Pro Tip: Don’t Hang Your Hat On Anything the New York Times Writes About the Second Amendment

The New York Times has an article out arguing the “dangerous or unusual” canard that antigunners have been pushing for years. It won’t surprise you to learn that the Times’ latest on gun rights is misleading in several ways.

The main argument is that Blackstone originally used “dangerous or unusual” when describing permissible limits on gun rights, not “dangerous and unusual,” but Scalia screwed it up in his Heller opinion and misquoted Blackstone. That’s true, but the problem with making a lot of hay over that is tons of other writers of the era did use “dangerous and unusual the way Scalia did.

Scalia attributed the “and” to the wrong source, but he didn’t invent it out of whole cloth. As the Times article later acknowledges, to its credit, the phrase “dangerous and unusual” predates Blackstone by fifty three years, with William Hawkins using it back in 1716.

Over the next two centuries, some courts used “and,” some used “or,” but they basically meant and referred to the same thing: weapons that were carried mostly by criminals, and typically concealed.

That’s what this article really overlooks; “Dangerous and/or unusual,” regardless of the form used, was never about possession bans. How could it be, no gun or arm was every banned in that way. It was about restrictions on a type of carry. Alan Beck wrote his amicus brief for Viramontes on this topic, and this article in the Reload covers it in short form.

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Ruger Posts Strong Quarter, But Pauses 19 Gun Lines

Ruger just posted a much stronger third quarter, but the company is still making some painful cuts to its firearm catalog.

During its latest earnings call, Ruger confirmed that it is suspending or winding down production of 19 product families. The list includes some of the company’s most recognizable revolvers, rifles, carbines and pistols.

The decision is part of Ruger’s broader “Ruger 2030” strategy, which aims to reduce manufacturing complexity and shift employees, equipment and capital toward products with stronger demand and better profit margins.

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Lessons to Learn From DC’s Latest Mass Shooting

Washington, D.C. is one of the most anti-gun cities in the country. It only became “shall issue” on carry permits because of a court decision, one it opted not to appeal to the Supreme Court because it had already lost Heller there and it didn’t want to wreck nationwide gun control any more than it already had. Officials there don’t like guns, and they swear that their policies work.

And I have a pet unicorn named Bubba who cooks great barbecue.

In fact, to give evidence of just how well the gun laws work, let’s look in on a pretty big story from the nation’s capital.

A man in a long-running dispute over the conditions of his penthouse condo shot and killed the building manager in a busy gym Thursday before fleeing and shooting four more people from his patio in just minutes, shocking a popular capital neighborhood and attracting a swarm of police officers.

Matt Lambert, a 55-year-old doctor, then fatally shot himself while holed up in his apartment, where he had been speaking by phone with police negotiators, said Jeffery Carroll, interim chief with the Metropolitan Police Department.

Lambert was locked in rancorous litigation with management over mold and moisture problems in his seventh-floor unit, court records show.

Mayor Muriel Bowser said she was “devastated” at the loss of life in a “senseless act of gun violence.”

The shootings occurred around 8 a.m. in Logan Circle, about a mile (1.6 kilometers) north of the White House. Much of the block on 15th Street Northwest was cordoned off as police urged people to avoid the area, which includes a VIDA Fitness center, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, residences and a Whole Foods store. Schools were locked down.

Now, this isn’t a rough neighborhood. The fact that this was a 55-year-old doctor should indicate this wasn’t some gang-banging killing, either, though many of what the media calls a mass shooting are. This one isn’t. It’s awful, especially because it was over something so petty; something that should have been handled in a court, not with a gun, but the truth is that this is also an example of why gun laws simply won’t work.

Even in the most restrictive regimes, there are some who get guns: the wealthy, the powerful; the rules are built so they can have guns and no one else can. Not lawfully, anyway.

I’m going to take a stab in the dark and argue that a well-off physician might well be among those who would get a gun no matter what. With deep enough pockets, anything can be possible, especially when everything is subjective, thus it doesn’t take much for an issuing authority to pocket some bills and decide this upstanding citizen is perfectly safe.

Yet those laws aren’t viable in the United States, and we all know it. Bruen settled that once and for all, which means you can’t use subjective values to determine who can and can’t have a gun.

A doctor who isn’t a felon will get one anywhere.

If that same doctor then has a squabble with his building manager that he can’t seem to resolve like a freaking adult, what’s going to stop him? The laws against murder and basic human decency should be enough.

It wasn’t.