A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down Maryland’s handgun licensing law, finding that its requirements, which include submitting fingerprints for a background check and taking a four-hour firearms safety course, are unconstitutionally restrictive.
In a 2-1 ruling, judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond said they considered the case in light of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that “effected a sea change in Second Amendment law.”
The underlying lawsuit was filed in 2016 as a challenge to a Maryland law requiring people to obtain a special license before purchasing a handgun. The law, which was passed in 2013 in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, laid out a series of necessary steps for would-be gun purchasers: completing four hours of safety training that includes firing one live round, submitting fingerprints and passing a background check, being 21 and residing in Maryland.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said he was disappointed in the circuit court’s ruling and will “continue to fight for this law.” He said his administration is reviewing the ruling and considering its options.
What other right do we put behind fingerprinting and coursework. Do you lose your right to remain silent if you don’t take a fucking course? No, the federal courts are bringing this right in line with the others.
Exercising your first amendment rights doesn’t kill in most instances. In instances that it can, such as inciting violence, it stops being protected speech
It doesn’t even have to be fatal. If it incites panic or causes misuse of emergency services, it’s a crime baby.
And just like with 1A rights we have laws that limit those effects of 2A rights, just as it should be. Just as you can’t go around inciting panic with your words, you can’t legally brandish a firearm in public to incite panic. ETC.
The difference being shouting “FIRE” in a theatre only remotely might kill people, while pulling a gun will much more likely lead to death. Also, the laws against shouting “FIRE” have proven far more effective than anything with guns.
You cannot compare the 2nd Amendment with any other law. It doesn’t have any rational justification behind it.
You can absolutely shout fire in a theater. That example was used as an example of protected speech.
The second has rational judgement, you just don’t like it because you think govs can’t turn into destructive forces…
No, shouting fire in a theatre (when there is no fire) is explicitly not protected speech. Schenck v. United States and Brandenburg v. Ohio. At least, depending on the actual consequence - if people die rushing out the theatre and it is apparent you were lying, then you’re not going to be protected.
Correct, if people are harmed. But you can shout fire in a theater, as it’s protected speech.
Actually no. If you read the court decisions I referenced, the exclusion is for “speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action”. You cannot reasonably say that shouting “fire” in a theatre when there is none has any other purpose other than to cause panic, thus it is prohibited speech. In practice, if no one gets hurt you probably won’t be prosecuted, but you will have still broken the law.
So then you’re saying that liberals and leftists CAN publicly call for the roundup, imprisonment, and execution of all Republicans who push fake news in online and broadcast media?
Sorry bro, you’ve read some of the latest bullshit that sounds clever but is actually a load of malarkey.
You can shout fire in a theater if there is a fire. (or reason to suspect there is one)
If there isn’t a fire, you do not get to hide behind 1st amendment protections.
Yes you can, that was the whole damn point of bringing it up…
Go do it.
Why are you pulling a gun?
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Exactly. If you murder someone, you will also not be protected by the right to keep and bear arms. In general, instigating harm against others is never covered by rights.
Now if only we could implement some sort of way to maybe check if someone has some disqualifying action in their past so we can make sure that right is adequately protected without risk of further harm. Maybe we could have like a check in the person’s background and make sure they know how to use it properly so we know they aren’t falling into the wrong hands.
Nope, that won’t work. Sigh. Looks like there’s “no way to prevent this.” Crazy that this is the “only nation where this regularly happens.”
Are you assuming that someone who knows they are not allowed to carry would go through a BG check and Finger prints…in order to be told they can’t carry? Really??? That’s the logic you’re going with?
Are you assuming they’d stay away from buying guns if there wasn’t a verification system? That the honor system would work here?
You losing your protection for having a gun does nothing to help the person that you killed with it.
Yet we don’t license speech on the grounds that inciting violence isn’t protected.
Owning guns does not guarantee gun violence. Most of the time it seems to be gross negligence.
We license people to drive, yet look at how many bad drivers there are.
This is a callous stance, but I think the left needs to shut the fuck up about guns. All it does is galvanize the right wing and drive them straight to the polls. Gun regulation does not win elections and there are so many more pressing problems. Fact of the matter is gun violence, while tragic, statistically isn’t something worthy of losing elections over. Climate change, education, healthcare, all are higher stakes issues with far more lives at risk.
