26 States Line Up in Opposition to San Francisco’s Gunlock Law

Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel is the latest to sign on to a friend of the court filing opposing San Francisco’s gun lock law, bringing to a total of 26 states asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the case. (Photo: Fox 11)

Guns dot com

Last week Wisconsin’s Attorney General Brad Schimel became the latest to file a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to throw out San Francisco’s law requiring guns to be locked up even at home.

The brief filed by Schmiel joins 25 other states, lead by Nebraska, who are seeking the intervention of the nation’s highest court to help overturn the California ordinance. This comes in the latest installment of the saga over Jackson v. City of San Francisco, which was unanimously rejected by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last March who upheld a district court’s ruling that the city’s gun lock law was valid.

“We must act, because if the decision by the federal Court of Appeals is not reversed, the precedent it sets could influence policy decisions and court holdings affecting the Constitutional rights of citizens within their homes, not just in the City of San Francisco, buy anywhere in America, including Wisconsin,” explained Schimel of his reasoning for joining Nebraska’s amicus curiae brief.

The case has been winding its way through federal courts since 2009. It challenged the city and county of San Francisco over local laws implemented in 2007 that compelled gun owners to secure guns either locked inside a container or disabled with a trigger lock.

Gun Deaths On The Rise For People Under 25 As Car Deaths Fall

Refinery 29

Car-related deaths for folks under 25 are down, according to a study by the Center for Disease Control. The C.D.C. attributes this decline to "improved technology, tougher laws and less driving by young people," according to The Economist. 

The bad news is that the rate of deaths related to gun violence for the under-25 set is increasing, and it's actually on track to exceed car-related deaths. The majority of these deaths are suicides, accidents or domestic violence. Back in 2012, Bloomberg News estimated that "by 2015, firearm fatalities will probably exceed traffic fatalities for the first time, based on data compiled by Bloomberg."

Although the number of gun owners is down, there are almost as many guns as there are people in the United States. Government regulations on vehicles are more stringent than gun laws, especially since the National Rifle Association (which has plenty of pals in Congress) opposes some suggested safety features.  

The Answer to Terrorism - The Second Amendment

Interracial Crime

Discover the Networks

But in fact, white-on-black crime is a statistical rarity. According to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), an estimated 320,082 whites were victims of black violence in 2010, while 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence. That same year, according to the Census Bureau, the white and black populations in the U.S. were 196,817,552 and 37,685,848, respectively. Whites therefore committed acts of interracial violence at a rate of 32 per 100,000, while the black rate was 849 per 100,000. In other words, the “average” black was statistically 26.5 times more likely to commit criminal violence against a white, than vice versa. Moreover, blacks who committed violent crimes chose white victims 47.7% of the time, whereas whites who committed violent crimes targeted black victims only 3.9% of the time.

For many years and for a wide variety of crimes, this pattern has been among the most consistent findings of criminal-justice research. Nationwide in 2010, there were approximately 67,755 black-on-white aggravated asaults, as compared to just 1,748 white-on-black crimes of the same description. Thus, blacks committed acts of interracial aggravated assault at a rate of 181 per 100,000—fully 201 times higher than the white rate of 0.9 per 100,000. Moreover, blacks guilty of aggravated assault chose white victims 44.1% of the time, while whites who committed aggravated assault selected black victims only six-tenths of 1% of the time.
Also in 2010, there were approximately 13,463 black-on-white rapes and 38,744 black-on-white robberies. Blacks guilty of rape chose white victims 50.2% of the time, and blacks who committed robbery chose white victims 48% of the time. By contrast, the number of white-on-black rapes and robberies reported in the NCVS surveys were so infinitesimal, that in each case whites were estimated to have accounted for 0.0% of all rapes and robberies committed against black victims in the United States.

The New Arms Race

Huffington Post

As for "carrying," it's now legal in every state in America and allowed in ever more situations as well. In the last year, for instance, Idaho, where that mother died, became the seventh state to green-light the carrying of concealed guns on college campuses. To put all this in perspective, less than two decades ago, fewer than a million concealed weapons were being legally carried in the U.S.; now, more than one million people are permitted to carry such weapons in Florida alone. In 21st-century America, the "right to bear arms" has been extended in every direction, while there has also been a "sharp rise" in mass killings.

Meanwhile -- since what's an arms race without a second party? -- the police,mainlining into the Pentagon, have been up-armoring at a staggering pace. It's no longer an oddity for American police officers to be armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers as if in a foreign war zone or to arrive on the scene with a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle previously used in our distant wars. And by the way, while much anger has been displayed, by the police in particular, over the recent murders of two patrolmen in Brooklyn by a disturbed man carrying a Taurus semiautomatic handgun, that anger seems not to extend to his ability to arm himself or to the pawnshop filled with weaponry that originally sold the gun (but not to him).

More on the Zimmerman Story

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FBI Data Show Thousands of Gun Sales Beat Checks

AP

More gun sales than ever are slipping through the federal background check system — 186,000 last year, a rate of 512 gun sales a day, as states fail to consistently provide thorough, real-time updates on criminal and mental histories to the FBI.

In the years since these background checks were required, about 71 percent have found no red flags and produced instant approvals.

But ten factors can disqualify gun purchasers: a felony conviction, an arrest warrant, a documented drug problem or mental illness, undocumented immigration status, a dishonorable military discharge, a renunciation of U.S. citizenship, a restraining order, a history of domestic violence, or an indictment for any crime punishable by longer than one year of prison time.

Any sign that one of these factors could be in a buyer's background produces a red-flag, which sends the check to the FBI researchers to approve, deny or investigate. They scour state records in the federal database, and often call local authorities for more information.

"It takes a lot of effort ... for an examiner to go out and look at court reports, look at judges' documents, try to find a final disposition so we can get back to a gun dealer on whether they can sell that gun or not," Del Greco said. "And we don't always get back to them."

This is in addition to the famous estimate of 40%, so how about we just add these default approvals to the approximate 40% in order to give it more validity?