in the US.
The numbers of guns held is quite staggering:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/02/us-gun-control-ownership-violence-statistics
America's passion for guns: ownership and violence by the numbers
The US is home to 88 guns for every 100 people and sees mass shootings more than 11 times as often as any other developed country
Three per cent of the US population owns half the guns.
Tom McCarthy, Lois Beckett and Jessica Glenza
Tuesday 3 October 2017 07.00 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 3 October 2017 07.46 BST
Not only is the United States the runaway world leader for gun ownership – it also suffers mass shootings at more than 11 times the rate of any other developed country, according to a 2014 study published in the International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Here are key statistics pertaining to gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, following the attack at a music festival Sunday night in Las Vegas, the country’s most deadliest mass shooting.
1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days: America's gun crisis – in one chart
88 guns for every 100 people
This is the gun ownership rate in the United States, the highest by far in the world, according to the UN office on drugs and crime through its annual crime survey for 2012. The No 2 country, Yemen, has 54.8 per 100 people.
Up to half
This is the proportion of civilian-owned guns worldwide held in the United States. With less than 5% of the world’s population, the United States is home to roughly 35–50% of the world’s civilian-owned guns, according to the Small Arms Survey from 2007.
More than 30,000
The number of Americans killed with guns each year. About two-thirds of those are suicides.
More than 100,000
The number of people shot each year in the United States, according to a study published in the journal Health Affairs.
25 times
Americans overall are “25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries”, gun control advocates say.
70%
Proportion of gun murders in the United States in which a handgun is the weapon, according to FBI statistics.
71%
Increase in number of handguns owned in the United States since 1994.
38%
Increase in total number of guns owned in the United States since 1994.
3%
Proportion of people who own half of the country’s guns, according to an unpublished Harvard/Northeastern University survey result summary. Anchoring this group are America’s gun super-owners – an estimated 7.7 million Americans who own between eight and 140 guns.
$2.8bn
Total hospital expenses to treat US gunshot victims annually, according to the study. If lost wages and hospital expenses are considered together, the authors said, the annual cost of shootings in the US could be as high as $45bn.
More than $1m
Amount of his own money that one doctor spent to fund gun violence prevention research after political pressure from the National Rifle Association targeted federal funding for public health research on guns.
The changing portrait of gun ownership in America
73%
Proportion of firearm murders among all murders in 2016 – the highest ever on record in the United States, according to FBI statistics. While murders in the United States are well down from historic highs, gun murders represent a greater share of the overall total.
400,000
The number of guns stolen in the United States per year, according to an unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary. That’s compared with 230,000 a year in a recent estimate from the National Crime Victimization Survey.
Why more urban women own guns: self-defense and the second amendment
Read more
32%
The proportion of US men who said they personally owned a gun in 2015, down from 42% in 1994, according to the Harvard/Northeastern study.
12%
The proportion of US women who said they personally owned a gun in 2015, up from 9% in 1994.
127
The number of US cities and towns accountable for half of America’s gun homicides in 2015, according to a geographic analysis by the Guardian.
Less than a quarter
The share of the country’s population in those 127 cities and towns. Read further in the Guardian report Want to fix gun violence in America? Go local.
Taricco the yid
Vital Champions League
Once you are checked in do staff actually keep tabs of when you come and go and what with.
Taricco the yid
Vital Champions League
I think they should have a policy that if a guest has do not disturb on their door for 2 days straight the maids should report it or something like that so the manager and security can check if nothing shady/bad has happened or happening.
Nick Real Deal
Vital Football Legend
I don't see what's wrong with scanning suitcases on entry . I am searched often and have no problem with it......why should I ?
Spursex
Alert Team
I'd agree with that for non-overseas guests (the ones most likely to have a stash of weapons in their cases) - the overseas visitors will have been through so many security checks already, any more would be pointless.