Edit: down vote all you want, the elections will still be lost and the supreme court will continue to be irreparably stacked against you. I don’t know how much more evidence you need that the left needs tactics, guile, and strategy. The Right is playing chess while the left is making a sandwich. They aren’t even playing the same game.
You nailed it, if the left put political capital into things that would actually curb the violence, and left the guns alone, they would sweep elections constantly.
Exactly. And most of the left usually argues that gun violence is a mental health issue anyway. Which means if we tackled the bigger issues you’d see a marked decline in gun violence without passing a single gun related law. Gun violence is a symptom. Let’s fight the disease.
President Trump removed the restrictions the prevented the mentally ill from buying guns.
Kinda proves my point actually. Winning elections is the overall goal that must be addressed first. When we lose, we literally regress.
We no longer need a well regulated militia, we have a permanent standing army capable of answering any threat, anywhere in the world within 24 hours.
Might be time for an update on the ole constitution, the problems of 1780 aren’t really the problems we have today.
Maybe if we still had a more militia like system we wouldn’t be engaged in an eternal state of war in countries across the globe. The Founding Father’s critiques of standing armies were made because they didn’t want to become what they overthrew.
Sure, and we can debate the merits of that all day. Fact is that right now the US’ primary export is force, our primary industry is war, and far behind that is literally anything else.
I would love if we cut the size of the military to admit a tenth of it’s current size, and spent all of that money on social programs.
As it happens, that would probably cripple the American economy for decades.
But if you can figure out how to uncouple the US from it’s military industrial complex, going to a Swiss militia style home defense network wouldn’t be a bad idea. Give everyone a rifle, require they train with it so many hours a year, call it good.
The Constitution is not a sacrosanct document, we’ve major changes before, including repealing amendments. We shouldn’t be afraid of changing it if it’s doing more harm than good. The President and Vice President are elected differently now, the 3/5ths compromise was repealed by the 14th Amendment, and 18th Amendment, enacting Prohibition, was struck down by the 21st.
It’s my belief that the reason nobody has seriously tried to change the Constitution to remove or modify the 2nd amendment is that they know it’s currently impossible. Changing the Constitution requires a serious amount of working together and agreement between the state and federal governments, and that just doesn’t exist right now.
That’s why some states are trying to pass unconstitutional laws, it’s easier to do that and get away with it at least for a little bit than it is to change the construction.
The second amendment also doesn’t create a well regulated militia.
What use is a militia of morbidly obese men who can’t even demonstrate basic firearm safety, whose entire contribution is “have gun”?
I don’t know why we’re suppose to politely play along with the hero fantasies of people who wouldn’t even wear masks in a pandemic but insist they’d lay down their lives to liberate people from the fascists that they enthusiastically voted for.
The well regulated militia that’s referenced in the amendment is the army. That’s what the amendment is meant to protect us from.
You think the second amendment is to protect us from what it calls “necessary to the security of a free State”?
You might want to go read it again.
Yes, you need a military to defend your country from other countries. And yes, it’s to protect us from an oppressive government. Remember the revolutionary war lil buddy?
Oh, so your interpretation is just mind-bendingly stupid. Got it.
Aw someone realized they are wrong
If a government does any oppressing, it’s almost always done with its military, not in spite of it.
No shit. That’s what the second amendment is for
Wait, so you’re arguing that the second amendment is designed for arming an oppressive military?
No, the second amendment is designed to enable citizens to protect themselves in the event of an oppressive military.
Article I Section 8 part 12 discusses the army. Parts 15 and 16 discuss the militia. They are two separate and distinct entities.
Constitutionally, “militia” refers to the obligations of every American person to provide the security of the state, individual and collectively.
Exactly! It’s not like we put our Voting Rights behind IDs and fees and make people lose that right if they’re in prison!
I’m no expert, but it’s my understanding that you need ID and have to pay fees for guns outside of the gunshow loophole.
Voting isn’t actually a constitutional right like owning firearms is. There are protections about equality when it comes to voting, but not much about voting itself. States are generally given the right to decide who can vote and how they vote.
