You need to reread our exchange, this time for comprehension.
The only one I’ve run across is the one where Boston banned loaded guns within city limits- which was a firecode safety ordinance, not a prohibition on guns. I will gladly look at better examples if you can point me to them.
I moved to NYC 36 years ago, lived there 10 years, have lived in the suburbs 26 years. My husband takes the subway every day, my kids take it frequently for work or school, and I take it a few times a month. I happened to take it several days in a row just before the recent decision. All of us agree that we feel less safe when we think of more people with guns on the subway.
While it isn’t AFAICT freely available online, " Gun Laws in Early America: The Regulation of Firearms Ownership, 1607–1794" by Michael A. Belleisles is a heavily sourced tome that lays out that every State had gun control regulations on the books at the time of the 1791 passage of the Bill of Rights. His primary sourcing for these claims is typical registers of official acts of colonial and early State governments, which are available online but non-trivial for a layman to search (the formatting of published statutes from the 18th century is a mess to work through if you aren’t familiar with them.)
As an example of some footnotes and the sort of information they contain and sourcing:
- See, e.g., Act of April 22, 1785, ch. 81, 1785 N.Y. Laws 152; Act of Nov. 16,
1821, ch. LXLIII, 1821 Tenn. Pub. Acts 78; Act of Jan. 30, 1847, 1846-1847 Va. Acts
ch. 79, at 67. The range of colonial regulation of firearms and gun powder is
documented. See, e.g., A Collection of all the Laws of the Province of Pennsylvania:
Now in Force 13, 39-40, 85, 197-200, 315-17 (1742) (concerning dueling, the storage of
gun powder, the carrying of weapons by “Negroes,” firing guns in the City of
Philadelphia, and hunting).- E.g., Act of Feb. 4, 1806, 1805-1806 Va. Acts ch. XCIV, at 51 (concerning the
carrying of weapons by free “Negroes and mulattoes”).- E.g., Act of Mar. 14, 1776, ch. VII, 1775-1776 Mass. Acts 31 (addressing the
disarming of persons who were “disaffected to the Cause of America”); Act of Apr. 1,
1778, ch. LXI, §§ 2, 5, 1777-1778 Pa. Laws 123, 126 (requiring white males over the
age of eighteen to take an oath of loyalty or be disarmed
While it would likely be beyond the easy scope of a message board discussion, a broad survey of colonial and early State legislative gun control regimes would suggest a society that was perfectly fine with individual gun ownership but also perfectly fine with fairly stringent regulations on the nature and manner of that ownership. Interestingly in the 18th century a number of colonial governments actually had continuous difficulties cajoling white property owners (who in many States were obligated to own firearms for militia purposes) to actually arm themselves appropriately for militia duty, and a number of intrusive regulations were passed to try and rectify this. While it may seem odd, by modern “conservative originalist” interpretations these laws would be gravely against the narrative charlatans like Scalia and Thomas put forth in the last 20 years, since they frequently intensely intrude on the individual rights element of gun ownership, and instead seem to treat guns as a matter of communal concern firstly.
Why would someone get a carry permit and then not carry?
Not always.
My state allows CCW license applicants to use their hunter safety course to satisfy the training requirement.
Hell, a friend of mine got his CCW in 2011 using documentation of his Army training to satisfy the training requirement. He was in the Army in 1951!
I would tend to agree. I feel like having a subway full of Berny Goetzes and Travis Bickles makes is more likely to lead to accidents or an altercation than it is to prevent crime.
ROFL. Bellesiles’ work was discredited years ago.
An independent panel of three prominent historians concluded in 2002 that Mr. Bellesiles was “guilty of unprofessional and misleading work,”and raised questions about falsified data. Columbia University’s trustees took back the Bancroft history prize it had awarded the book, and Mr. Bellesiles resigned from the faculty at Emory University.
I seem to recall from real life and Taxi Driver that Goetz and Bickle* never troubled themselves with obtaining carry permits (not that they would have gotten them. NYC long has made legally obtaining guns very difficult, even for businesspeople who have legitimate-sounding need for permits). I prefer not to think about how many of my fellow travelers when I regularly rode the subways in the late '60s and early '70s were carrying concealed firearms or other weapons.
