Rudy on guns – again
A bit back, I thought Giuliani may have seen the light on guns. Or rather, he may have realized that to win in the red states with some adultery under his belt, he’d have to get some pro-gun street cred. Looks like that wasn’t the case. He apparently thinks that there is a right to arms but some sort of “densely populated area” exception that squares his support for New York City’s excessively restrictive gun laws. Well, restrictive if you’re not a politician or famous actor.
Seems Rudy has taken the Howard Dean let the states decide position.
GIULIANI: It’s part of the constitution. People have the right to bear arms. Then restrictions have to be reasonable and sensible. You can’t just remove that right. You got to regulate consistent with the second amendment.”
I suppose that $439 in licensing fees, stipulations that all but prohibit the transport of arms, begging the powers that be for permission to own, and waiting up to a year are consistent with the second amendment? I’m not impressed.
Update: Sebastian has some quotes. My fave:
“This is an industry that is profiting from the suffering of innocent people. What’s worse, its profits rest on a number of illegal and immoral practices. This lawsuit is meant to end the free pass that the gun industry has so long enjoyed.”
February 6th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Well, at least he didn’t take the patented Romney “I didn’t really MEAN it back then” approach.
I have to respect him for sticking to his guns, so to speak, even if I have no respect for his position.
In other words, I no longer see him as a lying, scum sucking politician, just an incorrect, scum sucking politician.
February 6th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
[…] SayUncle has Rudy on guns – again. […]
February 6th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
When he first became mayor of New York he started enforcing the gun laws by tracking down the source of illegal guns (not registered) used in crimes. Before that it was just ignored by the NYPD. That is when I gained respect for him, even though I don’t agree with his position. He was consistent and serious about it, and not just enforcing laws at the expense of legal gun owners.
February 6th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I think Rudy’s salvation lies in the concept of Federalism. There is little argument today that just as the First Amendment’s right to free speech has exceptions so, too, does the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. If Rudy continues to hold that it is the perogative of State and local governments to enact gun laws that comply with the Constitution and not the federal government’s place to dictate sweeping restrictions his position becomes more acceptable to gun owners and enthusiasts.
February 6th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
WTF is up with a right being subjected to restrictions? Rudy is still a scum sucker from N.Y.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Fred, perhaps you need to revisit some decissions on libel, fighting words and obscenity. You may not agree with each point, but there is no denying that “Free Speech” is not an absolute right. Nor, in practice, is the Right to Bear Arms, unless I missed the way I can go buy my own personal M203.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
IIRC, an M203 is regulated as a destructive device. It is subject to a $200 tax and background check. Of course, each round is also a destructive device subject to same. And the M203 costs about $2k.
But, yeah, there are reasonable restrictions on all rights. NYC gun laws go far beyond reasonable.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
There is little argument today that just as the First Amendment’s right to free speech has exceptions so, too, does the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.
That argument is pure sophistry.
There are no “exceptions” to first amendment rights, only consequences for misusing same. There is no law PREVENTING anyone from speaking or writing what they want, only laws that effect conseqences for doing so in a harmful way.
No one has ever, to my knowledge, put forth the theory that the unfettered exercise of rights should be consequence free. If you misuse First Amendment rights and harm others, you should be charged and punished just as you should if you misuse your Second Amendment rights and harm others.
The problem is that Second Amendment infringements disguised as “restrictions” or “regulation” are used to prevent one from exercising the right at all, not to effect consequences for misusing said right.
Were you required to beg government permission, be background checked, fingerprinted, investigated, charged a fee and issued a license before you were permitted to make your comment? When you are required to jump through those hoops to exercise your First Amendment rights, then you’ve got an argument. Until then, it’s nothing more than a straw man.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Sailorcurt ,
You are spot on! Keep charging!
February 6th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Beat me to it, Sailorcurt. Absolutely correct.
February 6th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Gack! PECO decides to have a power hiccup in the middle of my basking in the glory of an instalaunch once removed! Wiped out my machine’s BIOS settings for some reason too. Not sure why, but it’s all fixed and seemingly happy now. If you couldn’t get to the link to Snowflakes in Hell before, it should be working now.
