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

The Philly Burbs

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.

More on the ACLU and Byron Williams

Over at AlterNet, Joshua Holland lays out the recent history of ACLU activity with regards gun rights, including the case we looked at the other day.

None of this makes any difference. As I’ve written before, the debate over gun ownership now has little to do with substantive policy issues. Guns have become part of the culture wars, which means that no matter how secure the right to own a firearm may be in the courts — in reality — the gun lobby and firearms manufacturers have too much at stake to let the specter of the gummint taking your shooting irons go away. And there are always people who are easily suckered and buy their dark conspiracy theories.

But make no mistake: theirs is an incredibly dangerous brand of demagoguery, because the suckers who buy the gun lobby’s spin are heavily armed.

He's referrring to Byron Williams, whom we've recently discussed. And, I'm afraid Byron is not the only one out there.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

Grassroots Support

FatWhiteMan said there's no grassroots support in the gun control movement.

Jadegold said there is and supplied this link to prove it.

I was scrolling down the names and noticed, after about ten minutes, the list is so long, the names of the entire Zappa family are there. I thought it's interesting since the late great Frank Zappa was such a big supporter of the 1st Amendment.

I often get the impression from pro-gun folks that they have some kind of proprietary relationship with all the Amendments. But, the fact is many of the individuals and organizations named on the NRA list, are supporters of 1A, yet have earned their place on this list as being "anti-gun."

My belief is it's not so much a question of supporting individual rights as it is one of common sense and honesty. The current interpretation of the 2nd Amendment by the Supreme Court is bogus, the ACLU said so. The notion that the gun-rights movement has more grassroots support than their opponents is bogus, Jadegold said so.

What's your Opinion? Please leave a comment.

The ACLU Loses Its Mind

St. Louis Today reports on this fascinating decision by the ACLU. It's a fascinating decision because they have the right idea about so much, I don't know what they're thinking in this case.

The American Civil Liberties Union is petitioning a court to help an 85-year-old man get his guns back from Florida's Broward Sheriff's Office.

For what may be the first time, the ACLU says, it is advocating on behalf of a gun owner to get his weapons back. And they're doing so free of charge.

That the ACLU, a longtime target of conservatives' scorn, is supporting gun ownership is "a breath of fresh air," said Marion P. Hammer, board member of the National Rifle Association.

Most people have understood all along that the ACLU does not pick and choose, that they defend all rights. I never thought they needed to prove anything, least of all to the NRA, but the strangest thing is their choice of this case. An elderly man, who recently lost his wife and expressed suicidal desires, should not have guns. The sheriff's department did the right thing and should stick with it. Further proving his unfitness, he said, "They'd been in the drawer over 20 years. They were loaded."

This may very well apply to the majority of gun owners, those who have loaded guns in the closet or in the drawer for years without practicing with them or even cleaning them periodically. These are the guns that end up getting misused. When a gun owner like that displays evidence of no longer being fit to responsibly maintain the guns, he should forfeit then.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

The Nevada ACLU

FishyJay provided a wonderful link for us.

The Nevada ACLU has declared its support for an individual’s right to bear arms, apparently making it the first state affiliate in the nation to buck the national organization’s position on the Second Amendment.

The state board of directors reached the decision this month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals to own handguns.

“The Nevada ACLU respects the individual’s right to bear arms subject to constitutionally permissible regulations,” a statement on the organization’s Web site said. “The ACLU of Nevada will defend this right as it defends other constitutional rights.”

“This was the consensus,” said Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for ACLU of Nevada. “There really wasn’t a lot of dissent.”

But the state affiliate’s position puts it at odds with the national organization.

The New York City-based ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court ruling, saying in a statement that it interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right to own guns and not an individual one.

Here's the ACLU's position.

Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right. For seven decades, the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view.

The Supreme Court has now ruled otherwise. In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.

The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.

What's your opinion? Is the dissent of the Nevada branch of the ACLU a hint of things to come? Couldn't the same thing happen in other gun-friendly states?

What about the idea that all the other ACLU affiliates support the national policy? Do you think they're all wrong? Isn't each branch comprised of lawyers and other professionals who have qualified opinions? We're not talking about a fringe element of radical thinkers, we're talking about the ACLU which represents a major segment of American politics.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

The ACLU and Christmas

Liberal Viewer posted this video and posed the following question:

Which seems more in keeping with the Christmas spirit, the ACLU's message of tolerance or those smears and false personal attacks from Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter?

The Thomas Jefferson quotes are the best. I wonder what he would have thought about a biblical justification for bearing arms?

I'm on the Pavement Thinkin' 'bout the Government

According to an article on the Propublica site, the ACLU is reportiong that the watch list has now reached one million names. (via Patrick) This is the same watch list that Naomi Wolf so eloquently spoke about in the video I posted the other day.

The American Civil Liberties Union held a news conference this morning to commemorate what it says is the addition of the millionth name to the nation’s terrorist watch list. The number is a calculation based on a 2007 Justice Department inspector general report, which said the database had 700,000 records and was growing by an average of 20,000 a month.

Of course the FBI denies this. Chad Kolton, spokesman for the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, says the figure of one million is far in excess of the actual 400,000 he admits are listed. I wonder if he was able to say that with a straight face; to me it sounds like a sick joke. Mr. Kolton defends the program claiming that it has enabled law enforcement personell to exercise front-line preventative measures in the war on terror.

That large net ensnares many innocent travelers, leading to an erosion of civil liberties, the ACLU argues. People flagged by the watch list have reported having to go through extra screening or having to answer numerous questions to prove they are who they say they are. Others have been prevented from getting on planes.

Personally, I'm more concerned with the government's over-reaching policies than I am about another terrorist attack. Of course we need reasonable policies in place to protect people, but it seems to me that since 9/11, the federal government has gone too far.

What do you think?