Posted on 12/08/2006 5:33:08 AM PST by theothercheek
Several states permit judges to pack heat in court for their own protection. These states include Florida, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas. On Jan. 1, Kansas is set to permit judges to carry concealed firearms in the courtroom. State senator and practicing attorney Phillip Journey, who wrote the bill, tells The National Law Journal, “Guns are like lawyers: Better to have one and not need it than need one and not have it.”
No doubt citizens in those states feel the same way, and judges in most of them do not enjoy Second Amendment rights that state and municipal governments have curtailed to the point of irrelevance for everyone else. Kansas and New York are the exceptions.
Here’s a brief summary of gun control laws in these states:
† Citizens in Florida need a permit to carry handguns.
† Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas require a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
† Kansas does not permit citizens to carry concealed weapons; a handgun must be in plain sight when a person walks about armed.
† In New York, permits are required to purchase, register and license handguns; a permit is also needed to carry a concealed weapon. In New York City, it helps to be rich, famous or politically connected to get these permits (Donald Trump, for one, reportedly has a concealed carry permit); criminals don’t bother with stinkin’ permits.
In another gun law development, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit began hearing arguments in a lawsuit challenging that city’s handgun ban as unconstitutional.
Other cities have bans on automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns that withstood legal tests pitting individual rights v. states’ rights. But the District of Columbia is a stateless city - and the only city in the US that bans that all side arms - so this case rests entirely on what the Founding Fathers meant by “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.”
Whatever the outcome, the case is likely to be taken up by the Supreme Court, which has not taken up a Second Amendment case in nearly 70 years.
The case before the three-judge appellate panel involves six city residents (Shelly Parker et al.) living in high-crime neighborhoods who were told by a lower-court judge in 2004 that they did not have a constitutional right to own handguns for their protection.
Defending the city’s ban and the earlier ruling, Todd Kim, the District's solicitor general, argued that the city interprets the Second Amendment "in military terms," and that the right to bear arms applies only to militias, not individuals. That line of reasoning did not appear to sit well with one of the three judges, according to The Associated Press: "Show me anybody in the 19th century who interprets the 2nd Amendment the way you do," Judge Laurence Silberman said. "It doesn't appear until much later, the middle of the 20th century."
However, it greatly troubles The Stiletto that Silberman and Judge Thomas B. Griffith questioned the Second Amendment’s continued relevance since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. In today’s America, they wondered, is a well-regulated militia is still needed? Is the right to bear arms still necessary?
The Stiletto will type this very slowly so liberals – and activist judges - can understand: A well-regulated militia is comprised of individual citizens who own guns and know how to use them, banding together into militias in times of national emergency. If all the guns in the land are cached inside armories and distributed to the public only when the country comes under attack, there is little chance those unaccustomed to handling firearms will be effective as citizen soldiers. The armories themselves would be targeted by insurgents or enemy forces for takeover or destruction. We, the people, are the militia.
So, what’s the emergency? Right now throughout the United States there are an unknown number of “jihadi camps” in full swing training Islamofascists in the art of terror. We know they exist because from time to time the FBI busts them up and the government prosecutes the terrorists who run them.
Should “sudden jihad syndrome” break out all over America one day, armed citizens at the scene will help stop the murder and mayhem. Unless, that is, state and local governments aided and abetted by the judiciary, delete the Second Amendment from the Constitution.
Even those who think this is a far-fetched scenario would have to agree that it is better to have a Constitutional right that you don’t need, then not to have it when you need it most.
NOTE: The original source contains links to relevant articles and Web sites.
One word...DISCRIMNATION Where is OUR group of lawyers who will sue these states and cities???
One word...DISCRIMNATION Where is OUR group of lawyers who will sue these states and cities???
How are they going to get to those guns with those long robes? Maybe we should market a robe with a built in holster?
What does "Shall not be infringed" mean?
Bang.
The same way that pervy judge got to his penis pump ...
Kansas does not permit citizens to carry concealed weapons; a handgun must be in plain sight when a person walks about armed.
I like the way Kansas does it. It leaves no room for doubt, and no fees are involved in claiming our right.
--would like to hear from somebody knowledgeable on the Kansas law and practise to comment on this---
Actually, Kansas law takes the guesswork out for the bad guys. With concealed carry they can't be sure who's packing and who's not.
Ever seen the Chuck Norris movie "Invasion USA"? A brigade size terrorist group lands on a remote Floridian beach and scatters. One scene has one small band ride through a suburban development in the middle of the night and openning fire with automatic weapons and grenade launchers on the sleeping families and causing fires. Not far fetch. Many suburban towns do not have a sizeable police force on duty. Take a large township police force, subtract out the admin/detectives, take the rest of the men and divide by three. The derived number represents the number of patrolmen on duty. Many of the large township, the number is less than 20 men scattered in patrol cars. A platoon (25 to 30) of terrorists trained to fight as a cohesive unit can take out police HQ (goes the command and control as well as commo), kill most of the police in their patrol cars that are scattered in the townships. Once the cops are dead or pinned, the roving jihadist will attack the sleeping civilian population at will, killing as many as possible before the neighboring towns and country forces figure out what has happened. Typical tactic would be for the jihadist attackers to breakdown into small squads (7 to 10 men) drive into a sleeping development, use grenade launchers to fire incindary rounds at the homes to start fires. As the families wake up to the smell of smoke they would exit from their homes onto their lawns. All the jihadist needs to do is drive up the street and open fire on American civilians in their pajamas and night clothing. After the mayhem the terrorist would move onto the next development. Let me see, it takes about three hours to mobilize a SWAT team, another several hours to assess the numerous incoming cell phone calls to determine the multiple locations of the attackers. I think by early morning when there is more light will the county and local cops will move in. By then how many dead Americans will be lying on their lawns in front of their smoldering homes?
They're the ones bringing the case described.
DC is an important place to challenge the ban because it is unencumbered by state-level regulations obfuscating the issue. Word from one of "our kind" who was present at the hearing (which was yesterday) took copious notes indicating the judges leaned much more toward the plaintiff's case than the defendant (who received much sarcasm from one judge in particular). DC has an outright prohibition, a licensing system in place that invariably says "no", won't even let a lawfully-owned & locked item be merely moved between rooms in one's house, and is officially "the feds" - there is no better case. One judge involved even noted that fully half of all related self-defense cases get straight-up jury nullification (it's absolutely shocking that a judge would even acknowledge jury nullification, much less use it to imply "hey, if half the cases are being thrown out by juries despite the law, something is very wrong with the law").
Getting a clean RKBA case heard at a high level has been a serious problem because the thick pile of varying state laws & interstate interactions, making practically all cases subject to dismissal based on some tangent. The slope has become very steep and very slippery, and there is but a 10sq.mi. part of the country where RKBA is not severly obfuscated - Washington DC.
"Our" lawyers are there, either running this lynchpin case or paying very close attention to it.
This could very well be the breakthrough case.
To people who demand gun bans in favor of letting the police protect us, the only effective answer is the phrase "respone time." Even if police are able to respond to a call in one minute, it is too late to prevent a murder. So, if judges have so little confidence in the ability of armed officers right there in the courtroom to make a timely respone to a threat, what does this suggest about how the justice racket insiders view the prospect of betting our lives on "response time?" When it comes to gun control, let the government set the example: You first.
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