NRA to Sue Arizona over Destroying Buyback Guns

The BBQ Pit
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For all this talk of analogs of police handing out $20 to disperse protesters or $100 to buy condoms, let me suggest something else that is more apt.

Let’s say the government wants to get old cars off the road. It offers a $2,500 credit for gas guzzling cars to be turned in to be destroyed. Let’s hope the government never aligns itself against the right of people to travel on public roads.

Oh, wait, that already happened. Are Americans worse off because of it? No! If one valued their 1969 Mustang V-8 more than $2,500, there’s no harm, no foul. If their 1980 busted-up Bronco was traded in, the interests of both the motorist and the government were well-served.

If the government wants to offer me $100 for each condom I turn in, I’m going to pee myself with laughter as I run maniacally between CVS stores and the bank, as I am going to be making money hand over fist. If the government offers 5 cents a condom, only scavengers and stoned college students with expired prophylactics are going to take advantage of that program. Either way, who the fuck cares what the effect on reproductive rights is?

But back to the larger question: If the government had some lawful interest in dispersing people from Zucatti Park (or wherever), whether it be in response to trespassing, riots, or other lawlessness, I could absolutely see the possibility that inducing people to leave, rather than having protesters’ heads bashed in after the Riot Act was read, to be a legitimate strategy. On the other hand, if the intent to disperse people was simply because the government did not agree with the people’s message, that would be wrong.

Similarly, a gun buy-back program that is intended to allow people to dispose of unwanted firearms in a safe manner is just fine with me. The government using either public or private funds for the takings of a gun shop simply in order to drive a gun dealer out of business would be wrong.

Am I nuts for thinking that this is a ridiculously easy question to answer?

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Since I proposed the contraception thought experiment, I feel compelled to add that I pointed out that one has to ignore the economics of it, since obviously most birth control is too cheap for a buyback program to be possible. If you prefer, consider the proposal to be the removal of IUDs for $100.

It depends on how you conceptualize rights in our constitutional order. Some people see rights as exclusively individual matters. Under that view, any truly voluntary waiver of a right is never a problem. Even here, spending could be a problem if it is “coercive,” whatever that means.

But you might also think that some rights are not only about individuals, but also about the larger social order. Free speech, you might argue, is not just about the right to speak, but about creating a marketplace of ideas. Similarly, you might think that the Second Amendment is not just about an individual’s right of self-defense, but also about the benefits of a well-armed populace. Or that the right to vote (not actually a constitutional right per se, but anyway), is not just about self-expression. If half the country waived their rights to vote in order to get $100, this would be bad for society notwithstanding the fact that many would be perfectly happy to abstain from voting to get the check.

I understand you to be saying that conditional gifts like this are only a problem if the government has an improper intent. How do you determine the government’s intent?

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For the billionth time, no one is waiving any rights by participating in a gun buy-back program. Your analogy fails hard once again. The whole point to the program – as **Ravenman **pointed out – is to provide citizens with a safe way to dispose of their guns. Constitutional rights have dick to do with any of this.

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You seem like you’re making an argument, but you’re actually just making an assertion.

And your assertion contradicts actual law, which says that sometimes constitutional rights are implicated by the government conditioning spending on the waiver of the exercise–even the limited, discrete, temporal exercise–of that right.

If taking a gun from a lawful gun owner violates the constitution (even though he could just go buy another one), then it follows that buying it from him implicates the same set of constitutional questions as are implicated in the cases involving paying someone not to vote or not to speak.

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Maybe they should do it for free then. Then auction them off to those who want them to lessen the tax burden. That sounds win-win to me.

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Seriously, who’s going to take that deal?

It’s the same people who take the gun deal, people who don’t actually want the fucking thing anymore.

Old ladies who inherited their IUD from their dead husband will happily take your money for that dusty old thing that’s been tucked away for 10 years getting rusty. They no longer have to worry about criminals getting their hands on the poorly secured IUD during a break in and using to carjack someone, or having their granddaughter find it and accidentally blow her crotch off.

This is “household hazardous waste” disposal. They don’t want the gun, don’t know what to do with it, and just want it to go away without getting in trouble by throwing it in the garbage.

If the NRA wants to keep these guns available, they should setup their own buyback program, make it easy for folks to dispose of weapons they don’t want, and send the guns to reputable dealers. They might have to partner with police so people don’t have to worry about dealing with an illegal gun.

Only, they’re not setting up a buyback program, someone else is, and they get to choose what happens to the guns they are funding the buyback of.

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If only there were a system of people that represented the populace who could get together and argue about possible laws in front of TV and the press. Perhaps some intent could be derived from that.

