New Gun Control Measures Set To Be Announced Today By The Senate

Gun Controllers Say They Want 'Reform' but They're Really Pushing Criminalization
The government should loosen laws, reduce conflict between government and the public, and let people defend themselves.

https://reason.com/2022/06/15/gun-controllers-say-reform-really-criminalization/

excerpt:

"Today, we are announcing a commonsense, bipartisan proposal to protect America's children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country," 20 U.S. senators from both sides of the aisle trumpeted this week. Details remain sketchy, but the senators referenced red flag laws which let police seize firearms from those considered potential threats, and the inclusion of juvenile records in background checks for gun buyers younger than 21. That was enough for The New York Times to hail the deal as "a significant step toward ending a yearslong impasse over gun reform legislation." CBS News called it a "bipartisan deal to reform U.S. gun laws." The Senate scheme contrasts with the House's "sweeping gun reform package" of restrictions, as per CNN, which everybody concedes has no future.

But "reform" is a weird word for legislation that threatens people with prison and must be enforced by police. Just recently, proposed criminal justice reforms featured reducing penalties for victimless crimes and repealing the death penalty. Reformers suggested legalizing many activities, using alternatives to police where possible, and eliminating qualified immunity protections for police misconduct.

"Decriminalization helps reduce crime," Stephen Averill Sherman of Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research noted in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd by police raised concerns about biased and brutal law enforcement. "In this country, the police actively pursue both users and sellers of hard drugs. Rendering these activities legal would place them under the aegis of non-police institutions, such as health and human services." Reducing the areas of life in which law enforcers intervene, he suggested, reduces conflicts between them and the public.

Unfortunately, criminal justice reform was tainted (temporarily, we can hope), by delusional prosecutors who ignored violence and theft and alienated the public.

Can reform, which means "improve" in common usage, really refer to both more criminalization and less criminalization, to increased policing of the public as well as reduced? That makes no sense when you consider the contradictions between earlier criminal justice reform and current gun "reform." Take the senators' advocacy of "state crisis intervention orders," often termed "red flag laws," for example.

"There are two basic problems with red flag laws that cannot be wished away by consensus-building rhetoric: Predicting violence is much harder than advocates of this approach are usually willing to admit, and trying to overcome that challenge by erring on the side of issuing red flag orders inevitably means that many innocent people will lose their Second Amendment rights, typically for a year and sometimes longer, even though they never would have used a gun to harm anyone," noted Reason's Jacob Sullum.

Rhode Island's chapter of the ACLU agrees, responding in 2018 to a red flag law proposal there with objections to "the breadth of this legislation, its impact on civil liberties, and the precedent it sets for the use of coercive measures against individuals not because they are alleged to have committed any crime, but because somebody believes they might, someday, commit one."

Remember that New York already had a red flag law that "should have" been applied to the Buffalo shooter, Vox's Nicole Narea insists, but wasn't. That prompted officials to tighten the law, magnifying civil liberties dangers without improving the ability to predict who might someday commit a crime.

Proposals to extend background checks into juvenile records are also worrying. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) warns of "the juvenile criminalization, the expansion of background checks into juvenile records," in comments to The Independent's Eric Michael Garcia. She added that putting cops in schools didn't make them safer but "increased the criminalization of teens in communities like mine."

Civil libertarians have long objected to "the use of arrest to address behavior that would likely be handled in the school by school staff if not for the presence of on-site officers" as put in a 2012 ACLU report. "Americans are experiencing higher rates of arrests and convictions by age 26 than did members of the generations before them," cautioned a 2018 RAND research brief. Now lawmakers want to turn the resulting criminal records into grounds for denying civil liberties.

Worse, there's the near certainty that new laws will be as unevenly enforced as old ones. That means disparate impact on minority communities, as alleged by public defenders in a brief in a gun rights case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Such laws are also likely to be brandished in our politically polarized country as weapons by partisans against their enemies. Red flag laws, with their virtually nonexistent due process protections, have already been abused to settle personal scores.
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more at the link

 

Hey we should require all teachers to be armed and all students over the age of 18 to be armed. This will make more profits for the gun industry.
Mission Accomplished.

 

It is hard to take the Ammosexuals seriously, though they are very dangerous for America.

 

Gun Talks Snag on Tricky Question: What Counts as a Boyfriend?
Among the sticking points holding up a final agreement on gun legislation is how to define a boyfriend in a provision meant to keep guns away from domestic abusers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/us/politics/senate-guns-boyfriend-loophole.html

excerpt:

WASHINGTON — Among the sticking points standing in the way of a final deal on what could be the first significant bipartisan gun safety legislation in decades is an age-old question: How do you define a boyfriend?

The question may sound frivolous, but for a small group of Republicans and Democrats who are pressing to translate a hard-won compromise on guns into legislation that can draw 60 votes in the Senate, it is vital. And for millions of women who have been threatened with a firearm by an intimate partner, it is deadly serious.

At issue is a provision in the proposed agreement that would make it more difficult for domestic abusers to obtain guns.

Current law bars people convicted of domestic violence or subject to a domestic violence restraining order from being able to buy a gun, but it applies only if they have been married to or lived with the victim, or had a child with them. Lawmakers have worked unsuccessfully for years to close what has come to be known as the “boyfriend loophole” by expanding the law to include other intimate partners. Taking such a step is seen as one of the more publicly popular and effective ways to reduce gun violence.

But first, lawmakers must agree on what exactly makes someone an intimate partner. Is it one date or several? Could an ex-boyfriend count?

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who has been leading the talks, described it as “a complicated question of state statutes and state charging practices.”

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, said the boyfriend question was surprisingly complex.

“The surface explanation seems like it would be fairly simple, but I know that as they try to reduce it to legislative text, I think it’s gotten a little bit more uncomfortable,” said Mr. Thune, who is not directly involved in the negotiations.
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more at the link

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