Guns Do Kill People, but that's not the point!

Guns do kill people, but that’s not the point!

Steven R. Berryman

[From The Tentacle March 26, 2012]

Contrary to a famous National Rifle Association gun phrase, guns do kill people. Just ask anyone currently associated with a “neighborhood watch” community patrol.

Unless you live under a rock, you know that this occurred under suspicious circumstances in Florida, when an unarmed (mostly) black man was shot dead by a (half) Hispanic neighborhood watcher.

For the record, I’m a mostly Western European descendant of several flavors, or what you might call a “mutt.”

However, in this issue, or tragedy, as is the accepted term by all GOP presidential candidates, that’s not the point! That is the distraction.

The American human tragedy itself – an unarmed young man shot and killed in the prime of his life by a non-law enforcement vigilante type who was not duly deputized – that is the point.

Anyone trivializing the incident by injecting matters of race or ethnicity – and by inference hijacking this into a political and racial incident – is not only selfishly grandstanding, but is losing the point of greatest concern. We do not live in the old Wild West. Why did this man use his weapon in an offensive manner (as the other guy was not armed), castle doctrine be damned?

And the shooter was not even arrested.

That the Rev. Al Sharpton, man of the cloth without congregation, is involved in the wordplay in the aftermath of this shooting is no surprise. That the Rev. Jesse Jackson, also weighed-in from the seclusion of his banishment (for fathering a child with an unmarried girlfriend) is but from a parallel universe of race-baiting past.

That the man who would be “everyman’s president” in America, Barack Obama, would personalize this unwarranted and unjustified shooting by claiming the victim looks like the son he never had…is bizarrely inflammatory and campaign 2012-centric by diabolic design!

But this is about a bad Florida gun law, not enforceable on its own merits. Basically if you can breathe and don’t have a record, you can carry legally in this “shall issue” state, much like Virginia law. By Florida state law you may shoot another person if you “feel” threatened, even outside of your own home. This is the part that needs fixin’.

I am a “gun guy,” and can prove it: just Google-search my name and the word “gun” to see! I’ve belonged to the NRA since the age of 18 (on and off, cash be willing) and have even been published in their journal, NRA-ILA, or their Institute for Legislative Action as a contributor at their request.

Therefore, I am compelled to remind you that, in the spirit of the greater national good that America would not be the free nation you live in today without our forefathers association with firearms as tools going back to our founding as a nation, used to hunt and provide, as well as to pry ourselves free from the clutches of the King of England.

We are instructed to this day by our own embattled Constitution to keep and bear arms against the – predicted – rise of a large government that would creep into tyranny against its own people. You know this today, as more and more we citizens are made to feel that we work for and at the mercy of an overarching government.

Respectable gun owners do understand that firearms ownership is a responsibility as well as a constitutionally guaranteed American right. These people are horrified about this Florida tragedy.  But it merits saying again: This is NOT about race!

Do not become distracted.

 Click link for the original post:  Guns do kill people, but that’s not the point!

srbmgr@gmail.com

Chief Kim Dine provided this link to me; a great read:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/opinion/floridas-disastrous-self-defense-law.html?_r=3&emc=eta1

[further reading on this subject from The Tentacle: Racial or not, it’s tragic by Derek Shackelford,
                                                     
and......... Delayed “Tragedy” by Roy Meachum.
Each Article contained on this website is COPYRIGHe printed for al authors.

Maryland handgun permit provision unconstitutional, federal judge rules

[Great news for the firearms aware crowd, not afraid to challenge Maryland Liberalism.  We have an unfettered understanding that when crooks don't know who has guns, they revert to their chicken-shit cowardice status and revert to shoplifting instead of assault and robbery -    Berryman. ]

