Category: Editorial O’ The Day

Carrying Guns is Preventive Medicine

Nor from what I’ve seen.

Will COVID-19 kill the Constitution

Jacob Sullum
The great American jurist St. George Tucker, writing at the beginning of the 19th century, called the right to armed self-defense “the true palladium of liberty” and “the first law of nature.” But California Gov. Gavin Newsom thinks that right, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, is optional.

After Newsom ordered “nonessential” businesses to close in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, he let local sheriffs decide whether that category included gun dealers. Newsom’s decision, which allowed Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva to unilaterally ban the sale of firearms and ammunition, illustrates how readily politicians ignore constitutional rights in the very circumstances where they matter most.

Villanueva’s ban, which several gun rights groups challenged in a federal lawsuit last Friday, was inconsistent with recent guidance from the Department of Homeland Security as well as the Second Amendment. In an advisory published on Saturday, the department added firearm retailers to its definition of the “essential critical infrastructure workforce,” which Newsom explicitly exempted from his order.

On Monday, Villanueva, who describes himself as “a supporter of the Second Amendment” but also suggests that keeping guns for self-protection is irresponsible, rescinded his ban, citing the new federal guidelines. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, whose business closure order initially covered gun stores, likewise recognized them as “essential” after seeing the federal advisory.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf also deigned to allow firearm sales, but only after three members of the state Supreme Court said that “it is incumbent upon the Governor to make some manner of allowance for our citizens to continue to exercise this constitutional right.” Notably, that rebuke came in a dissent from a March 22 decision summarily denying a challenge to Wolf’s violation of the Second Amendment.

The reversals by Murphy and Wolf, who are now allowing firearm sales by appointment and in compliance with social distancing rules, show that shutting down gun stores was never necessary to curtail transmission of COVID-19. But their reluctance to respect the Second Amendment and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s unwillingness to intervene do not bode well for civil liberties at a time when many people seem to think that fighting the pandemic trumps all other concerns.

To “save the nation” from COVID-19, Cornell law professor Michael Dorf argued two weeks ago, Congress should suspend the writ of habeas corpus, an ancient common-law right that allows people detained by the government to demand a justification. Yet the Constitution says that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

Although neither of those circumstances applies, Dorf suggested that the spread of the COVID-19 virus from other countries to the United States could be construed as an invasion. While “no one knows” whether the courts would accept that interpretation, since “Congress has only ever suspended habeas in wartime,” Dorf said, “there is reason to think that the courts would dismiss a habeas case following nearly any congressional suspension.”

In a recent survey of 3,000 Americans, the University of Chicago’s Adam Chilton and three other law professors found bipartisan agreement that “now is the time to violate the Constitution,” as they put it. The survey asked whether the respondents would support various constitutionally dubious policy responses to the epidemic.

Sizable majorities of both Democrats and Republicans favored confining people to their homes, detaining sick people in government facilities, banning U.S. citizens from entering the country, government takeovers of businesses, conscription of health care workers, suspension of religious services and even criminalizing the spread of “misinformation” about the virus. “Even when we explicitly told half of our sample that the policies may violate the Constitution,” Chilton et al. report, “the majority supported all eight of them,” including the speech restrictions.

“After the threat has subsided,” the law professors conclude, “Americans must recognize any constitutional violations for what they were, lest they become the new normal.” By then, it may be too late.

FROM THE EDITOR: Can someone explain the gun control endgame?

End game? They want to disarm the population, because they want you dead.

With another legislative session in Olympia, there is another slate of gun control bills that have conservative Facebook whipped up in a frenzy. For the umpteenth year, gun control is among the top issues when it comes to politics and that probably will never change.

We hear the same tired stats that have been thrown out and modeled for everyone’s argument. While I do like to look at some sort of basis when it comes to political topics, it almost appears facts really don’t matter anymore because you can cherry pick basically any subset of data to support your view.

A quick glance at cable news and you might think we have a huge gun violence problem since it is always being talked about. However the top killers in the U.S. for 2019 is:

647,457 dead from heart disease
599,108 from cancer
169,936 from accidents.
160,201 from chronic lower respiratory diseases
146,383 from strokes
121,404 from Alzheimer’s disease
83,563 from Diabetes
55, 673 from influenza and pneumonia

But how often do people draw opposing lines in the diabetes debate, or talk about the accident lobby? When did cable news do a wall-to-wall special report on heart disease?

Some of these causes of death due to poor life choices and poor diets. “Eat healthier” isn’t going to transition into a viable bill on Capitol Hill. Our healthcare system is hopelessly tangled, and while cancer treatment keeps getting better, we don’t have a cure. No amount of legislation is going to stop cancer. We usually don’t even think about the flu or pneumonia but they are actually big killers

When it comes to violence, there are some weird things to consider. You have definitions and terms thrown out there that aren’t clearly defined. There is no accepted definition of “mass shooting,” for example.

While the 30K+ people died in shootings is thrown around a lot in the media, the breakdown of these stats paint a slightly different picture.

In 2016, nearly 23K of these deaths were from suicides, 14K came from homicides and just 71 of them came from mass shootings.

But again this breakdown is really never presented to us by the media or politicians when discussing gun control bills. There was a recent story saying 2019 had the most number of mass shootings on record resulting in the death of 211 people combined.

It’s tragic. It’s sad to see. I’m not condoning gun violence or shrugging it. But when things get put into perspective, blunt objects kill more people a year than guns, with 443 people killed. There were 1,515 people who died in a year from knives or cutting objects. There were 672 deaths from fists, feet and other personal weapons according to the FBI. The maligned firearm – the rifle – was around 400 people.

To me, it begs the question, what good will gun control laws do if it “may” prevent 400 deaths? That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the 30K+ deaths a year. The handgun is the biggest perpetrator of shootings and a large majority of these are people taking their own lives – which is a completely different topic to unpack. While firearms make it easier, people have many other methods that could be used to take their own lives as well.

The reality and numbers smack into what is coming from bills in Olympia and how the argument is framed. Heck the recent rally of thousands of gun rights activists in Virginia was called a “White Nationalists gathering” and the rally was portrayed as something that could erupt in violence at any point. You know what happened? Nothing. People just showed that they want to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.

I was asked “wouldn’t you feel uncomfortable if you were among that group?”

No. No one is going to mess with an armed group of people. Gun owners to me are the people who follow the laws, and I’ve never felt uncomfortable around 2nd Amendment enthusiasts. On the flip side, a recent shooting in Seattle showed that a criminal not following gun laws currently on the books had no problem getting a firearm — again proving our government’s inability to control guns except by making law-abiding gun owners criminals with sweeping rule changes.

I’ve said before, there is plenty of dialogue that needs to happen in this country. I, for one, would like to see more gun training, gun safety courses and more teaching moments. The anti-gun movement is so patently ignorant about how guns even operate, how can they govern them? More information needs to be spread.

But gun control narratives and misrepresentations get spun. It is a perfectly suited political football. Both sides can form their ranks, talk about how the other side is either taking away rights, crazy, out of touch or hellbent on turning America into a hellscape.

But why?

With no solution reached in decades of gun debate, what exactly are the goals? Prevent 400 gun deaths out of 38K? Take guns away from law abiding citizens while criminals can still acquire guns? I would just like someone to lay out their end goals as opposed to root for their team in the debate