*if we’re going to bring up Travis, maybe we should start worrying about cabbies and Uber drivers packing heat.
One of the things I was trying to point out is that the worry warts/Chicken Littles aren’t confined to one side of the political spectrum.
In the concealed carry case, it was mostly liberals who were upset, but in my alcohol sales example, it was almost exclusively the conservative churchgoing crowd against it.
I’m not sure “mass panic” or “moral panic” is quite the way to classify this. It’s less of a collective hysteria thing than it’s a change to the status quo, and there are always people who are going to claim that it’ll cause all sorts of dire consequences, and those consequences virtually never come to pass, or if they do, in such miniscule ways that it’s laughable.
I mean, what makes anyone think that concealed firearms on a NYC subway is going to change one thing? The criminal element wasn’t waiting on the law to change to start carrying guns, and I sort of doubt that suddenly there’s going to be a huge uptick in law-abiding CCW people on the subways. Here in Texas anyway, the CCW crowd tends to overlap significantly with the fearful and conservative crowd- older white men mostly. Not too many of those on the NYC subways I suspect.
The article you link to concerns another work he wrote in 2000, not the 1997 paper I cited. Also, as mentioned–his paper contains hundreds of citations to colonial and early State legislative statutes, if you believe those citations are false (some of which I already posted), you are free to go to the original source material yourself.
As you said, a full analysis of Belleisles is beyond the scope of a message board. But I do wonder about several things. Obviously laws against negroes possessing firearms are hardly endorsements of gun control. And even gun rights proponents would find it hard to object to laws against dueling(!) or the reckless discharge of firearms within city limits. Doubtless there were many felony and misdemeanor offenses and judges’ orders for which one could be ordered to surrender one’s guns, more or less like today. Black powder, a far more hazardous substance than modern propellants, would require stringent safety laws. And the circumstances of an armed revolution are hardly the norm for a civil society. In short, I wonder how many colonial era laws actually support the argument that the Founders would be perfectly happy with the idea of disarmament- broadly forbidding (white) people from owning and carrying firearms.
What I think it gets into is this: the natural rights philosophers of the time were not libertarians or anarchists in the modern sense, but they did believe in liberty. What we see in the way of gun regulations in that era were just that: regulations, to manage the ubiquitous possession of firearms, in much the same way that e.g. Switzerland regulates firearms today. This is a rather different proposition from modern gun “control”, which is more or less an effort to try to have the fewest possible number of armed people, with an ideal number of zero. If modern gun owners hew to an ahistorical standard of libertarianism with regards to firearms, it’s because they have reacted against an asserted government authority to “regulate” firearms to mean “regulate out of existence”. I for one would be perfectly happy with Swiss-style gun regulation in exchange for ironclad guarantees that these would not be used as pretexts for disarmament. But since large numbers of gun control proponents want disarmament, there’s very little chance of seeing this.
The whole gun control/regulation debate seems to have followed abortion/reproductive rights into two sides talking past each other, because both sides are convinced they’re absolutely right, and the other side is absolutely wrong.
I think the rational compromise is some sort of licensing, but good luck convincing either side of that.
You need to reread the thread title, this time for comprehension. 
Concealed firearms on a NYC subway.
Let us not go into other states with open carry, etc laws. Not to mention you are confusing correlation with causation. I am trying to keep this thread on track. And there is no need for snark.
Yes, true, which is why we have the Bill of Rights.
It is data. This quote is a misquote, the actual quote is The plural of anecdote is data
The plural of anecdote is data – Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation | Kauffman.org.
“The plural of anecdote is data.” That observation, by cognitive psychologist and “skeptical activist” Barbara Drescher, is not an apology for sloppy logic.
If you are, for example- a diamond merchant, or a retailer who carries large sums to the bank, you would not need to carry on your days off, etc
The RAND study says otherwise. OTOH, there is no solid evidence that the public will be any safer.
I was on a panel with some FBI and other agents, and that came up as a question- is the public safer or not with a lot of people carrying guns. After much discussion, the panel had a sorta WAG consensus- CCWs and open carry seems to cut down on armed robberies, muggings, forcible rape by strangers, etc, but there is a increase of “crimes of passion”, thus the two balance out, more or less.
