Journalists shot, killed in Virginia during live shot

Priceless.

 

I'm probably going to be buying a gun soon.

A handgun, probably a 9 mm since I believe the ammo is cheapest for it. I'm not going to buy it through a dealer. Probably at a gun show or just go through the classifieds in the paper and find one in my price range. I'll never take a class for it, never declare it for insurance purposes and never have it registered.

I'll buy a lock case for it and keep it in the trunk of my car.

Then I'll take it once or twice a month, go to the range near the office and shoot.

Sure, I have just dramatically increased my chances for a fatal accident or suicide along with a host of other issues and if I was going to do any other thing that had a similar set of issues, I'd need to have a wide-ranging set of permits, licenses and insurance to get, but not my gun.

 

We have a Second Amendment.

 

I think I read that in his fax, he wrote something like, "today didn't work out."

I'm pretty sure he was planning on getting it done over the course of several days, as the opportunity presented itself.

 

It was white, non-Hispanic. But like I said, I was just pulling it off a quick search and couldn't tell if it was the FBI's numbers or what. Also wasn't broken down by socioeconomic status.

 

Right. That's what I'm particularly interested in. I want to know the murder rate among whatever we would decide the middle class is, though whatever the number would be would be somewhat arbitrary. But still.

And I understand this isn't something anyone could do in a quick spin through the Google.

I concur that we have a gun violence problem in America. And I concur that we have a growing rampage gun violence problem in America. But at the same time, I don't think it's intellectually honest to throw out 3.59/100,000 as the relevant figure, because an enormous percentage of that 3.59 is driven by problems that run a lot deeper than guns or mental illness. And, frankly, our coverage and social media patterns show that we don't really care about the murders that constitute that huge percentage of the 3.59.

 

Well, that was a worthy contribution to this discussion.

 

I am the master of my Bush domain.

 

FYI, .22 LR ammo is a lot cheaper.

 

So You Think You Know the Second Amendment? - The New Yorker

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “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 courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

...

But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)


Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.

 

Where does it say that at the founding, people had to be in a militia to own a gun?

 

In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.