The problem with the gun control advocate’s approach to reducing access to guns is that they can most easily reduce a law abiding citizen’s access to guns so rather than try to reduce access to guns for those who are most likely to misuse them. Licensing and registration would do much much more than any sort of ban but they have historically chased weapons bans rather than licensing and registration. In fact this misguided attempts at an assault weapons ban after Sandy hook has damaged their credibility so much that no one really listens to them any more when they propose another “solution”
I don’t know enough about the CT laws to comment but I’m skeptical of any claims as dramatic as the one this study claims (25% increases in homicides due to relaxed gun laws and 40% reduction in homicides due to stricter gun laws). The fact that CT has porous borders and that most gun murders are committed by people who are not legally allowed to own guns in the first place makes me wonder how they got such a huge reduction.
Consistency in the law is anything but foolish. Not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
Minors do not have the same protections against search, nor do they have the franchise. They can’t enter contracts and therefore their ability to obtain necessary permits to assemble in certain protest is also limited. A 12 year old cetainly doesn’t have the same constitutional rights as a 22 year old. I grant the two are separate in some instances, majority and attachment of rights, but there is certainly a relationship between age and certain exercise of rights.
If you want to argue the law should not be consistent go right ahead but that is a position so far off the reservation for me I’d leave you to it.
Because as a society we recognize that children are not fully capable of making decisions for themselves. Adults are.
The antipathy towards switchblades is much like the antipathy towards suppressors. They associate switchblades with rumbles and Jets/Sharks just like they associate suppressors with KGB assassins.
I’m pretty skeptical about this particular methodology, to be honest. Creating one single synthetic state as the basis for comparison is an invitation for statistical cherry picking. I’m particularly skeptical because the synthetic state is 72% Rhode Island, which has a whopping dozen or two firearm homicides per year (my lazy sampling of a few years’ UCR “murder, by state, by type of weapon” tables). The difference ascribed to Connecticut gun control could be instead due to an isolated cluster of homicides in Rhode Island. By eyeball, it looks like would only take a handful (5-10 per year) of “extra” firearm homicides in Rhode Island to account for the effect.
I would be more confident in some sort of empirical distribution of synthetic states, though I admit I don’t know exactly how to do this. In biology we use bootstrapping to create an empirical distribution of control samples, which allows more robust analysis of an experimental subset of the data. Maybe a population of synthetic states could be created by sampling, say, a Connecticut’s worth of counties, and then appropriately weighting the sample counties to match the demographics of Connecticut?
Applied to this study, I’d like to see that Connecticut had a reduction in firearm homicides that was clearly outside the distribution of rates in other synthetic states. Otherwise it’s just as reasonable to ascribe the effect identified in the study to a crime wave in a single city in Rhode Island.
Why demand consistency where consistency is not called for? What constitutional principle would require us to have a single age at which voting and gun ownership be permitted? Why insist on this consistency when rational arguments can be made for having one age for the right to vote and another age for the right to bear arms in a state?
Any state is free to give 15 year olds the right to vote, its just that none of them ever do. There is a constitutional amendment (the 26th) that prohibits denying the right to vote to people over 18 based on age but nothing says that their state cannot give them that right. The 26th amendment was a reaction to the conscription of 18 year olds (for the Vietnam War) when the right to vote in most states did not attach until you were 21 years old.
Is there a constitutional amendment guaranteeing 18 year olds the right to bear arms? If not then does that mean that everyone has the right to bear arms including 15 year olds? or does it mean that a state can reasonably regulate the right to bear arms and that this right can be an age other than the right to vote.
Sure and in some states the ability to purchase a handgun is limited to people over the age of 21. Is the argument that handguns are so important to self defense that we have to permit 18 year olds to purchase them? Then why doesn’t the homeless 16 year old have the same right?
When people talk about consistency in the law, they usually mean that the law should be equally applied to all citizens not that they laws all use the same age. In what way doer the constitution require that 18 year olds (but not 17 year olds) be able to purchase handguns?
There is nothing inconsistent about permitting 14 year olds to get married, 16 year olds to drive, 18 year olds to vote, 21 year olds to drink, 25 year olds to run for congress, etc.
Where is that in the constitution? The notion of competency is almost exclusively handled by the states.
Me too. (Except “formulated” instead of “formulates”.)
2nd Amendment
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.
Shall not be infringed seems pretty straight forward and easy to understand.
Forgot to add: the reason I’m not interested in the age discussion is because we’ve had the exact same discussion before in which I made the case very clearly.
Wisconsin law doesn’t even exempt peace officers. And it covers “spring assisted” knives that companies like to advertise as legal, but our Attorney Generals office has stated that they are not.
Yeah…and Tom Edison, Henry Ford, And Henry Clay Frick were assholes,too. Did you have some overarching point or were you just operating under the mistaken assumption that we thought Colt was a nice guy?
Here are the murder rates (per 10000) for Connecticut and the states surrounding it, from 1996 to 2013:
Based on data from:
The “Average” line is the average of Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. Assuming that, by virtue of being in the middle of those states, Connecticut would generally follow the average of them, this line predicts where Connecticut’s homicide rate should be.
Now, if Connecticut’s laws make it noticeably different from the states surrounding it, the Average line should not be a useful predictor. Specifically, Connecticut should trend downwards relative to the Average and the states around it. According to the article in the OP, to be more specific, it should follow the average at the start of the time period and then dive harder and harder towards the end.
If Connecticut’s homicide rate seems on-par for where we would expect it to lie, solely based on geography, then Connecticut’s laws have not made any difference and have not spared any lives.
