When the gun lovers and the cop haters converge
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A new joke, but it isn’t funny:
What do the accused subway shooter, the socialist left and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority have in common?
None of them think cops can do much to stop gun violence.
“He ain’t stopping it,” Frank James said of Mayor Adams’ plan to put more cops on trains in a video James recorded before allegedly pulling out a gun and shooting 10 people at random on a N train in Brooklyn. “With all these police, I’d still get off. I know I could get off because they can’t be everywhere.”
Two lefty lawmakers representing Sunset Park, where the shooting happened, echoed that idea hours after (and while the shooter was still at large, having indeed managed to get off the train and away from the police):
“We know that more police presence on trains or in neighborhoods would not have prevented this,” Councilwoman Alexa Avilés and Assemblywoman Marcela Mitaynes wrote in a joint statement also calling for “dramatic investments in violence prevention and interruption programs, full employment, and guaranteed housing…before more people get hurt.”
Good luck in the meantime, everyone!
And now, the Supreme Court’s ascendant conservatives have joined the zealots, lunatics and idiots determined to tear down the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” that Max Weber brilliantly identified as the defining characteristic of the modern state, and replace it with one where people are left to their own devices — very much including killing machines — to fend for themselves.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s decision for a 6-3 majority struck down New York’s restrictive 111-year-old gun-permitting law along with a 2012 Second Circuit decision affirming that law because of the state’s “substantial, indeed compelling, governmental interests in public safety and crime prevention.”
In place of public safety, crime prevention and precedent, Thomas cites a newly created individual constitutional “right to keep and bear arms in public” in part by noting that “the police cannot disarm every person who acquires a gun for use in criminal activity; nor can they provide bodyguard protection for the State’s nearly 20 million residents or the 8.8 million people who live in New York City…some of these people reasonably believe that unless they can brandish or, if necessary, use a handgun in the case of attack, they may be murdered, raped, or suffer some other serious injury.”
That’s less blunt than James, but basically the same point.
The new decision, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, picks up on the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller majority decision that Antonin Scalia wrote and Thomas signed that asserted for the first time that “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right,” and extends it from the privacy of the home into the public commons.
Citing the “individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation” that he voted to create in 2008, Thomas then notes that “confrontation can surely take place outside the home.”
The idea that America is going to arm its way to public safety is every bit as crazy as the idea that America is going to abolish its way there.
(While guns can still be excluded from “sensitive places,” Thomas’s decision obnoxiously fails to define them except in the negative: “there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a ‘sensitive place’ simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department”).
Under the current, restrictive licensing law, a bit more than 3,000 people in New York City have a permit to conceal and carry a gun, and about another 3,000 permits allow for guns at places of business.
But now New York (and the other states with similar laws, collectively covering one-fourth of the U.S. population) will have to provide licenses to carry a gun to most anyone with a clean record.
As Mayor Adams, whose NYPD has had real success targeting illegal guns and bringing down the number of shootings in recent months, put it on Thursday, “this decision has made every single one of us less safe from gun violence… People are going to be empowered to believe they can carry.”
Officers here will have to assume, even more than they presently do, that every person they encounter may be carrying a gun, and they will have a much tougher time going after illegal guns or controlling gun violence given how many guns will be fully legal until after the damage has been done.
(If there’s a silver lining to this dreadful decision, it may be an end to the endless corruption scandals involving cops who controlled these until now tough-to-obtain licenses.)
One more joke that isn’t funny:
Donald Trump will almost surely be one of the Republicans running in 2024 by pointing to the “American Carnage” in cities like New York that the Supreme Court majority he delivered to conservatives just did its damndest to make worse.
