The flamethrower on amazon is listed here, and it appears more like a tool than a weapon. I would prefer a weaponized flamethrower that’s specifically meant to incinerate people not dry sagebrush.
- Honesty
By the general principle that convicted felons and those adjudged incompetent are considered to have forfeited the respecting of their rights.
A flame thrower is just a device to throw flame. You could build one if nothing else…like this guy. AFAICT it’s legal to own one, though there probably isn’t a large market for such things to incinerate people with these days. 
Depending on whose statistics you believe, it’s happening already. And this despite that few places have permit holder rates more than 5% of the population.
I look forward to the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Chicago PD.
So I guess the requirement to pass a safety class before getting a CCW permit is unconstitutional. That is clearly an infringement on someone that did nothing to forfeit the respecting of their rights.
My point is merely that reading the 2nd to be unlimited is generally not supported, and not a position that SCOTUS took in Heller either. I believe they specifically allowed for banning of uncommon or unusual weapons, as well as concealed carry. They also supported bans on bearing arms in schools or government buildings, infringements not mentioned in the text of the amendment.
Sometimes I think you’re way too nice a guy.
I tell you what, I’m gonna be a hell of a lot more selective about the bars and restaurants I visit from now on. I used to walk into shady bars thinking “what’s the worst that can happen?” - not any more.
I was just thinking that I know too many people who’ve been chomping at the bit to concealed carry just because they can, and who I wouldn’t trust with a gun if my own life depended on it. (And it may now that they’re going to be carrying, but not in the way those particular ‘cowboys’ think it does.)
Well previously you’d said felons and the insane so I answered that. As to permits: some people in fact use the phrase “Constitutional Carry” to mean no prior restraint on carrying weapons, like in Vermont. And I suppose that simply certifying that you were investigated and found to not be forbidden to carry (felony conviction, judged insane, etc.) would pass muster. Required classes to carry- I’ve got to admit I’m conflicted on that one. Technically it is an infringement, but it really does filter out the yahoos from those willing to take some responsibility with regard to firearms.
The Bill of Rights has never been held to mean a boundless libertarian immunity from government interference. For example, the Constitution guarantees freedom of assembly; no one argues that that means the police can’t break up an unruly crowd or that cities can’t require parade permits for demonstrations. But it does mean that the right of assembly is recognized as a right- not a privilege that the government can grant or withhold on a whim. And to continue the analogy, with regard to guns it’s as if the cities of Chicago, DC and New York had passed crowd control ordinances predefining all unauthorized gatherings as riots.
Since when can a court instruct a legislature to pass a law on a subject? I call bullshit on this overreach of judicial power. This is not striking down a law, which courts do have the power to do.
I’d love to see these statistics if you have them handy.
Well, in 2003, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts declared that barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that individual would marry a person of the same sex violated the Massachusetts Constitution, and ordered the state legislature to pass a law modifying marriage laws to be consistent with that opinion.
Is that the kind of overreach you mean?
I’m curious – other states that have passed mandatory “shall issue” concealed carry permit laws do not show the kind of increase in violent crimes that this opinion seems to contemplate. In light of this experience, why does the spectre continue to worry you? Does Illinois have more than its share of individuals with poor impulse control, such that her experience will be different than all other states?
Part of the problem with compiling such statistics is getting both sides to agree on, not only to count apples with apples, but to agree on what exactly is an apple. A more in-depth explanation of the difficulty can be found at Chapter 5 of, Firearms and Violence, a 2004 publication of the Commitee on Law and Justice. Your guess is as good as mine what their political bias is; I just found the first part of the cited chapter to be a good introduction to the difficulty of acquiring and compiling this sort of data. A good rule of thumb when reading synopses of studies like these is that Gary Kleck and John Lott are going to give you studies that suggest firearms owned by law-abiding citizens are tremendously effective at stopping crime, while studies by groups such as the Violence Policy Center will suggest the opposite.
As to which side has a better handle on the statistics, I couldn’t tell you, but I agree with the wiki for Concealed Carry in the United States’s section on efficacy which allegedly (I can’t get past the subscriber wall) quotes The Journal of Higher Education in stating, “Mr. Lott’s research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime.” I remember the stories in the media surrounding the adoption of the first sets of CCW laws in the 1990’s, that, e.g., gunfights would break out at fender benders because of this law. It didn’t happen. (FWIW, I was surprised too.) I think crime has dropped from the early 1990s for other reasons, primarily demographic, but CCW hasn’t made things appreciably worse. And since I’m a small-L libertarian, and therefore, if at an impasse, lean to the side of increased liberty; if CCW doesn’t makes things worse, and might actually help, I fail to see the pressing case for the State to restrict CCW.
Anyway, I just came in to recommend that, if you want criminological papers on defensive gun uses, looking at Professors Kleck and Lott’s work would be a good start.