Even then, the bottom line is Gun owning Americans are in love with their second amendment, even if they still don't understand what it's original intention was and even if they can't recognise it's way out of it's use-by date;
American is a country of rabid contradictions, land of the free, the brave etc etc but also the land of some of the most stupidest laws and politicians ever put on Gods green Earth:
The "Second Amendment" as we know it today is a legal fiction invented by the gun industry and their buddies on the Supreme Court and sold to Americans by an expensive multi-decade-long PR campaign.
Despite what you might hear on Fox news, there actually was no “individual right to own a gun” until 2008, when the Supreme Court said there was in its decision in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller.
That decision, which struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban, was the culmination of a decades-long push by the gun industry to twist the Second Amendment into something that would help it sell more weapons, and it had zero basis in real Constitutional history.
It’s what former Chief Justice Warren Burger called a "fraud on the American public,” and it’s a fraud that now makes it very, very hard to put in place sensible gun control laws.
So, if the Second Amendment wasn’t originally about protecting gun rights, why is it in the U.S. Constitution? What were the Founders thinking?
Well, the first and most obvious answer, and the one accepted by most historians, is that they were trying to prevent the existence of a standing army during times of peace.
The Founders were scholars of classical history, and they knew that history teaches that when given too much power, armies, repeatedly and throughout history, would overthrow democracy and put in place a military dictatorship. There's even a phrase to describe it: a military coup.
As James Madison told the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787,
“A standing military force… will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
With this situation in mind, the Founders wrote the Second Amendment, which says that, “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 key word here is “Militia.”
At the time the Bill of Rights was written, America had no real professional army, and what military it did have was in the form of 13 separate state militias.
The Founders saw these militias as the best check against the rise of the standing army, and so they wrote the Second Amendment to make sure that they were always protected. But that’s only part of the story.
By protecting the militias, the Founders weren’t just preventing or trying to prevent the rise of mischief by a standing army; they were also protecting the institution of slavery that was the key to the southern economy. In states like Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas, militias were also known as slave patrols.
And after the Constitution was written, southern slave-owners, led by Patrick Henry (Virginia's biggest slave owner) started freaking out that their slaves could be constitutionally freed and then drafted by the federal government, which was given the power under Article 1, Section 8 to raise a national militia.
The slave-owners worried that this national militia would eventually be used by Northern anti-slavery types to destroy the slave patrols and maybe even the institution of slavery itself. So what did those slave-owners do?
They had the Founders write into the Second Amendment specific protections for slave patrols.
These protections aren’t obvious, but they’re there, and we know this because of the difference between James Madison’s original draft of the Second Amendment and the final version included in the Bill of Rights. Madison’s original version of the Second Amendment reads as follows:
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
This version of the Second Amendment didn’t fit well with slave-owners because it included words like “country,” words they felt could be used to justify the creation of a national militia that would include freed slaves—a backdoor way for a Northern president to free Southern slaves. And so Patrick Henry lobbied James Madison to rewrite the Second Amendment into the version we know today.
He spoke passionately at the Virginia Ratifying Convention:
"If the country be invaded, a state may go to war," Henry said, "but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress ... Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."
He added:
"In this state [of Virginia], there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States ... May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free."
As Michael R. Burch wrote, "Henry was obviously convinced that the power granted the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave control militias. He anticipated exactly what Abraham Lincoln would end up doing:
"'They will search that paper [the Constitution],' Henry said, 'and see if they have power of manumission. And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery?
“May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it. This [slavery] is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress.'"
To satisfy Henry, James Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state,” a change Patrick Henry demanded to make it explicitly clear that the Constitution protected the state militia (aka slave patrol) in Virginia.
The big picture here isn’t a pretty one: The Second Amendment, which is now used by the weapons industry to justify selling weapons of war to civilians, was originally created, at least in part, to help preserve slavery in the South. You really couldn’t ask for a better metaphor for everything that’s challenging about America and its history.
But here’s the thing: we don’t need to be trapped by that history.
Ever since it was ratified, Americans have repeatedly changed parts of the Constitution that don’t match up with the times. We’ve changed electoral rules so that the person who comes in second place in a presidential race no longer becomes vice president, we’ve given women the right to vote; we’ve given black people full citizenship; we made alcohol illegal, and then re-amended the Constitution to make it legal. These are just a few examples of ways in which we’ve broken with our past and moved toward a better future.
