In my previous post from Saturday, I mentioned Sheriff David Clarke’s PSA where he advised people to get firearm training so they can protect themselves when their lives are in immediate danger and help from law enforcement isn’t available. Yet gun control laws make protecting oneself no easy task. Excessive laws, restrictions, regulations, and bureaucracy that restrain our Second Amendment rights will, and have, cost the lives of the law-abiding.
One such instance of laws failing citizens came to light the other day in New Jersey. By way of National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke, the Courier-Post reported last week:
When Carol Bowne felt the threat of domestic violence, the petite hairdresser took steps to protect herself.
The Berlin Township woman got a restraining order against a former boyfriend, installed security cameras and an alarm system to her home and began the months-long process of obtaining a handgun, friends said.
But it wasn’t enough.
Bowne, 39, was stabbed to death in the driveway of her Patton Avenue home on Wednesday night.
Her former boyfriend, 45-year-old Michael Eitel, was charged with her murder. Eitel, a convicted felon, was a fugitive Thursday, being sought by a U.S. Marshals Service task force…
Berlin Township Police Chief Leonard Check said Bowne applied for a gun license on April 21, and that she had inquired Monday about her request.
The application process typically takes two months or more as police collect information on the applicant, including fingerprints and reference checks. “We did not get the fingerprint information yet,” said Check.
Separately, news sources reported this morning that the Supreme Court refused to hear a case involving a San Francisco gun law that makes residents keep trigger locks on their handguns or store them in a lockbox when owners aren’t carrying them. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dissented from the rest of the court. The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had earlier ruled that the San Francisco law be upheld, which led San Francisco residents and the NRA to want the Supreme Court to review the law.
From USA Today:
“San Francisco has no more right than the District of Columbia to force its residents to fiddle with lock boxes or fumble with trigger locks when the need to use a handgun for immediate self-defense arises,” the challengers argued in their brief seeking Supreme Court review.
A coalition of 25 states sided with the city residents in urging the court to overturn the law. Otherwise, they said, “responsible citizens will be unable to possess operable firearms in defense of hearth and home.”
That was at the heart of the Thomas-Scalia dissent.
“The law … burdens their right to self-defense at the times they are most vulnerable — when they are sleeping, bathing, changing clothes, or otherwise indisposed,” Thomas wrote. “There is consequently no question that San Francisco’s law burdens the core of the Second Amendment right.”
Violators of the San Francisco law can be fined up to $1,000 and spend up to six months in jail.
However, the law only applies to handguns, not “long” guns. So thankfully, citizens are still able to fire warning shots with their shotguns at a moment’s notice. According the the USA Today article, the statute that local San Francisco lawmakers passed in 2007 was intended to curb suicides and accidental shootings.
Yep, because there’s no other way for people in San Fran to kill themselves when they have their minds set on it, and because all accidents should be preventable. We should just ban all pointy things. Ban all stairs. Ban all roofs. Ban all concrete sidewalks. Ban all toxic liquids. Ban all venomous snakes. Ban all cars. Ban all bridges. Ban propulsion. Ban kinetic energy. Ban gravity. Ban…
It may seem that the law is pointless because it’s largely unenforceable–unless some neighbor rats on the gun owner who leaves his gun in plain view, or the cops come to the gun owner’s home for some reason and find the handgun unsecured. Either instance could prove to be uncommon, but they will happen.
The point is that gun laws like those in San Francisco and New Jersey rarely deter violent crimes. More often, those laws end up harming the people who abide by them.
As the late Carol Bowne’s co-worker Denise Lovallo told the press, “She did absolutely everything she was supposed to.” Because of New Jersey’s sluggish process for approval of a gun permit, it may have cost this woman her life. Because of how the laws are set up there and in other places around the country, gun control legislators and activists can rejoice, feeling good that they’ve done their part to save lives. Society’s criminal elements, those who intend to violate the safety and security of the innocent and law-abiding, can rejoice right alongside them.
Good job, do-good jobbers.