By Dan Morse and Aaron C. Davis, Published: March 5

in The Washington Post

A federal judge in Maryland has ruled that state residents no longer must show they have a good reason to carry a handgun outside their home, declaring a key provision of the state’s gun-control laws unconstitutional.
Gun rights advocates said the opinion — in a relatively liberal state with some of the country’s tightest gun restrictions — would help as they challenge similar laws in about a half-dozen states. Maryland officials said Monday that they are seeking a stay and will appeal the decision.
U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg focused on one portion of Maryland law that requires residents to show they have a “good and substantial reason” to carry a gun, such as a “precaution against apprehended danger.” Legg found that the requirement, kicking in alongside background checks, was too broad and said it violates the Second Amendment.
“The Court finds that the right to bear arms is not limited to the home,” Legg wrote in a 23-page ruling signed Friday.
The judge added that the requirement for issuing a handgun permit amounts to a “rationing system” to limit the number of guns carried outside the home. “The law impermissibly infringes the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed by the Second Amendment,” he wrote.
The case centered on a Navy veteran, Raymond Woollard, who was denied a handgun permit in 2009.
In 2002, Woollard’s son-in-law broke into Woollard’s rural Baltimore County home, high on drugs and looking for car keys so he could drive to Baltimore and get more drugs, Legg wrote. Woollard pointed a shotgun at his son-in-law, who managed to wrestle it away before being subdued by Woollard’s son, who also pointed a gun at the intruder.
Woollard applied for and was granted a permit to carry a handgun, according to the ruling. He was allowed to renew his permit in 2006, shortly after his son-in-law was released from prison, the judge wrote. But three years later, his renewal was denied, prompting him to appeal to the state’s Handgun Permit Review Board.
The board ruled that Woollard had “not demonstrated a good and substantial reason to wear, carry or transport a handgun as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger in the state of Maryland.”
In the summer of 2010, Woollard sued.
Under state law, applicants for a carry permit must show, among other things, that they are not addicted to drugs or alcohol, don’t have a history of violence and haven’t been convicted of a crime and sentenced to more than a year behind bars. Those requirements still stand.
Legg’s ruling only upended the “good and substantial reason” requirement. In his ruling, he said Maryland State Police have issued permits to people in professions that may carry a risk, such as armored-car drivers, security guards, police officers and prosecutors. Permits also go to those who can show they need “personal protection.”
The judge wrote that the requirement doesn’t ensure that guns are kept away from people “most likely to misuse them,” criminals or the mentally ill, for instance. Nor, he wrote, does it ban guns in churches, government buildings or places where the “possibility of mayhem is most acute.”
“It’s definitely a great boost for the right to bear arms,” said Alan Gura, a lawyer in the case who earlier helped overturn gun-control measures in the District. “People around the country are a little more secure in their freedoms today.”
But others said that an important safeguard in Maryland — the ability to judge whether someone really needs to carry a gun in public — has been stripped away.
“This is a potentially very dangerous decision,” said Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which supported the state in the lawsuit. “People of Maryland have right to decide who can carry loaded guns in the public places that we all enjoy.”
“I don’t think this is a decision that will enhance public safety,” said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “It will more likely harm public safety.”
The fight over gun rights in Maryland also reaches into the state legislature and produces a perennially heated debate in Annapolis, with Republicans blasting Democrats for imposing gun laws on the state’s entire population that are tailored for the Baltimore and Washington areas.
Republican lawmakers have four bills pending in the House of Delegates to repeal the “good and substantial reason” requirement. Similar bills have failed repeatedly in recent years. There are now about 12,000 active handgun permits in Maryland, according to the state police.
Officials have denied an average of 214 applicants annually since 2009 on the basis of a finding that the person did not have a substantial reason to wear, carry or transport a gun, according to the state Department of Legislative Services.
During debate on the Republican-sponsored bills this year, state police warned that undoing the requirement would result in an initial wave of 15,000 applicants for handguns in the budget year beginning in July and that an additional 10,000 people would apply, on average, every year thereafter.
But the state’s nonpartisan budget analyst’s office took issue with those estimates. It said the state police had failed to provide a rationale for such a large projected increase. The analyst’s office, nonetheless, estimated that the number of gun applications statewide would double, to about 3,600 annually.
During a Feb. 21 hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, dozens of gun rights advocates crowded the committee room to testify about the difficulty of obtaining a permit to carry a gun in Maryland.
Del. Michael D. Smigiel Sr. (R-Cecil), the lead sponsor of one of the bills, argued that the ability to carry a gun is an “unalienable right that comes from God” and grilled Maryland State Police Lt. Jerry Beason about the necessity of the “good and substantial reason” clause. Beason conceded that the phrase is “impossible” to define.
“Shame on the state of Maryland,” Smigiel said.


Staff writers Fredrick Kunkle and Greg Masters and staff researcher Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

Part of Md. gun law ruled too broad