It’s time we did the same with the Second Amendment.
At its best, the Second Amendment is an anachronism that's no longer relevant in an era in which the United States has a standing army but remains a democracy. At its worst, it’s a tool for slave-owners that’s now being used by the weapons industry to prevent any and all sensible gun laws.
There’s only one way out of this mess: it’s time to repeal the Second Amendment.
Spursex
Alert Team
As true then as it is today - what is wrong with Americans, why are they afraid to act intelligently and sensibly for the sake of their own security and that of their children?
Opinions
The five extra words that can fix the Second Amendment
A customer shops for a pistol at Freddie Bear Sports sporting goods in Tinley Park, Ill. (Scott Olson/Getty)
By John Paul Stevens April 11, 2014
John Paul Stevens served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1975 to 2010. This essay is excerpted from his new book, “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.”
Following the massacre of grammar-school children in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, high-powered weapons have been used to kill innocent victims in more senseless public incidents. Those killings, however, are only a fragment of the total harm caused by the misuse of firearms. Each year, more than 30,000 people die in the United States in firearm-related incidents. Many of those deaths involve handguns.
The adoption of rules that will lessen the number of those incidents should be a matter of primary concern to both federal and state legislators. Legislatures are in a far better position than judges to assess the wisdom of such rules and to evaluate the costs and benefits that rule changes can be expected to produce. It is those legislators, rather than federal judges, who should make the decisions that will determine what kinds of firearms should be available to private citizens, and when and how they may be used. Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good.
The first 10 amendments to the Constitution placed limits on the powers of the new federal government. Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of the Second Amendment, which provides that “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.”
For more than 200 years following the adoption of that amendment, federal judges uniformly understood that the right protected by that text was limited in two ways: First, it applied only to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes, and second, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not impose any limit whatsoever on the power of states or local governments to regulate the ownership or use of firearms. Thus, in United States v. Miller, decided in 1939, the court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that sort of weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated Militia.”
When I joined the court in 1975, that holding was generally understood as limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to uses of arms that were related to military activities. During the years when Warren Burger was chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge or justice expressed any doubt about the limited coverage of the amendment, and I cannot recall any judge suggesting that the amendment might place any limit on state authority to do anything.
Organizations such as the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and mounted a vigorous campaign claiming that federal regulation of the use of firearms severely curtailed Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Five years after his retirement, during a 1991 appearance on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Burger himself remarked that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
In recent years two profoundly important changes in the law have occurred. In 2008, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court decided in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects a civilian’s right to keep a handgun in his home for purposes of self-defense. And in 2010, by another vote of 5 to 4, the court decided in McDonald v. Chicago that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment limits the power of the city of Chicago to outlaw the possession of handguns by private citizens. I dissented in both of those cases and remain convinced that both decisions misinterpreted the law and were profoundly unwise. Public policies concerning gun control should be decided by the voters’ elected representatives, not by federal judges.
In my dissent in the McDonald case, I pointed out that the court’s decision was unique in the extent to which the court had exacted a heavy toll “in terms of state sovereignty. . . . Even apart from the States’ long history of firearms regulation and its location at the core of their police powers, this is a quintessential area in which federalism ought to be allowed to flourish without this Court’s meddling. Whether or not we can assert a plausible constitutional basis for intervening, there are powerful reasons why we should not do so.”
“Across the Nation, States and localities vary significantly in the patterns and problems of gun violence they face, as well as in the traditions and cultures of lawful gun use. . . . The city of Chicago, for example, faces a pressing challenge in combating criminal street gangs. Most rural areas do not.”
In response to the massacre of grammar-school students at Sandy Hook Elementary School, some legislators have advocated stringent controls on the sale of assault weapons and more complete background checks on purchasers of firearms. It is important to note that nothing in either the Heller or the McDonald opinion poses any obstacle to the adoption of such preventive measures.
