One of the interesting things about this analysis is that it does not correlate the violence to the actual owners of the guns. The registered owners, according to other studies, probably aren't committing the crimes. The conclusion is that in locations in which there are higher levels of gun ownership, there are also higher levels of gun violence. The survey correlated household surveys about gun ownership with crime statics.

One of the things that I've found interesting about the gun debate is that sensible regulation is seldom discussed. At this point ATF's National Tracing Center is not allowed to include the actual identity of gun purchasers in their national database. Local law enforcement must go to the retailers or wholesalers in order to secure the name of the registered owner. According to gun tracing experts, this leads to what they believe may be carelessness. Guns are just "lost" until they appear at crime scenes. And of course these "lost" weapons are replaced at a furious pace. I believe that nationally less than 20% of gun crime is committed by the registered owner of the gun.

Wouldn't it be fitting if someone drove by and shot at those people while they were protesting? I'm just saying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/weeki ... ekinreview

Gun Laws and Crime: A Complex Relationship

Lurking behind the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms were a series of fascinating, disputed and now in many ways irrelevant questions.

Do gun control laws reduce crime? Do they save lives? Is it possible they even cost lives?

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, one of the dissenters in the 5-to-4 decision, surveyed a quite substantial body of empirical research on whether gun control laws do any good. Then he wrote: “The upshot is a set of studies and counterstudies that, at most, could leave a judge uncertain about the proper policy conclusion.”

There is no question, of course, that guns figure in countless murders, suicides and accidental deaths. Over the five years ending in 1997, the Justice Department says, there was an average of 36,000 firearms-related deaths a year. (Fifty-one percent were suicides, and 44 percent homicides.) Determining whether particular gun control laws would have, on balance, prevented some of those deaths is difficult. Take Washington, D.C., whose near-total ban on handguns in the home was on the receiving end of last week’s decision.

At the crudest level, as Justice Breyer wrote, violent crime in Washington has increased since the ban took effect in 1976. “Indeed,” he continued, “a comparison with 49 other major cities reveals that the district’s homicide rate is actually substantially higher relative to these other cities than it was before the handgun restriction went into place.”

Those statistics by themselves prove nothing, of course. Factors aside from the gun ban, like demographics, economics and the drug trade, were almost certainly in play. “As students of elementary logic know,” Justice Breyer wrote, “after it does not mean because of it.”

But Gary Kleck, a professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, whose work Justice Breyer cited, said there were good reasons for making a definitive judgment.

“We know the D.C. handgun ban didn’t reduce homicide,” he said in an interview.

Not everyone agrees. A 1991 study in The New England Journal of Medicine compared Washington to its suburbs before and after the gun law took effect. It found that the law was linked to a 25 percent drop in homicides involving firearms and a 23 percent drop in such suicides. The study found no drops in other kinds of homicides and suicides in Washington, and no changes in the suburbs.

Professor Kleck was critical of the study, saying that the period it studied was too short and that the suburbs were a poor point of reference. “The place most like D.C. is Baltimore,” he said, describing his own approach. “It’s a virtual twin city.”

Professor Kleck conducted what he called “an elaborate before-and-after study” of Washington and Baltimore that took into account trends before the implementation of the ban and included “a good long follow-up” because the ban “didn’t immediately take anyone’s guns away.”

Baltimore did not have a similar law, yet its crime rate mimicked Washington’s. “The law itself had no effect one way or the other,” Professor Kleck said.

Even if he is right, his conclusion is not an indictment of all efforts to regulate guns. There are many flavors of gun control, and many problems of definition and measurement.

“It’s very hard to wrap your head around,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, whose work supporting an individual-rights view of the Second Amendment was cited three times by the majority in last week’s decision. “You have to think about the particular kind of gun control at work, and you have to subdivide gun users and gun abusers.”

There is some evidence, Professor Volokh said, that denying guns to people who might use them in self-defense, usually merely by brandishing them, tends to increase crime rates. There is also evidence that the possibility of confronting a victim with a gun deters some criminals.

In addition, criminals are the people least likely to obey gun control laws, meaning that the laws probably have a disproportionate impact on law-abiding individuals. “For the typical gun control law,” Professor Volokh said, “you’ll have very little positive effect but a possible negative effect.”

A brief defending the Washington law filed by the American Public Health Association and other groups said there were other collateral positive effects, including reductions in suicides and accidents, that gun control opponents overlook or underestimate. More generally, the brief said, “banning handguns in Washington, D.C., appears to have reduced suicide and homicide rates.” It cited the New England Journal study and statistics showing that Washington has an exceptionally low suicide rate. Asked what sorts of gun control laws seem to work, Professor Kleck mentioned two.