Yeah. It’s too bad we are stuck with this albatross of 2A making it impossible to put reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. Clearly that was a mistake.
You are wrong, and it’s good that we have such strong protections on our inherent rights to effective self defense.
Fortunately, there’s nothing you can do about it as well.
The longer guns continue being a problem, the likelier we get to electing the legislative body needed to pass a new amendment canceling the 2A in its entirety. The longer it stands, the harder it gets to pass the compromise measures needed to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people, and so the problem keeps getting worse.
Can’t wait for only billionaires and their armed thugs to be the only ones able to defend themselves
laughs in actual civilised country
You gunfuckers are hilarious.
Looks around
Gestures broadly
You’re the type of guy that says “well I just did a thing”
You should really read up about the amendment process. It’s not something that Congress can do by itself, it requires 75% of the 50 states to ratify it after the initial hurdles. It’s not going to happen, because there will always be at least 13+ states that will vote to keep the 2nd Amendment, and that’s a good thing. You should be happy that our rights are safe, because it’s pretty fuckin’ hard to get new rights, you know they don’t just hand out new ones regularly.
Unenumeration of a once recognized right, wouldn’t give congress the authority to inhibit people from practicing that right.
A different Supreme Court could redecide settled law just like Roe v Wade. If 2A needs to die to keep guns out of dangerous hands, then it needs to die. The absolute refusal to compromise means eventually they’ll lose everything. Okay.
I don’t have a problem with responsible gun ownership. You’d think they’d make some compromises to soften the resolve of the anti-gun crowd. I wouldn’t be with them if we had sane laws, but here we all are.
The problem is that US law is ridiculously and unnecessarily convoluted. There’s Federal law, which is supposed to be comprehensive but intentionally has holes in it that State law is supposed to flesh out for themselves. However Federal law overrules state law, meaning that State law can only ever fit inside Federal law.
This leads to Federal law being lazily written, such that it covers a far wider breadth than it was ever intended. Meanwhile, when States try to write their own laws to fill in the gap, they get overruled by Federal law.
If you have a Federal legislative body - Congress, the people who are supposed to write laws - in perpetual turmoil, and a Supreme Court that is politically stacked, then you can easily invent case law to twist whatever legislation was written decades or centuries ago into whatever you desire.
And all of this glosses over the fact that US law is written in horrible language. I dread to think the fit that a modern grammatical spell checker would go through if you copy/pasted the law into it, with how the sentence structure is drawn on with commas and bullshit. If Clippy were still around, he would’ve been bent so far out of shape he could hack a Nintendo Switch. Yet, because it’s at the Federal level, which is detracted further from the people, there isn’t enough of a public incentive to have it written plainly so that everyone could understand it.
You don’t get a vote on laws, you get a vote on “representatives” who vote on laws
on your behalfbased on their financial backers.Astounding how the “well regulated” part of the second amendment is simply washed away by gun zealots.
“Good” how? Because it makes your pee pee tingly? Americans are less safe from criminals, tyrants and the monthly “legal gun owner opening fire on a crowd” than anyone in comparable countries.
Make buying a gun without proper checks and training a felony, remove the guns as evidence of a crime, try those responsible in a court and if they’re convicted, congratulations, you’re now a felon who has been shown due process then stripped of their rights.
Or just stop voting Republican. Personally, I don’t care if “responsible gun owners” want to die in a hail of bullets after shooting at innocent people, just because it was democratically decided that the “responsible” part shouldn’t be voluntary.
After all, would we even notice a difference? Legal gun owners are already responsible for 80% of mass shootings.
Why are you bringing your weird penis thoughts into a discussion about the constitutional rights of US citizens? Keep that to yourself, because it’s gross.
It’s fascinating what causes you to clutch your pearls and what doesn’t.
It’s just a tell about your psychological viewpoint when you immediately associate penises with guns and try to use that as a form of insult.
Sounds like you’re as much a psychologist as you are a militia.
Stupid take based on lies.
Well regulated militia.
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But the right to bear arms is in no way in line with the others. Freedom of speech makes sense. Equal treatment of all citizens by the government does also. The right to play with guns is in no way comparable to this.