Or, perhaps law-talkin’ guys could argue in front of a kind of referee, and the ref could determine whose case is more convincing; knowing that disagreements with his interpretation could be elevated to increasingly larger panels of refs.

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If I decide to type the word “banana,” I’m not at that time typing the word “Coriolis.” But it’s idiotic to phrase this as saying that I’m “waiving my right” to type that word. It’s absurd to suggest that I’m giving up the right to free speech thereby. If you interpret it that way, then any time you act, you are by definition waiving your right to act in all the ways you didn’t act. This is some college-sophomore-level philosophy.

Similarly, if someone chooses to sell a gun, they are not waiving their right to gun ownership in any but the most ridiculous college-sophomore-level meaning of the phrase.

Sure. Imagine the police decided that crime was happening in a particular neighborhood due in part to the fact that neighbors didn’t know one another, so crime wasn’t getting reported, so criminals could act with willful abandon.

So the cops host a spaghetti dinner for people in the neighborhood to get together to meet one another.

Now, of course the right to peaceful assembly necessarily includes the right to assemble with someone else. By asking people to come to that spaghetti dinner, the cops are asking people to waive their right to, for example, assemble at their cousins’ house, or at a fancy restaurant, or even just to assemble with their own family in their own homes. But only in the idiotic college sophomore sense of the phrase.

Who should sue the police in this case?

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Also, a serious question: if the police are required by that statute to sell guns at auction, how are they not required to sell at auction used Kleenexes thrown away in garbage cans at the police station? It seems to me that the NRA’s strained reading of the law is going to catch a lot more than guns.

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Cheesesteak: I don’t disagree. I think the NRA would be wrong to be concerned about the kind of reduction in gun ownership caused by a buy-back program.

I was just trying to defend two things: (1) that voluntary exchanges like this have the potential to cause net social negatives (a premise many reject and some in this thread seemed to question); and (2) that there is actually a non-frivolous constitutional issue lurking in these kinds of programs, even if such a claim here would be quite likely to fail.

Yeah, in my experience, legislators who want to pass laws for less than above-board reasons tend not to give speeches about it, or leave a paper trail for litigation. Instead, courts are left with the question of whether Senator Dumbfuck really thinks abortion clinics need more stringent hygiene standards, or if his intent was to make it harder for abortion clinics to get state certification to reduce the number of them.

So I’m not entirely comfortable with the solution that we’ll just leave it up the courts to decide what some collection of individuals “intended.” Seems like it would be better to find something more objective.

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I kind of made a joke about it earlier, but could the police hypothetically offer to buy just half the gun and then cut in half with whatever tool it would take and take their half. Tell the folks, come by the station if you want your half, otherwise it will be abandoned after 30 days.

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In my experience, it’s pretty fucking obvious when less than above board reasons are offered for various bills. I regret any congenital or acquired affliction you may have that hinders your ability to detect bullshit.

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Oh really? So it follows that it’s no problem for the government to condition, say, your low-interest student loans on your not using profanity? Since you’re constantly waiving your right to use profanity, then this doesn’t implicate your free speech rights?

Regardless of your intuition on the subject, the law has recognized that the choice not to exercise a right (which is called waiver in this context) can be problematic if that choice is somehow induced by the state. So if a police officer lets me out of a parking ticket if I don’t march in a parade, we talk about that as a coerced waiver problem, even though there a million parades a day I choose not to march in.

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Detect is quite different from prove. I strongly suspect that the PA legislature’s decision to up the hygiene requirements for abortion clinics was bullshit. But I’m not sure how I would prove it. So I’m pretty glad that the test doesn’t turn on intent.

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If you are ever picked for jury duty, please do the defendant and the prosecution a favor and tell them during voir dire that you don’t think you can tell the difference between murder one and negligent homicide.

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It benefits collectors who already own them. And, be honest. We’re talking about a $1000 dollar riffle, so any collector who really wanted one, could easily own one already. I’ve seen 16yo manage to save up for $5k cars just because they wanted one. We’re not talking $50k items here.

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Can I tell them you told me to say that? This actually sounds like a good plan.

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Or they could keep doing what they’re doing and people like you can shut the fuck up about it since it doesn’t affect you or your friggin’ rights one way or another.

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No.

Under what specific circumstances has the law made such a recognition, and how do those specific circumstances apply to this case? Note your use of the words “can be,” which are different from the words “is always.” Just because it can be under some circumstances does not remotely mean it always is.

I suspect that in order for such a situation to be problematic, the cops must not be able to represent something along the lines of a rational basis for their decision, and I also suspect that there needs to be some coercive element to the whole proceeding.

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Taxpayer money is used to get garbage off the streets. Taxpayer money is used simply to get rid of a lot of things.