Technicalities of Gun Control in the U.S.

Reposted from www.nysun.com

After Supreme Court Ruling, N.Y. Gun Laws Eyed

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | June 27, 2008

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New York City, which has some of the most restrictive and perhaps even unconstitutional gun laws in the nation, will become a flash point in the legal battle over gun control, as civil rights proponents turn their attention to enforcing the historic gun rights decision issued yesterday by the Supreme Court.

For the first time in the nation's history, the Supreme Court has recognized that the Second Amendment affords individuals the right to keep a gun at home for protection.

"The movement to end private firearms ownership in America is over," the gun rights attorney who argued the case before the federal high court, Alan Gura, told The New York Sun.

Yesterday's 5-4 ruling, which declared a Washington, D.C., handgun ban to be unconstitutional, will put advocates of municipal gun control on the defensive. Gun proponents say to expect new suits challenging handgun bans and licensing restrictions from New York to Chicago to San Francisco.

Reposted from www.talkleft.com, 10th Circuit: No Individual Right to Bear Arms By Jeralyn, Section Constitution Posted on Wed.

10th Circuit: No Individual Right to Bear Arms

By Jeralyn, Section Constitution
Posted on Wed Mar 24, 2004 at 08:53:00 PM EST
Tags: Second Amendment (all tags)

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The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals joins a growing number of circuits in holding that the Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to bear arms (pdf). For those who haven't read it lately, the Second Amendment says:

“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 court reaffirms prior decisions holding that:

...to prevail on a Second Amendment challenge, a party must show that possession of a firearm is in connection with participation in a “well-regulated” “state” “militia.”.... The Second Amendment does not guarantee an individual the right to keep and transport a firearm where there is no evidence that possession of that firearm was related to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.

The Court notes that the 5th Circuit (which includes Texas) is the only circuit to hold the Second Amendment conveys an individual rather than collective right to bear arms. In the Emerson case in the 5th Circuit,

The Second Amendment “protects the right of individuals, including those not then actually a member of any militia or engaged in active military service or training, to privately possess and bear their own firearms.”

Here's where the other circuits stand:

In contrast, the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits have adopted the most restrictive interpretation (also known as “the collective rights model”) of the Second Amendment. Under “the collective rights model,” the Second Amendment never applies to individuals but merely recognizes the state’s right to arm its militia.

[the] First, Third, Eighth, and Eleventh Circuits have all adopted a "sophisticated collective rights model.." Under this interpretation of the Second Amendment, an individual has a right to bear arms, but only in direct affiliation with a well-organized state-supported militia.

The Tenth Circuit joins the "sophisticated collective rights model" group of circuits. The Court also rejects a claim that authority to regulate the right to bear arms is reserved to the states under the Tenth Amendment. It held that private citizens do not have standing to raise such a claim.

My view is in accord with that of the 5th Circuit, but we're not moving to Texas just to exercise our individual right to bear arms.

Then, in the comments section (a slightly opposing viewpoint that makes a whole heck of a lot of sense):

In the D.C. appellate opinion in Heller upholding the individual rights theory, it links reasonable regulations to public safety. See pages 53, 54.

The protections of the Second Amendment are subject to the same sort of reasonable restrictions that have been recognized as limiting, for instance, the First Amendment. See Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781, 791 (1989) ("[G]overnment may impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place, or manner of protected speech . . . ."). Indeed, the right to keep and bear arms--which we have explained pre-existed, and therefore was preserved by, the Second Amendment--was subject to restrictions at common law.

We take these to be the sort of reasonable regulations contemplated by the drafters of the Second Amendment. For instance, it is presumably reasonable "to prohibit the carrying of weapons when under the influence of intoxicating drink, or to a church, polling place, or public assembly, or in a manner calculated to inspire terror . . . ." State v. Kerner, 107 S.E. 222, 225 (N.C. 1921). And as we have noted, the United States Supreme Court has observed that prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons does not offend the Second Amendment. Robertson, 165 U.S. at 281-82.
Similarly, the Court also appears to have held that convicted felons may be deprived of their right to keep and bear arms. See Lewis v. United States, 445 U.S. 55, 65 n.8 (1980) (citing Miller,
307 U.S. at 178). These regulations promote the government's interest in public safety consistent with our common law tradition. (my emphasis) Just as importantly, however, they do not impair the core conduct upon which the right was premised.