First, the court did not overrule Miller. Instead, it “read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.” On the preceding page of its opinion, the court made it clear that even though machine guns were useful in warfare in 1939, they were not among the types of weapons protected by the Second Amendment because that protected class was limited to weapons in common use for lawful purposes such as self-defense. Even though a sawed-off shotgun or a machine gun might well be kept at home and be useful for self-defense, neither machine guns nor sawed-off shotguns satisfy the “common use” requirement.
Thus, even as generously construed in Heller, the Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations prohibiting the ownership or use of the sorts of weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado and Arizona in recent years. The failure of Congress to take any action to minimize the risk of similar tragedies in the future cannot be blamed on the court’s decision in Heller.
A second virtue of the opinion in Heller is that Justice Antonin Scalia went out of his way to limit the court’s holding not only to a subset of weapons that might be used for self-defense but also to a subset of conduct that is protected. The specific holding of the case covers only the possession of handguns in the home for purposes of self-defense, while a later part of the opinion adds emphasis to the narrowness of that holding by describing uses that were not protected by the common law or state practice. Prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons, or on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, and laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings or imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms are specifically identified as permissible regulations.
Thus, Congress’s failure to enact laws that would expand the use of background checks and limit the availability of automatic weapons cannot be justified by reference to the Second Amendment or to anything that the Supreme Court has said about that amendment. What the members of the five-justice majority said in those opinions is nevertheless profoundly important, because it curtails the government’s power to regulate the use of handguns that contribute to the roughly 88 firearm-related deaths that occur every day.
There is an intriguing similarity between the court’s sovereign immunity jurisprudence, which began with a misinterpretation of the 11th Amendment, and its more recent misinterpretation of the Second Amendment. The procedural amendment limiting federal courts’ jurisdiction over private actions against states eventually blossomed into a substantive rule that treats the common-law doctrine of sovereign immunity as though it were part of the Constitution itself. Of course, in England common-law rules fashioned by judges may always be repealed or amended by Parliament. And when the United States became an independent nation, Congress and every state legislature had the power to accept, to reject or to modify common-law rules that prevailed prior to 1776, except, of course, any rule that might have been included in the Constitution.
The Second Amendment expressly endorsed the substantive common-law rule that protected the citizen’s right (and duty) to keep and bear arms when serving in a state militia. In its decision in Heller, however, the majority interpreted the amendment as though its draftsmen were primarily motivated by an interest in protecting the common-law right of self-defense. But that common-law right is a procedural right that has always been available to the defendant in criminal proceedings in every state. The notion that the states were concerned about possible infringement of that right by the federal government is really quite absurd.
As a result of the rulings in Heller and McDonald, the Second Amendment, which was adopted to protect the states from federal interference with their power to ensure that their militias were “well regulated,” has given federal judges the ultimate power to determine the validity of state regulations of both civilian and militia-related uses of arms. That anomalous result can be avoided by adding five words to the text of the Second Amendment to make it unambiguously conform to the original intent of its draftsmen. As so amended, it would read:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”
Emotional claims that the right to possess deadly weapons is so important that it is protected by the federal Constitution distort intelligent debate about the wisdom of particular aspects of proposed legislation designed to minimize the slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns in private hands. Those emotional arguments would be nullified by the adoption of my proposed amendment. The amendment certainly would not silence the powerful voice of the gun lobby; it would merely eliminate its ability to advance one mistaken argument.
It is true, of course, that the public’s reaction to the massacre of schoolchildren, such as the Newtown killings, and the 2013 murder of government employees at the Navy Yard in Washington, may also introduce a strong emotional element into the debate. That aspect of the debate is, however, based entirely on facts rather than fiction. The law should encourage intelligent discussion of possible remedies for what every American can recognize as an ongoing national tragedy.
Copyright © 2014 by John Paul Stevens. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
Opinions
The five extra words that can fix the Second Amendment
A customer shops for a pistol at Freddie Bear Sports sporting goods in Tinley Park, Ill. (Scott Olson/Getty)
By John Paul Stevens April 11, 2014
John Paul Stevens served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1975 to 2010. This essay is excerpted from his new book, “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.”