The worry is not so much as you would CCW just to ride the subway. But that diamond merchants , abused wives who have left their spouses, and people who have a legit need to carry a lot of cash- would not be able to get to and fro without public transit. Those classes were generally denied a CCW under “may issue” laws. From my short time there, it seems like public transit or taxi is about the only way to go beyond walking distance. Banning, say, a diamond merchant from CCW on mass transit, more or less bans his carrying at all. Which of course was the idea, and why that will be thrown out by the courts. Judges, by and large, ain’t that stupid.
Why? Someone won’t try to rob or kill you on your days off? How would you ever know that? Which days of the week do you not have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers in your home/business?
Trying to guess which day you may need to defend your life is no more effective than playing the lottery. And, it is your life you would be defending. Not diamonds or money, or any other replaceable property. You either carry all the time or you do not carry at all. Your reasoning is absurd and risky.
I lived in NYC for 39 years, and I think I’d feel less safe, not more, if there were a significant number of people carrying firearms on the subway.
The thing about the NYC subways is there’s almost always a lot of people on them. I’ve taken the train at 2AM on weekends and been unable to find a seat. The exceptions would be in the late early hours, 4AM, 5AM and some of the stops near the end of the line in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
But aside from that are almost always other people in the car with you, and most of those people will not hesitate to help you if you need. It’s not that none of those people are criminals, but subway crimes are almost always either stealthy ( like pickpocketing) or grab and run, ( like purse snatching ).
IMHO, the presence of so many other people combined with the layout of the cars and the fact that the train is in motion, make using a firearm in self-defense on a subway car a REALLY bad idea, you’d have to be an expert marksman to get off a shot without collateral damage.
That’s your opinion. I carried for years as a peace officer in NYC. I was required to carry on duty most of the time* and I did - but I almost never carried off-duty, although I was allowed to. The few times I did, it was because I had something to do right before or after work. When I retired, I did not apply for a law enforcement retiree license although I am eligible.
I traveled around NYC including on public transit without a firearm before I got that job and I didn’t see any difference afterward - except of course that NYC in general had become much safer starting in the mid-nineties than it had been in the late seventies and the eighties.
Sure , someone could have tried to rob me or kill me on my days off - was much less likely , though , for a number of reasons having to do with the specifics of my job.
* There was exception if I was assigned for the day to a location where I would have to turn my weapon over to another agency’s officer such as a court, jail , or prison. In that case, I did not have to carry my firearm just
You’re not responding to the conversation I’m having with Dr Deth. Their theory is a non-leo only has to carry sometimes and not others. Your post seems to fall into the never carry attitude, which is what I was talking about. Either you do or you don’t.
And BTW, I’m a LEO as well. Quite probably longer than you were.
Dr Deth was specifically speaking about the diamond merchant or the retailer who brings large sums of cash to the bank not needing to carry on their days off. I’m not sure exactly how that’s different from me not carrying on my time off or from the armored car driver not carrying when off-duty.
IANALEO. I’ll jump in quickly here to say that I have held CCWs from a couple of other states. I support licensing and training for CCW holders, and the training has to be much better than what’s currently provided, to include handling stress and adrenaline, shooting tactics, and just simple basic marksmanship to start.
And when I found out that some LEOs are not allowed to carry when off duty and, for example, going on vacation with their families, I find that ludricous. They should be able to, if they want to.
And why would a CCW holder choose to not carry? Many reasons. But to have the option to carry when one wants to is a very good thing, contingent on the training and licensing.
Because it sounds like you are in the never carry camp unless I am misunderstanding your post.
People who only carry sometimes are flirting with a trouble as there is a different dynamic to ones awareness of their surroundings and such while they are armed as to when they are not. There is a different dynamic in the overall thought process. I assume you know that, however. Going back and forth on that dynamic may mess them up when trouble comes calling and they are not equipped.
Years back I took an entire training course on off-duty carry and there was a large extension as to why you should either always carry or never carry. It was dry, but it made it’s point.
Who told you that? Because it’s incorrect. An agency can prohibit an officer from carrying their department issued equipment off duty but the cannot prevent an off duty/vacationing officer from carrying their own firearm off duty or in another state. That’s been the law since 2004.