February 6th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
So what do you do, Sebastin? My ISP blocks port 80 too. Do you run the server off another port on your home machine?
February 6th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Who determines reasonable restrictions? IMHO the 1st protects political speech. Shouting fire is not protected.
February 6th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Standard Mischief:
I pay for Verizon FiOS for Business, so I can run servers. They don’t restrict me. I did this even before I started the blog, because I need static IPs for other reasons, plus I hate the idea of someone telling me how I can use what I’m paying for. My router/firewall handles all the incoming connections on port 80, and redirects them to the server.
I run the apache/PHP front-end on my Linux workstation/server in my office. The MySQL database runs on my DVR box attached to my TV. The DVR software already needed MySQL, so I figured it was easier just to set up another database instance on there to deal with wordpress.
Now that I had the blog go down at a horribly inconvenient time, I’m thinking about setting up a redundant front end on the DVR and a redundant database on my workstation/server. That way if I lose one of them, it’ll just take a few seconds, and a port redirection on the firewall to get everything back up.
It would probably be easier just to pay for hosting, but since I’m already paying for this setup, I figure I might as well put it to use. Plus, it’s probably better than I have no one to blame but myself when stuff like this happens 🙂
February 6th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
IMHO the 1st protects political speech. Shouting fire is not protected.
So if your house is on fire and I stand outside your window and shout “FIRE” I can be arrested?
This is my (non-lawyer) interpretation of this issue, any lawyers out there may feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about anything. I do realize that I am oversimplifying, I’m just trying to get the basic point across:
The controlling factor is intentionally or negligently causing harm (in other words, violating someone else’s rights in the exercise of your own).
If, in the course of an argument, political or not, I say something objectionable to you, unless it causes you actual harm or conveys a threat, that is protected speech. I may get a punch in the nose, but no one ever said exercising rights should be consequence free.
If I make an untrue or defamatory statement that causes actual harm, loss of income, damaged reputation etc; that would cross the line into non-protected speech and would be actionable. I believe in many states, actual malice must be demonstrated for a charge to stick.
I believe that you are probably correct in that the founders primarily were concerned with political speech when penning (quilling?) the first amendment, but they were pretty smart people. I imagine if they felt that the natural right is restricted SOLELY to political speech they would have clearly said so.
Of course, back then if I defamed you, you wouldn’t sue me, you’d challenge me to a duel.
Barret .50’s at 1000 paces anyone?
Anyway, the point still stands, until First Amendment rights are regulated in a manner that is designed to prevent one from exercising them, rather than specifying consequences for their abuse, those regulations are not analogous to Second Amendment restrictions as they exist today.
February 7th, 2007 at 4:30 am
All this time sailorcurt I thought you were hitting on all eight cylinders and it turns out you have 12 and they are all firing.
Doesn’t it strike you as strange the number of people that cannot tell the difference between a right and abuse of that right? It is unfathomable to me what is so hard about knowing when the exercise of your rights interferes with the someone else’s exercise of his rights. Do you have any idea why so many prefer to screw everybody, rather than make judgment call regarding actual violators of others’ rights and abuse of their own?
Is it mental laziness? Or is it moral paucity?
I truly don’t know. It doesn’t seem that difficult to me. I could do a dissertation on why it doesn’t seem so difficult, but suffice it to say, that we weren’t encumbered with more intellectual theory than was useful or appropriate. We were actually engaged in living not in theorizing about how “those other people” do it.
February 7th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Sailorcurt, your “shouting fire” example violates a maxim often attributed to Einstein: make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. “Yelling fire” is a shorthand for Oliver Wendell Holmes’s observation in Schenck v. United States that “[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” It has no application toward truthfully shouting fire anywhere, let alone in an open area where causing a panic wouldn’t be that big of a deal anyway.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
“Shouting ‘Fire’ is not protected”
Very true. But you don’t have to undergo a background check, etc., before you can yell at all for fear you might yell “fire” in a croweded theater. However, if you do yell “fire” in a crowded theater, you’ll be responsible for the consequences. I think the lawyer phrase is “prior restraint.” Prior restraint (or at least, what I imagine that phrase to mean) isn’t usually applied to First Ammendment issues, but it sure is to the 2nd.