Following the massacre of grammar-school children in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, high-powered weapons have been used to kill innocent victims in more senseless public incidents. Those killings, however, are only a fragment of the total harm caused by the misuse of firearms. Each year, more than 30,000 people die in the United States in firearm-related incidents. Many of those deaths involve handguns.
The adoption of rules that will lessen the number of those incidents should be a matter of primary concern to both federal and state legislators. Legislatures are in a far better position than judges to assess the wisdom of such rules and to evaluate the costs and benefits that rule changes can be expected to produce. It is those legislators, rather than federal judges, who should make the decisions that will determine what kinds of firearms should be available to private citizens, and when and how they may be used. Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good.
The first 10 amendments to the Constitution placed limits on the powers of the new federal government. Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of the Second Amendment, which provides that “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.”
For more than 200 years following the adoption of that amendment, federal judges uniformly understood that the right protected by that text was limited in two ways: First, it applied only to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes, and second, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not impose any limit whatsoever on the power of states or local governments to regulate the ownership or use of firearms. Thus, in United States v. Miller, decided in 1939, the court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that sort of weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated Militia.”
When I joined the court in 1975, that holding was generally understood as limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to uses of arms that were related to military activities. During the years when Warren Burger was chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge or justice expressed any doubt about the limited coverage of the amendment, and I cannot recall any judge suggesting that the amendment might place any limit on state authority to do anything.
Organizations such as the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and mounted a vigorous campaign claiming that federal regulation of the use of firearms severely curtailed Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Five years after his retirement, during a 1991 appearance on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Burger himself remarked that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
In recent years two profoundly important changes in the law have occurred. In 2008, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court decided in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects a civilian’s right to keep a handgun in his home for purposes of self-defense. And in 2010, by another vote of 5 to 4, the court decided in McDonald v. Chicago that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment limits the power of the city of Chicago to outlaw the possession of handguns by private citizens. I dissented in both of those cases and remain convinced that both decisions misinterpreted the law and were profoundly unwise. Public policies concerning gun control should be decided by the voters’ elected representatives, not by federal judges.
In my dissent in the McDonald case, I pointed out that the court’s decision was unique in the extent to which the court had exacted a heavy toll “in terms of state sovereignty. . . . Even apart from the States’ long history of firearms regulation and its location at the core of their police powers, this is a quintessential area in which federalism ought to be allowed to flourish without this Court’s meddling. Whether or not we can assert a plausible constitutional basis for intervening, there are powerful reasons why we should not do so.”
“Across the Nation, States and localities vary significantly in the patterns and problems of gun violence they face, as well as in the traditions and cultures of lawful gun use. . . . The city of Chicago, for example, faces a pressing challenge in combating criminal street gangs. Most rural areas do not.”
In response to the massacre of grammar-school students at Sandy Hook Elementary School, some legislators have advocated stringent controls on the sale of assault weapons and more complete background checks on purchasers of firearms. It is important to note that nothing in either the Heller or the McDonald opinion poses any obstacle to the adoption of such preventive measures.
First, the court did not overrule Miller. Instead, it “read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.” On the preceding page of its opinion, the court made it clear that even though machine guns were useful in warfare in 1939, they were not among the types of weapons protected by the Second Amendment because that protected class was limited to weapons in common use for lawful purposes such as self-defense. Even though a sawed-off shotgun or a machine gun might well be kept at home and be useful for self-defense, neither machine guns nor sawed-off shotguns satisfy the “common use” requirement.
Thus, even as generously construed in Heller, the Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations prohibiting the ownership or use of the sorts of weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado and Arizona in recent years. The failure of Congress to take any action to minimize the risk of similar tragedies in the future cannot be blamed on the court’s decision in Heller.