Please answer me this: why should you have the right to play with guns, with few if any restrictions, when it is clear that everyone having such a right directly leads to death? Why is your right to have fun more important than other peoples’ lives?
Edit: Why is it that no one can justify why they should have guns?? Did you trade your balls in to buy your gun?
People need to realize that the 2A is simply obsolete. It’s irrelevant talking about original intention when that is totally irrelevant to the modern world. It’s an inevitability that the 2A goes away. The only question is how it removed.
Australia have done pretty well with it all. Pay people money for their guns, then fine people if they still have them outside the law.
Handguns in particular are completely unnecessary. They don’t shoot very accurately, they only exist to perpetuate violence between people.
The problem is that you’ve got no way of keeping guns outside the law in the US right now. The government can run a gun buyback program, but they can’t stop the sale of new guns as long as the 2nd amendment remains part of the US constitution. Following Australia’s lead without criminalizing most gun ownership just turns any gun buyback program into a government-sponsored trade in of older models for a down payment on newer ones.
There are ways, it just requires Federal law makers to actually have balls. Unfortunately, Federal law is woefully insufficient - whether it be in writing legislation or Supreme Court rulings. States can’t make effective laws, because poorly written Federal laws and a politically stacked Supreme Court can easily circumvent them.
Even more unfortunately, it’s most likely that conservatives will unravel Federal law, but only for their benefit. They’ve already been practising their “Convention of the States”. Furthermore, state governments are predominantly Republican, in a disproportionate misrepresentation of the US population.
And that last part is the key problem: we have a “representative” democracy. We vote for someone to go to Washington and make/vote on laws on our behalf. This made sense 100 years ago, when it took forever to travel and communicate. Now, technology gives us the ability to communicate with almost anyone else in the world instantly. We need a direct democracy, where everyone gets to have their say, as much as they want to.
Furthermore, people shouldn’t just have the opportunity to vote on what kind of laws should be made, but on the individual fleshed out law itself, and also in review of laws both before they’re enacted and after they’ve had some time to play out. Disinformation campaigns have proven effective for very occassional votes, but they cannot be maintained indefinately. We need to make it hard to manipulate voting.
We need to go back to thinking about democracy in such a way as to make it bullet proof. If you look at the UK, they vote with pencils - all because there is the remote possibility of replacing a pen with one that has disappearing ink. That’s the kind of abject paranoia we need to be implementing.
lol no. Voting with pencils is because they’re cheap, abundant, don’t leak, don’t smudge when folding the ballot paper. It’s recommendation, not a law No nonsense about disappearing ink.
Source: Am from UK and have voted with a pen (blue, black, green and red ink) and a pencil.
Check yourself.
You can bring your own pen to vote in the UK, that’s fine. However the utensil they provide is always a pencil, for the exact reason I gave.
I’m also in the UK, and I normally use Pilot Frixion pens.
Edit: Argos use pens. Pens are cheaper than pencils.
FYI Frixion pens erase with heat. If the ballot is exposed to the temperature of, say, a blow-dryer, or is left to bake in the sun, the marks will fade.
Learned that when I tried to laminate a document I handwrote with a Frixion pen and out came a blank laminated piece of paper.
What other right lets you mutilate a room full of children beyond recognition or execute your abused partner on a whim?
There’s few things that upset “responsible gun owners” more then the idea that they might actually have to be responsible.
If gun owners were an issue…the 500 million firearms in civ hands means you’d know about it.
It’s the pro-gun crowd that insist no systems are enacted to separate “idiots” and “domestic terrorists” from “responsible gun owners”, so you’re either going to have to take responsibility for them or finally agree to changes that single them out.
Maybe if you can’t come to an agreement with the rest of the country, you could come to some kind of agreement with the mass shooters instead?
They want to shoot children, the pro-gun community has children, and the pro-gun community believes that some children should be shot if it means maintaining the current gun laws.
That should settle things down until you’ve finished building your mental health utopia where its safe to give a gun to any man, woman or child, at any time, because you’ve completely cured violent impulses forever.
We do know about it. The entire world knows about it. That’s literally what this whole conversation is about.
Yes, please in your Almighty wisdom tell us how you would enact this?