February 7th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
“[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” It has no application toward truthfully shouting fire anywhere, let alone in an open area where causing a panic wouldn’t be that big of a deal anyway.
I assume you agree with me since you just added evidence to support my point.
Thank you.
February 7th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
If anyone wants to use a free speech analogy, just remember that the courts do not allow prior restraints on speech. That is, if you could buy any weapon you wanted, carry it anywhere you wanted, and only got into trouble when you committed a crime (that would still be a crime whether you used a gun or a baseball bat), then you’d have an analogy to freedom of speech.
As for federalism and whether the 2nd applies to the states:
1) Notice the word that is present in the 1st and not in the 2nd: “Congress”, as in “Congress shall not”. The 1st as written was thus specifically a limitation only on federal power. The 2nd just says “shall not be infringed”, with no limitations on who shall not infringe. If they meant only the feds, they should have written it so it applied only to the feds. (A limit on Congress is a limit on the whole federal government. The executive branch would be nothing but the President and Veep standing in an empty field with nothing to do and no salary if Congress hadn’t passed laws authorizing taxes, created the departments of the executive branch, appropriated money to run them, and passed laws for them to enforce, or for the military, appropriated funds and wrote the governing regulations. With neither executive agencies or laws, the federal courts would be just the Supreme Court, unpaid and without a building. I’m not saying that Congress is supreme over the other branches; without tax collectors and courts, they could pass all the laws they wanted while working unpaid and standing out in the rain, but nobody would enforce them!)
2) The Dred Scott court clearly thought that the 2nd protected an individual right against both the states and the feds. One reason they cited that free blacks couldn’t be citizens was that it would give them the RKBA… (And then, they’d rise up using those guns, slaughter the slaveowners to free their enslaved kin, and rape all the white women. Especially the old and ugly ones.) (That’s sarcasm, if you’re wondering, but the Court’s blindness and bigotry on the race issue doesn’t invalidate their expertise on other issues. They didn’t cite cases or arguments about the RKBA because to them there was no controversy; it was simply common knowledge that law-abiding citizens had a RKBA inviolable by any government agency, just like the text if the 2nd said.)
3) Even if the 2nd didn’t originally apply to the states, if the badly-written 14th amendment means that the rights protected by the 1st are also protected against the states, then there is no reason at all that it also wouldn’t protect the RKBA against the states. Except that !@#$%^& federal courts don’t bother to be consistent…
February 7th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Sebastian Says:
Sebastian, off topic, but if you can handle a prompt in a chroot jail, perhaps you’ll like my new host, http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net . Since you only pay for the bandwidth and storage you use, as a backup, NFS.N will be super cheap for you.
I’ve only had them for about a week, but I really like the TOS.
They’re my primary, and with me getting about 100+ visits a day, plus bots, total cost for this month looks like it will be around 90 cents, plus or minus two bits.
They’re not for everyone, but if you can install your own blog on your own machine and can handle a BSD prompt, perhaps this is the backup host for you.
February 8th, 2007 at 12:24 am
Yelling ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater is a form of fraud, and as such is a punishable offence. There is nothing to say you can’t commit the crime, but plenty to say what will happen as a result.
“You can’t just remove that right. You got to regulate consistent with the second amendment.”
The amendment says “shall not be infringed”.
“Anyway, the point still stands, until First Amendment rights are regulated in a manner that is designed to prevent one from exercising them, rather than specifying consequences for their abuse, those regulations are not analogous to Second Amendment restrictions as they exist today.”
Can you say “McCain-Feingold”?
February 8th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Which means “shall not be destroyed,” a far cry from “shall not be regulated in any way, shape or form.” If I hum a few bars of a copyrighted song, have I “infringed” the copyright?
May 25th, 2007 at 8:49 am
[…] he still believe in the “densely populated area” exception to the second amendment? More: “As far as I am concerned, you can have a concealed […]