“Background checks in general at the state level did show lower homicide rates,” he said, adding: “I’d improve the enforcement of laws against unlicensed carrying of guns in public places.”

The international experience is no less complex. Justice Breyer cited one study finding, in the justice’s words, “that strict gun laws are correlated with more murders, not fewer.”

According to the study, published last year in The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, European nations with more guns had lower murder rates. As summarized in a brief filed by several criminologists and other scholars supporting the challenge to the Washington law, the seven nations with the most guns per capita had 1.2 murders annually for every 100,000 people. The rate in the nine nations with the fewest guns was 4.4.

Justice Breyer was skeptical about what these comparisons proved. “Which is the cause and which the effect?” he asked. “The proposition that strict gun laws cause crime is harder to accept than the proposition that strict gun laws in part grow out of the fact that a nation already has a higher crime rate.”

Many criminologists say cultural, economic and demographic factors play a big role in murder rates, and some say the number of guns and the number of murders may well be uncorrelated.

The murder rate in the United States, in any event, is higher yet — 5.7 per 100,000 people in 2006, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 2005, according to the Justice Department, 55 percent of homicides were committed with a handgun and 16 percent with another kind of gun.

Correlation or not, the United States is a special case, Nicholas Johnson, a Fordham law professor, said in an e-mail message. “Our culture of armed civilians is unparalleled in the history of the world,” he said. “According to the high estimate, there is a gun in every other American home.”

Justice Breyer concluded that the mixed quality of the evidence on the efficacy of gun control, along with its varying interpretations, means that lawmakers should be allowed to assess it for themselves to set reasonable gun control policies.

Justice Antonin Scalia, on the other hand, said the Constitution had largely shut down the discussion. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, acknowledged that “gun violence is a serious problem.” But, he went on, “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.”

What are you rolling your eyes for? Did you read the what JPS wrote on the matter? It's scary fucking shit. You guys are worried about wiretapping of terrorists? And going around FISA laws to get bad guys? But you're gonna play coy in regards to judges who think that the government should have the right to enact policies that superceded expressed rights within the constitution? Fuck...

Yeah, fuck - they care more about some hill billy's right to own a high-powered firearm than what normal adults do in their private bedrooms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v_texas

Clarence Thomas. That's a scholar right there

I'm rolling my eyes because political policy has, in almost every single instance, superceded, or at least been as important a determinant as qualification when it has come to appointing justices. Both sides, Democrat and Republican. And sadly the Supreme Court is not this haven of non-political influence which it idealy would be. Politics has always been a factor. They are right now. So for you to imply that this will happen only if Obama is elected and gets to make an appointment is a joke. It's been happening for 200 years and will continue to happen. It sucks, but that's the way it is. The only difference is that the court would likely swing away from your views for the first time in a while. Which probably should be enough alone to make you suck it up and vote for McCain as much as you hate him, but that's another conversation to be had.

What are the chances of sucess for the NRA's suits against several other cities that have local ordinances banning handguns?

I think if it's a total ban like existed in DC, the odds are good of success. It would still take a majority to extend the 2nd Amendment to the States, but I think it would probably happen.

However, I don't think they could hold together the 5-4 majority to invalidate lesser restrictions.

But based on this ruling alone, those suits don't have any new precedent to lean on, do they? They'd have to go through the Supreme Court?

The plaintiffs in teh new suits would rely on the new ruling, and they would have to make the novel argument that the 2nd Amendment applies to the states via the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. A lower court will accept or reject this argument and it will be appealed up to the Supreme Court.

Excecising as many of your rights as possible - a good thing, yes?

Dear Justice Stevens

Please stay alive until the end of January next year.

Yours faithfully

shades-go-down

Even if he were to bite the dust before then, you think the Democratic Congress would even allow a vote on a replacement during a lame duck period?

True enough, but I wonder if a John Roberts-esque, seemingly centrist nominee might get consensus and slip through the cracks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090114/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_evidence


Court says evidence valid despite police error

Incopetence is a good excuse for violating a person's rights.

That's fucking evil. I can see it now:

"Ooops. That warrant was suppose to be for 1234 Main Street, not 7665 Elm street. Sorry about the midnight, no-knock raid, Mr. Disadvantaged Ethnic Minority, but those those computers guys are just useless sometimes. Since we are here, we are gonna grab anything that we might be able to sue against you."

Yes. That's exactly what will happen on a daily basis in every jurisdiction in the country as a result of this ruling. We're all fucked.

We're talking about an expired warrant here, not the arrest of someone who was not the original target of the search.

This goes completely against what I learned in High School civics, what with warrants having the slightest discrepancy being invalid. What was the reasoning behind the court's decision?