Saturday, December 5, 2015

You Can Buy A Gun, But You Cannot Fly

Thus spake the US Senate.  OTOH, if you are a convicted felon you can fly but might not be able to buy a gun, unless you go to one of those loophole gun shows.

I see some editorials and columns and comments about this outrageous Senate vote.  Its defenders argue that the no fly list is not fully reliable.  Some people not really suspected of terrorism are on it and would be deprived of their right to buy a gun.  I know the NY Times just had a front page editorial  about stopping the gun epidemic, but somehow this Senate vote strikes me as being so far beyond the pale of anything remotely defensible or even sane (Obama called it "insane," and I agree), that I would expect more noise than there has been.  But somehow there has not been quite the level of outrage I would think is appropriate.

I guess this is just a sign of how many completely ridiculous and unacceptable things have been happening.  When one comes along that is completely bonkers, so many of us do not even notice any more or even care all that much.

Barkley Rosser

3 comments:

Karelian Isthmus said...

Important assault rifle ban case coming up before SCOTUS. Should be interesting: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/friedman-v-city-of-highland-park/

Jack said...

The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to keep guns out of their hands to begin with. And what kind of a good guy, who isn't a member of a police force or the military, needs an assault rifle to do good guy kind of stuff?

Mass shooters are often found to have stored thousands of rounds of bullets that are only suitable for automatic, or semi-automatic, firearms. How is that an individual can make purchases of so much ammo and not send up a red flag in some manner?

Is there ever a case that a mass shooter is a member of a "well regulated militia"? Justice Scalia and his cohorts a guilty of incitement to commit mass murder on multiple occasions. Why would any one phrase of a Constitutional amendment be any more or less definitive of the entire amendment than any other part of the amendment?

Anonymous said...

«I guess this is just a sign of how many completely ridiculous and unacceptable things have been happening. When one comes along that is completely bonkers, so many of us do not even notice any more or even care all that much.»

Completely bonkers (and much worse) things have been a constant feature of the USA political landscape.

Consider for example "apex" laws and hereditary peanut growing monopolies, which on the face of it are absurd, and exist only because they were purchased by the relevant vested interests (mining speculators and southern segregationists). They have existed for a long time, the involve pretty significant (even if not gigantic) consequences, probably much bigger than gun licensing and airplane travel bans.