The rest of the country? You do realize that people who are gun owners are the majority right? There are way more people who own them, then not. Mass shootings are a recent phenomenon, not something that has been happening for forever and it’s all the guns fault. We’ve been armed for a long time, hell kids used to bring their rifles to school so they could go hunt afterwards, and this was less than 40 years ago that kids were doing this.
Ah yes here it comes the tried and true method of dehumanizing your opponent…you think an AWB will stop school shootings…and because I don’t think it will and that we need to focus on why they happen and solve that, you slam down the “ok with kids being shot”…how original.
You know the thing that bothers me most about you anti-2a types?..you automatically assume you’re debating a white right wing republican…
My wishlist of how to heavily curb all violence in this country starts with:
Single payer
Ending the war on drugs
Ending for profit prisons
Ending qualified immunity
Paying teachers more
Building more schools and hiring more teachers so class sizes can get back down to like 10-15 kids a classroom vs 30+
Making sure everyone has safety nets in place (think ubi)
Making sure all kids are heavily protected by these safety nets, so they don’t turn to gangs
I’ve got more but this is a good start.
No…no you don’t…2/3rds of our gun deaths are suicides…the remaining 3rd has around 85% as gang/drug violence, then domestic violence and then police killing people and self defense… the last tiny bit is mass shootings… it’s basically a rounding error it’s so small.
Most mass shooters have a history of domestic violence, but the pro-gun community opposes disarming domestic abusers.
Most mass shooters have a history of red flags, but the pro-gun community opposes disarming people with red flags.
But really, you seem to have misunderstood whose problem this is to solve. It’s not the people who support gun control doing all the mass shootings, its legal gun owners (or the children of legal gun owners).
If you want me to solve it, I’m more than happy to, bur you’re not going to like it.
The majority of Americans support stricter gun legislation. basically any time they’re asked.
You mean the last 20 years, during which you’ve let the problem spiral further and further out of control, despite insisting that you have the answers?
That percentage also won’t be going down as all the children you sold out graduate and have to face sending their own children off to play mass-shooting roulette.
Then jump in your time machine and fuck off back there, because that America no longer exists.
If you think you can rebuild it, go right ahead. Until then, gun legislation isn’t even remotely close to handling the America of today and needs to be addressed immediately.
Oh no, you’re mistaking me for a politician tip-toeing around a death cult. I’d ban all semi-automatic firearms from being privately owned, because they’re the weapons of choice for criminals and terrorists.
It’s not even remotely close to worth it. All the pro-gun promises turned out to be lies and fantasies.
How many innocent lives are your gun laws worth then? Because we’ve got the numbers and you’ve done nothing, so I just assumed it was more than that.
Damn, looks like you’ve got a fuckload of work ahead of you before it’s safe to sell guns to people again. Better get started.
Means reduction has worked for every form of suicide it’s targeted.
The they get their guns from the magic gun fairy, or did they steal then from “responsible gun owners” who left their guns poorly secured?
Or did they just buy one because “haven’t been convicted of a felony yet” is a trivial bar to clear? Or maybe they just bought one privately without a background check at all, because that’s a feature that pro-gun cultists insist on?
Which again, the gun lobby doesn’t consider grounds for disarming someone.
Weren’t you objecting to the “okay with kids being shot” label just a few sentences ago? Because calling murdered people a “rounding error” sounds exactly like someone who is okay with kids getting shot.
As long as they’re not yours apparently.
Your mass shooter drills, where you scare the living hell out of every child in America, are backfiring on you. In their teens, these kids are learning that they don’t have to be defenseless targets. They are learning that they can, indeed, fight back. By the time they are 18-21, these kids are buying guns, so they never have to feel like they did when you barricaded them in a room and told them to pretend someone was trying to kill them.
Yeah they’re not going to fall for “standing up to us makes us stronger so you should stop”, nor “this is why 5 year olds need guns”. You’re just another gun owner living in a fantasy world.
They’re fully aware of who is responsible for arming school shooters and exactly those people respond to being told “you need to stop arming school shooters”.
The fear you have been instilling in kids with your shooter drills doesn’t disappear when they leave school. They take that lesson with them when they leave: they need to be prepared for violence at all times. They are taking up guns faster than any other time in US history. And, they are voting as gun owners, whether they decide to have kids or not.