A second virtue of the opinion in Heller is that Justice Antonin Scalia went out of his way to limit the court’s holding not only to a subset of weapons that might be used for self-defense but also to a subset of conduct that is protected. The specific holding of the case covers only the possession of handguns in the home for purposes of self-defense, while a later part of the opinion adds emphasis to the narrowness of that holding by describing uses that were not protected by the common law or state practice. Prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons, or on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, and laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings or imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms are specifically identified as permissible regulations.
Thus, Congress’s failure to enact laws that would expand the use of background checks and limit the availability of automatic weapons cannot be justified by reference to the Second Amendment or to anything that the Supreme Court has said about that amendment. What the members of the five-justice majority said in those opinions is nevertheless profoundly important, because it curtails the government’s power to regulate the use of handguns that contribute to the roughly 88 firearm-related deaths that occur every day.
There is an intriguing similarity between the court’s sovereign immunity jurisprudence, which began with a misinterpretation of the 11th Amendment, and its more recent misinterpretation of the Second Amendment. The procedural amendment limiting federal courts’ jurisdiction over private actions against states eventually blossomed into a substantive rule that treats the common-law doctrine of sovereign immunity as though it were part of the Constitution itself. Of course, in England common-law rules fashioned by judges may always be repealed or amended by Parliament. And when the United States became an independent nation, Congress and every state legislature had the power to accept, to reject or to modify common-law rules that prevailed prior to 1776, except, of course, any rule that might have been included in the Constitution.
The Second Amendment expressly endorsed the substantive common-law rule that protected the citizen’s right (and duty) to keep and bear arms when serving in a state militia. In its decision in Heller, however, the majority interpreted the amendment as though its draftsmen were primarily motivated by an interest in protecting the common-law right of self-defense. But that common-law right is a procedural right that has always been available to the defendant in criminal proceedings in every state. The notion that the states were concerned about possible infringement of that right by the federal government is really quite absurd.
As a result of the rulings in Heller and McDonald, the Second Amendment, which was adopted to protect the states from federal interference with their power to ensure that their militias were “well regulated,” has given federal judges the ultimate power to determine the validity of state regulations of both civilian and militia-related uses of arms. That anomalous result can be avoided by adding five words to the text of the Second Amendment to make it unambiguously conform to the original intent of its draftsmen. As so amended, it would read:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”
Emotional claims that the right to possess deadly weapons is so important that it is protected by the federal Constitution distort intelligent debate about the wisdom of particular aspects of proposed legislation designed to minimize the slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns in private hands. Those emotional arguments would be nullified by the adoption of my proposed amendment. The amendment certainly would not silence the powerful voice of the gun lobby; it would merely eliminate its ability to advance one mistaken argument.
It is true, of course, that the public’s reaction to the massacre of schoolchildren, such as the Newtown killings, and the 2013 murder of government employees at the Navy Yard in Washington, may also introduce a strong emotional element into the debate. That aspect of the debate is, however, based entirely on facts rather than fiction. The law should encourage intelligent discussion of possible remedies for what every American can recognize as an ongoing national tragedy.
Copyright © 2014 by John Paul Stevens. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
Without visiting yourself, explaining the true SCALE of Vegas is absolutely impossible. There are 65,000 hotel rooms on the Strip, and searching/scanning all the baggage is a functional impossibility.
And if they'd searched his bags? And found 4 or 5 broken down AR-15 style rifles? They'd remind him that loaded weapons are not allowed on hotel grounds (or whatever their particular policy is), repack his stuff and wish him a happy day. Because he wouldn't be doing anything illegal.
There are massive gun shows (Flea Markets) in Vegas just about every weekend, where you could buy just about everything that guy had in one day (Probably not the bump stocks, gotta order those online), and Nevada has some interesting weapon carry laws.
And if they'd searched his bags? And found 4 or 5 broken down AR-15 style rifles? They'd remind him that loaded weapons are not allowed on hotel grounds (or whatever their particular policy is), repack his stuff and wish him a happy day. Because he wouldn't be doing anything illegal.
There are massive gun shows (Flea Markets) in Vegas just about every weekend, where you could buy just about everything that guy had in one day (Probably not the bump stocks, gotta order those online), and Nevada has some interesting weapon carry laws.
