Vocal Voices

The Guardian reports.

Gun reform advocates reacted with outrage to the supreme court decision overturning a New York state handgun law that placed strict restrictions on carrying concealed firearms outside the home.

If you go and look at the US supreme court and it's competence

According to the Constitution (Art. III, §2): "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution

In short, all law in the US is subject to the constitution and the supreme court rules on constitutional law.

So taking the next step, the second amendment of the constitution says:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The New York legislation continued the right to keep weapons, in your own home. However the right to "bear arms" was infringed. I have no idea what they thought they were doing because this is as clear a case of state law overriding constitutional law as there can be. The Supreme court didn't need to work hard on this at all.

The path to deal with arms is clear. First the white house and the Congress need to get together and agree on a change to the constitution to restrict the right to bear arms. Then that legislation needs to pass through the Senate before it can be written into law. Once that has happened, depending on the wording, states may then enact legislation to restrict the right to bear arms.

The fact that more than half of Americans, whether Republican or Democrat, don't want the second amendment to be touched, is the real problem here and it is not something individual states or cities can deal with. The nearest I have seen to this is Miami. Where they removed the right to bear hidden weapons, you might think in the same way. But they did not make it illegal to bear arms, they just forced anyone who wants to bear arms to do so openly in a visible holster. Thus avoiding this issue with the court.

America may seem odd, but it is also quite predictable.

The lawyers are going to make some good money over this.
Actually the right to bear arms has been infringed for years. Most states don't allow the ownership of fully automatic weapons, others have banned semi automatic rifles including the relatively mild M1 carbine.

Anything which automatically reloads the chamber is absolutely lethal in the right hands.

I carried a semi automatic weapon as my personal weapon all the time I was in the army.

Suff wrote:I carried a semi automatic weapon as my personal weapon all the time I was in the army.

Me too, so what, it didn't make me a mass murderer.

It's a US problem, not ours. Let them sort it. I couldn't care less.

No it didn't make me one either. But, again, I only had it in my hands after signing it out with authorisation and, outside of tightly controlled range days, I only had 10 rounds of ammunition issued to me twice in 7 years when on guard duty.

Whilst in NC working I went to a range with a friend, hired a pistol and blew away 200 rounds on an uncontrolled range where it was personal conduct which managed the range.

The US attitude to weapons is similar to our attitude to a tool.

As you say it is their problem to sort out. The US seems to breed a lot of mass murderers, weapons are just a convenient tool for them.

Banning semi automatic firearms would drastically reduce the incidence of mass shootings imo.
But it won't happen.
And even if it did it wouldn't stop bad or insane people wanting to do others in.
One thing they certainly could do is to insist on background checks for mental health issues.
The right to bear arms shouldn't include the right for a mental health sufferer to own an assault rifle.

You're quite right Cromwell. But the sad fact is that the polarised nature of US politics means that neither side trusts the other so is instinctively opposed to more controls which can be used to effectively remove the right to bear arms. Worse is that the two sides are so close in ideology (compared to, say, the UK), that many Democrats also don't want their right to bear arms removed either.

Only the Republicans have a hope in hell of passing arms laws and they don't want to.

However here is the reality. If a nutcase wants to go out and murder lots of people and go out in a blaze of glory, weapons are just the low hanging fruit. Remove the weapons and we will see that these nutcases can find many other ways to achieve their goals of mass murder.

After all, apparently, 9/11 was enacted with box cutters. No guns in sight.