Wednesday, August 21, 2013

The NRA and the ACLU Agree - Stop and Frisk Has to Go

Question: What do the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union have in common?

Answer: The determination to stop New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg from having his way with guns.
The NRA defends the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. The ACLU defends the Fourth Amendment’s constraints on “stop and frisk.” Between the two, guns will remain on the street and more people will die.
The numbers are irrefutable. Last year, 419 New Yorkers were murdered, mostly by gunfire. In 1992, the figure was 1,995.
That works out to about four New Yorkers a day who were not killed by guns. Yes, crime has fallen across America, but nowhere has the drop approached New York City’s. Some of that is due to whiz-bang policing, computers and all that jazz.
But some of it is due to stop-and-frisk. There are simply fewer guns on the street. (The New York Police Department estimates that in 1993, “as many as 2 million illegal guns were in circulation in New York City,” many of them imported from Virginia.)
Rightly or wrongly — a higher court will ultimately decide — the city’s stop-and-frisk program has collided with the Fourth Amendment’s injunction against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin has ruled that the program is racial profiling at its most pernicious, and that, too, is illegal. After all, of an incredible 4.4 million stops, an overwhelming number were of black or Hispanic men — and resulted in relatively few arrests. It did not seem to matter to the judge that an equally overwhelming number of both assailants and victims were also black and Hispanic men. Her gavel came down. The city was guilty.
It may well be. The issue before the court was not the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk but constitutionality.
Bloomberg has failed to appreciate the political dimension of what he was attempting. The conservative culture adores guns, and the liberal culture of a city that has grown accustomed to a low crime rate endorses a simplistic notion of racism.
Both sides have, so to speak, stuck to their guns — and as a result, more people will die.

14 comments:

  1. Control freaks hate freedom, but it's a safe bet that if Bloomberg wants something done, those who love liberty should be against it.

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  2. There are lots of things the government could do to reduce deaths in the population. We could eliminate tobacco, mandate all people exercise, restrict what foods people are allowed to eat, force people to receive medical care whether they want it or not, restrict cars to 15 MPh, etc. The list could go on forever. The question is do we want to have maximum freedom or maximum safety because in general the two goals are opposites to each other.

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  3. We talked about how gun control doesn't save lives, but the liberty vs. safety argument I believe is strongest in the 4th amendment. If not for that restriction on police, they would clearly have an easier time fighting crime, and lives would be saved. They could bust into unkept homes and find drugs and other illegal activities, and justify the policy with all the arrests that were made. But the 4th amendment is there to specifically prevent this "safety trumps freedom" attitude. 4.4 million stops! This isn't some little program. New York has 8 million people, but we know these stops are not random, but concentrated on certain people. I wonder what the record is for most times an individual has been searched? 20? 50? 100? I can't believe any liberal minded person would support this. Maybe if they asked to see Hispanic's papers it would rile them up.

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    1. We constantly get the argument that safety must trump the Second Amendment in other issues. However, the Second Amendment is really not the issue here. As TS rightfully focuses on it, the argument here is over the 4th Amendment and also the Racial Profiling issue.

      Mike is always telling us that drawing parallels to other rights recognized in the Bill of Rights is an improper equivalency, but this article shows exactly how the violation of one metastasizes to others.

      Here, the issues of guns and public safety have been conflated and we are told that safety MUST trump the 4th Amendment as well, in at least this circumstance.

      Of course, what's to stop Appalachian cops from making the same argument and instituting more 4th Amendment violating searches to fight the Meth cookers? They're a danger to themselves and others. What's to stop sheriffs in Western states from violating the rights of hispanics to fight illegal immigration based on some illegals smuggling or dealing drugs? Both of these would probably face opposition from the left because they don't touch on the evil guns, but once the cancer of safety trumping an amendment is firmly in place, that precedent will be applied to other issues like these.

      Meanwhile, any other amendment's protection that touches on guns risks the same weakening and eventual destruction.

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  4. First of all I reject the claim that New York City's "stop and frisk" policy is responsible for any reduction in murders. It might well be but there is no way to determine that.

    More importantly "stop and frisk" is the leading edge of a police state. It is the State declaring boldly that people have no, none, zero liberty. What people fail to recognize is that killing people's liberty is just as atrocious as killing people. So even if "stop and frisk" did save 1,500 lives last year, "stop and frisk" killed the liberty of the tens of thousands of the citizens that the police stopped and frisked. Trading murders for rapes is not a success. Neither is trading murders for liberty.

    When an aggressor uses threat of deadly force to stop a citizen and order them to do something against their will, it is an attack on their humanity. Whether the aggressor is a criminal or a government employee wearing a blue costume doesn't matter. That is why "stop and frisk" has to go.

    -- TruthBeTold

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  5. The ACLU exposed themselves as a special interest group when they decided they weren't going to pay any mind to the Supreme Court's Heller and McDonald decision declaring the second amendment to be an individual right. They have stated that they are still going by the Miller decision. So apparently they get to decide what parts of the constitution are rights you should have.

    https://www.aclu.org/organization-news-and-highlights/second-amendment

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    1. It's not picking and choosing which parts of the Constitution you like. It's disagreeing with the individual interpretation of the 2A. The ACLU, as well as many other experts in law, has always had that differing opinion.

      Some people believe it's anachronistic and meaningless.

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    2. The ACLU pushes for expanded and individual rights all through the Constitution, except in one amendment. Let's call it a blindspot, shall we?

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    3. As this article shows, some people are also beginning to believe that about the 4th Amendment. Eventually, they'll believe it about all of them, because in the age of Terrorism, we can't be protecting all of these anachronistic old rights that make us vulnerable!

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  6. There are many parallels to Arizona’s immigration bill, but “Stop and Frisk” takes it much further. For one, Arizona’s bill was written to not initial stops, but to check citizenship status during the course of normal police contact. “Stop and Frisk” initiates stops. Second, NYPD is actually searching people- laying hands on them, violating their space. Third, the implementation of “Stop and Frisk” has been on a massive scale. 4.4 million rights violated and counting. I cannot see how those who oppose Arizona’s immigration bill can possibly support Bloomberg here, unless you are so blinded by gun control that you are willing to sacrifice every other principle you have. And remember, this isn’t even about guns. I am sure more people get busted for knives and drugs than for gun possession.

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    1. I think both are unavoidable. Checking for citizenship papers, if that's what you want to do, necessarily requires profiling. It's the same in NY with stopping people on the street in bad neighborhoods. Most of them are black or Hispanic so you can't help but end up with those disproportionate numbers.

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    2. Are you saying you accept profiling as a necessary part of protecting us, Mikeb? Where was this marvelous equanimity with regard to a certain neighborhood watch volunteer?

      But more importantly, what this illustrates yet again is that once you are willing to sacrifice one right, no rights are safe.

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  7. Nice bit of plagiarism, Mikeb.

    http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/nra-nyclu-put-new-york-risk-article-1.1431278

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    1. What the fuck are you talking about. My post is attributed to "The Philly Burbs." If they got it from the Daily News article, I don't know. Perhaps it's an Associated Press or Reuters share job. One thing for sure accusing me of plagiarism is nonsense.

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