I remember it well too; MN became a Shall Issue state in 2003-2004 (there was something about the first version of the carry law didn’t meet a technicality so they had to pass it again). What astonished me and has colored my view of gun control advocates ever since is the sheer contempt voiced by opponents of Shall Issue for the intelligence and responsibility of the average citizen. To hear them tell it, the public shouldn’t be allowed to run with scissors let alone own or carry guns. People who apparently believe that The Simpsons is a documentary of modern America (presumably with themselves as the exception, since they’re smart enough to recognize this).
It sounds like Alt-Right paranoia, but I have to wonder if the gun control movement is part and parcel with the infantilization of American society and the abandonment of any notion of personal responsibility.
ISTM that of course the more activistic voices will of course be more heard and their statements will imprint in people’s consciousness if they touch a nerve. Even if not majoritarian.
Right, no one outside of far right gun activists were obsessing over things like that mentioned in @Crafter_Man’s post, I would wager virtually no one in the State of Ohio was aware any of that dialogue was going on.
It’s quite difficult to find op-eds on this subject from 30 years or more ago, and nearly impossible to dredge up letters to the editor from the period. I see that you’re now conceding the existence of “a few scattered op-eds by hysterical people”, so maybe you’ve decided that flatly denying the memories of multiple posters isn’t the way to go.
To get back to the subject of the OP, I wouldn’t feel safer on New York subways with more people authorized to carry concealed weapons. I wouldn’t feel less safe either. Best to keep a good distance from the edge of the platforms, as nobody needs a weapon to shove you onto the tracks.
I mean no, almost every significant newspaper has searchable archives (some may require you to pay for it.) And sorry but no, a few people who are obsessed with “gun rights” “remembering” the evil liberals foaming at the mouth, and me being expected to simply accept their “memory” as an unbiased gauge as to what America in the 90s was like is not going to fucking happen. I was here in the 90s, I even was involved in Republican politics in the 90s, the idea that there was a lot of gun control people who were dominating public attention just isn’t accurate. If anything the NRA and advocates of repealing the AWB were the ones getting more prominent attention.
Gun control has largely been in retreat in the United States since the mid-1980s, and has never had anywhere near the PR prominence as the “guns for everyone” movement that has dominated discourse on the topic ever since. The people who define their entire existence based on guns obsess over anyone who is anti-gun, but that massively overstates how important anti-gun voices are, and how much prominence they had, or how common they were.
If the claim was that gun control histrionics dominated the discussion in the 1970s, I would not contest it–that is mostly accurate, and the 70s is when many of the more restrictive gun laws started to become common.
Particularly absent training and permit requirements (as well as background checks), how can we expect ‘constitutional carry’ people to know what to do in order not to become the next Johnny Hurley ?
“Good Samaritan” Johnny Hurley died needlessly last year because nearby Arvada police officers failed to confront a gunman in Olde Town Arvada, failed to verify that Hurley was a threat and an officer failed to announce himself as a police officer before shooting Hurley from behind, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed Wednesday by Hurley’s mother.
What happens when the ‘good guy with the gun’ is on a NYC subway car, but LEOs don’t have good information when they reach the scene about who’s who, and have to make split-second decisions (as they so often do) ?
CCW classes tend to give you some information about what you should and should not do if you have to (brandish or) discharge your weapon.
I’m not a shrill, Chicken Little type, but I do see this kind of problem escalating, not decreasing, as more people decide to ‘constitutionally carry.’
He gets shot, as would other people like him. Hurley was not a good guy with a gun. He was a dumb person with a gun who got himself killed. He chose that path and we should mot mourn it. I frankly celebrate it.
I stated just a few posts ago that “I do not support concealed carry without a permit and meaningful training. Applicants should preferably have a good reason for needing a permit, modeled on need for safety and security.”
So lumping me in as “obsessed with “gun rights”” doesn’t fly, and suggests as a minimum that your own “memory” is distinctly flawed.
I dunno, I’ve seen fights break out on the subway, and IMHO, it was a good thing that no one was carrying. A gun added to that mix would have made everything exponentially worse.
I lived in NYC for 7 years, and took the subway every day. I was never in a situation where i thought I’d be better off of i had a gun with me.
But i suppose even if NY is forced to allow more people to get gun permits, most of them will have the common sense not to carry them around, and even if they lack that, most of them will have the good sense to avoid shooting a gun on the subway. It will make the subway less safe, but probably not a lot less safe.
Not at all. In the time of the Founding Fathers many towns had regulations on carrying firearms within town borders and on certain days and at certain times.
As is typical, conservative “originalists” often simply ignore the actual original history, which in our country is of localities passing frankly draconian firearm regulations from the earliest eras of American history.
Not really; as has been discussed in many threads, the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment as ensuring an individual’s right “to have guns whenever and wherever they want” is comparatively recent in American jurisprudence.
I think that the average Founding Father would agree there is an individual right to firearms, why? Because they were all born thinking of themselves as Englishmen to some degree–while they also viewed themselves as Virginians, Pennsylvanians etc, they still firmly viewed themselves as Englishmen–their rhetoric frequent referenced, in public and private writings “the rights of Englishmen.” And while in America we often think of the Bill of Rights as something that burst forth out of American exceptionalism, we learn even in basic history classes that a direct predecessor was the English Bill of Rights, that actually has within it an individual right to bear arms (note that like most of the English Bill of Rights, that section has long been overridden by later acts of Parliament), but back in the 18th century it was still fairly understood that an innate right of Englishmen was to bear arms (this was frankly fairly understood even in England until the Pistols Act, of the early 20th century, one of the first meaningful firearms laws in England.)
But, the Founding Fathers did not view the Federal constitution as a protector of rights, it was broadly and completely understood that the representative governments of the 13 States were responsible for protecting basic rights. The Federal government, very limited and only possessing enumerated powers, simply needed to be constrained from potentially passing legislation harmful to rights as they relate to Federal laws (which at the time had a limited scope compared to today.) So while the Founding Fathers would be shocked by some elements of the modern discussion about guns, they would be far more shocked that we were concerning ourselves with the Federal right. Both the decision of MIller and the National Firearms Act, as well as decisions like Heller would some alien and strange to them, as they are all predicated on a Federal involvement in ordinary daily life that was unthinkable in their time.
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