Another paragraph I like in the Heller opinion, p. 23

When we look at the Bill of Rights as a whole, the setting of the Second Amendment reinforces its individual nature. The Bill of Rights was almost entirely a declaration of individual rights, and the Second Amendment's inclusion therein strongly
indicates that it, too, was intended to protect personal liberty.



Reposted from www.guncite.com/journals/kmich.html

Equally ironic, the legal community's endorsement of the exclusively state's right interpretation has actually aided the gun organizations in one way. By concentrating attention on the state's right position, the gun-owner organizations have been able to avoid the details of their own individual right position, which seems inconsistent with the kinds of gun controls the organizations have themselves endorsed.[23] In almost every state, the basic handgun legislation, including (p.210)both the prohibition on the carrying of concealed weapons and the restrictions on gun ownership by felons, minors, and incompetents,[24] stems from the Uniform Revolver Act,[25] drafted and promoted by the NRA and the now defunct United States Revolver Association in the first three decades of this century.[26] However socially desirable these and other controls may be, they raise problems for the individual right interpretation which its proponents have rarely, if ever, attempted to address. For example:

(1) Since the amendment contains no express limitation on the kind of "arms" guaranteed, why does it only protect possession of ordinary small arms (rifles, shotguns, handguns)? Why not of artillery, flame-throwers, machine guns, and so on, to the prohibition of which gun-owner groups have readily acceded?
(2) Likewise, since the amendment's guarantee does not explicitly limit gun ownership to responsible adults, why does it not proscribe the laws restricting handgun ownership by lunatics, criminals and juveniles?
(3) Since the amendment guarantees an (apparently unqualified) right to "bear" as well as to "keep" arms, how can individual right proponents endorse concealed-carry proscriptions?
(4) Conversely, if all these controls are consistent with the gun-owner groups' position, how can they contend that registration and licensing requirements are not?[27]

Terrorism As You Know It Doesn't Exist

Headline: STATE DEPARTMENT STILL SEARCHING FOR USAMA BIN LADEN - U.S. Intelligence tracking vowel movements of the worst enemy the U.S. has had since Darth Vader.
by Phillip Bunker

I found out recently that the U.S. military has a new ally in the War On Terror: Explorer Scouts being trained by the F.B.I. With plastic assault rifles, you too can send your kid to train with the F.B.I. and U.S. Border Patrol, and if you're lucky your child will discover the true rush of engaging terrorists, perhaps giving them a taste of what how exciting war can really be (satire).

Since this program is further evidence of the threat posed to the U.S. by terrorists (sarcasm), I thought I'd check up on terrorist facts in the United States using official sources and I discovered two very unusual things.

First, the State Department web site that lists all the significant terrorist events from 1961-2003 and Islam just isn't the biggest problem. I figured any terrorist strike on U.S. soil committed by foreign nationals or organizations would be listed. Islamic-based terrorism is the "threat" everyone talks about, so there should be evidence that terrorism comes from the middle East. So, first I searched for the word Islam. Only one instance of terrorism committed on U.S. soil and attributed to an Islamist group showed up:

World Trade Center Bombing, February 26, 1993: The World Trade Center in New York City was badly damaged when a car bomb planted by Islamic terrorists exploded in an underground garage. The bomb left 6 people dead and 1,000 injured. The men carrying out the attack were followers of Umar Abd al-Rahman, an Egyptian cleric who preached in the New York City area.

The next entry for terrorism that occurred on U.S. soil was that thing that happened on my Wedding Anniversary:

Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Homeland, September 11, 2001: Two hijacked airliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Soon thereafter, the Pentagon was struck by a third hijacked plane. A fourth hijacked plane, suspected to be bound for a high-profile target in Washington, crashed into a field in southern Pennsylvania. The attacks killed 3,025 U.S. citizens and other nationals. President Bush and Cabinet officials indicated that Usama Bin Laden was the prime suspect and that they considered the United States in a state of war with international terrorism. In the aftermath of the attacks, the United States formed the Global Coalition Against Terrorism.

At first I thought, "wow, no wonder the U.S. military can't capture Osama, they've got the wrong spelling of his name." But, with a little more research, I found out that the U.S. media is the only group to use the spelling Osama. Most government agencies use the spelling Usama.

You may also notice that the title of the entry with the word Homeland in it. So first of all, I get it that you can't call it the "World Trade Center Planing." Second, I'll just say that the terrorists apparently didn't strike several selected sites in the U.S., but infact struck the Homeland of the U.S. The only other person I can think of that used that kind of rhetoric was Hitler. He also convinced the people that the French occupation of the Rhineland wasn't just a threat to strategic interests in the area, but that the Homeland was in danger from foreigners. New York is not my homeland, and if Islamic terrorists had anything to do with the planning and orchestration of 9/11 I'll eat my hat (but that's a whole other story). Oddly enough, the State Department web site doesn't mention Iraq, Islam, or even Al Queda as being responsible - nor do they quote the 9/11 commission report. Instead the entry states merely that Bush and Cabinet Officials indicated that Usama did it. Well, terrorism is as terrorism does, and it's a really good thing that the U.S. gets to decide what terrorism is, considering how much terrorism it does.

So, that's the second thing I found: there's afew terrorist incidents every year, sometimes a few more, and all but four occurred off U.S. soil from 1961-2003 (I don't know why the list ends there - is there a waiting period for the government to report official acts of terrorism, and is that waiting period no less than six years?). Of the four that did occur, one was Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (right-wingers who must have hated Islam too), one was attributed to Islamic Jihadists (first World Trade Center bombing), one was attributed to Usama (as an assertion made by Bush with, to my knowledge, no credible proof), and the last was the mysterious Anthrax mailings - an unsolved, unclaimed, and unsubstantiated attack (unless you count Tom Daschle, John Ashcroft, television networks, and the F.B.I. as substantiation).

Anthrax Attacks, October-November 2001: On October 7 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that investigators had detected evidence that the deadly anthrax bacterium was present in the building where a Florida man who died of anthrax on October 5 had worked. Discovery of a second anthrax case triggered a major investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The two anthrax cases were the first to appear in the United States in 25 years. Anthrax subsequently appeared in mail received by television networks in New York and by the offices in Washington of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and other members of Congress. Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a briefing on October 16, "When people send anthrax through the mail to hurt people and invoke terror, it’s a terrorist act."

Conclusion: Without crunching numbers, my research indicates that you are only likely to personally encounter a terrorist attack carried out by a foreign person if: i) you travel to (in rough order of likelihood of encountering terrorism) Columbia, Isreal, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, or Uganda, and maybe London depending on how the I.R.A. is feeling; ii) you assume dark skinned terrorists are lurking near your home (the operative part of Homeland) and treat the world accordingly - enough of us making this assumption will cause it to be true, since the world is literally what we make of it. As an example: sending drones all over the world to explode the houses of "terrorists" will eventually cause drones to send explosives back at us. Every foreign person killed by the U.S. military is considered an act of terror by someone, and if we kill too many, then we'll be in the minority - especially if we don't control all the money anymore.

Solution: Assume the media spins things so much that they border on lies of omission, and spend as much time finding your own answers with primary and factual based sources as you can. Let's not leave the media, the government, and the banks to do all the truth interpreting for us. Take back the government; the first step is making sure all your friends vote. Good luck to us all.

ps: watch "Zeitgeist, The Movie" even if you don't agree, at least you thought outside the box a little.

Re Post: Is David Brooks That Gullible? by Aaron Pallas

FYI - If you want to see some great back and forth debate on the issue, go to the original website to see all the comments afterward.

Re-posted from www.thisweekineducation.com

May 8, 2009

Just How Gullible Is David Brooks?

by Aaron Pallas

Now that I have your attention … Today’s New York Times column by David Brooks touts a new study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) Promise Academy charter schools, two celebrated schools in Harlem. Fryer and Dobbie’s finding that the typical eighth-grader was in the 74^th percentile among New York City students in mathematics leads Brooks to state that HCZ Promise Academy eliminated the black-white achievement gap. He’s so dumbstruck by this that he says it twice. Brooks takes this evidence as support for the “no excuses” model of charter schools, and, claiming that “the approach works,” challenges all cities to adopt this “remedy for the achievement gap.”

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s release of the 2009 New York State English Language Arts (ELA) results, in which the HCZ schools outperformed the citywide white average in grade 3, but were well behind the white average in grades 4, 5 and 8, skoolboy decided to drink a bit more deeply from the datastream. The figure below shows the gap between the average performance in HCZ Promise Academy and white students in New York City in ELA and math, expressed as a fraction of the standard deviation of overall performance in a given grade and year. The left side of the figure shows math performance, and the right side shows ELA performance.

It’s true that eighth-graders in 2008 scored .20 standard deviations above the citywide average for white students. But it may also be apparent that this is a very unusual pattern relative to the other data represented in this figure, all of which show continuing and sizeable advantages for white students in New York City over HCZ students. The fact that HCZ seventh-graders in 2008 were only .3 standard deviations behind white students citywide in math is a real accomplishment, and represents a shrinkage of the gap of .42 standard deviations for these students in the preceding year. However, Fryer and Dobbie, and Brooks in turn, are putting an awful lot of faith in a single data point — the remarkable increase in math scores between seventh and eighth grade for the students at HCZ who entered sixth grade in 2006. If what HCZ is doing can routinely produce a .67 standard deviation shift in math test scores in the eighth grade, that would be great. But we’re certainly not seeing an effect of that magnitude in the seventh grade. And, of course, none of this speaks to the continuing large gaps in English performance.

But here’s the kicker. In the HCZ Annual Report for the 2007-08 school year submitted to the State Education Department, data are presented on not just the state ELA and math assessments, but also the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Those eighth-graders who kicked ass on the state math test? They didn’t do so well on the low-stakes Iowa Tests. Curiously, only 2 of the 77 eighth-graders were absent on the ITBS reading test day in June, 2008, but 20 of these 77 were absent for the ITBS math test. For the 57 students who did take the ITBS math test, HCZ reported an average Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE) score of 41, which failed to meet the school’s objective of an average NCE of 50 for a cohort of students who have completed at least two consecutive years at HCZ Promise Academy. In fact, this same cohort had a slightly higher average NCE of 42 in June, 2007.

Normal Curve Equivalents (NCE’s) range from 1 to 99, and are scaled to have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 21.06. An NCE of 41 corresponds to roughly the 33^rd percentile of the reference distribution, which for the ITBS would likely be a national sample of on-grade test-takers. Scoring at the 33^rd percentile is no great success story.

How are we to make sense of this? One possibility is that the HCZ students didn’t take the Iowa tests seriously, and that their performance on that test doesn’t reflect their true mastery of eighth-grade mathematics. The HCZ Annual Report doesn’t offer this as a possibility, perhaps because it would be embarrassing to admit that students didn’t take some aspect of their schoolwork and school accountability plan seriously. But the three explanations that are offered are not compelling: the Iowa test skills were not consistently aligned with the New York State Standards and the Harcourt Curriculum used in the school; the linkage of classroom instruction to the skills tested on the Iowa test wasn’t consistent across the school year, and Iowa test prep began in February, 2008; and school staff didn’t use 2007 Iowa test results to identify areas of weaknesses for individual students and design appropriate intervention.

If proficiency in English and math are to mean anything, these skills have to be able to generalize to contexts other than a particular high-stakes state test. No college or employer is ever going to look at the New York State ELA and math exams in making judgments about who has the skills to be successful in their school or workplace. I’m going to hold off labeling the HCZ schools as the “Harlem Miracle” until there’s some additional evidence supporting the claim that these schools have placed their students on a level academic playing field with white students in New York City.