In High Cost of Willfully Misinterpreting the 2nd Amendment, I revealed how the Supreme Court’s right wing quintet ignored text, history and precedent in order to elevate "the profits of the domestic small arms industry above the ability of government to protect our safety, our general welfare, our domestic tranquility and our very lives."

In stand-your-ground Florida, Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott (R) seeks to elevate the 2nd Amendment above the 1st Amendment. He has vowed to appeal a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Cooke that an NRA-sponsored 2011 law, which purported to make it unlawful for a physician to ask a patent whether he or she owned a gun, violated physicians’ right to free speech.

Interestingly, while Scott claims to be a fiscal conservative, the Sun Sentinel reports that Scott has squandered some $880,000 to wage mostly unsuccessful court battles over voter suppression laws (both the failed purge and registration restrictions), drug tests for welfare recipients, prison privatization and the Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

Look before your very own eyes, those who would make this an issue of rights profit from your loved one's death. Get a grip Americans and put limits on their bought and sold excess!

"and on which [weapons] our entire American system of government is based" - Wayne LaPierre

It may be now, but it wasn't always that way.

We used to not be warmongers and bully worshipers.

The small arms treaty is a legal document, and should be read and interpreted as such. "It is intended to. . . " doesn't matter.

What I don't get is why the Obama administration kowtows to the NRA at all. Because even when they do give into every single demand the NRA still comes out saying Obama is trying to take their guns away.

If it were me and I were president I would have the head of the NRA over for dinner then tell him flat out. Either stop attacking me and telling bald faced lies or I will in fact do absolutely everything that I can to slow down gun sales since you are going to say that is what I am doing I may as well do it.

Obama, and his (hand picked?) administration makes me ill sometimes, and this is just yet another example of his (their) capitulation to corporate/lobbyist interests in total disregard of human dignity and decency, not to mention logic and reasoning.

Do not get me wrong, Romney will be far worse. Obama/Democrats are far better than the GOP when it comes to human rights--hands down. But they too fail sometimes to do the correct thing.

Through lies and deceit, PR and propaganda (which are pretty much the same things today), organizations such as the NRA run rough-shod over politicians with the backing of a (very much) deceived right-wing populis. And lots of money.

It is also the GOP ideals of "God, country and freedom" that run rough-shod over it's own constituency, too. And this country as a whole.

Who did not think that "stand your ground" gun-laws would not result in increased deaths by guns?

Who does not see that the U.S. has more civilian gun deaths each year than any other country?

Who does not see that the U.S. is the greatest exporter (besides Israel) of arms and armaments?

Who does not see that the small-arms trade devastates entire countries with, increasingly, children as the worst victims, while the arms industry profits?

Do not get me wrong. People need--have the human right to--defend themselves from aggression. And genocide can happen via machettes as well as via small-arms. But the ultimate answer to death by guns is: no guns means no one dies from guns.

No guns is, of course, impossible, in this world. But, unrestrained, rampant gun/arms sales equals more and more death, more and more profit by death.

But, less guns equals less death by guns. This can not logically be refuted.

--
"I would rather be not understood than mis-understood." Buckminster Fuller.

Me: "Who did not think that "stand your ground" gun-laws would not result in increased deaths by guns?"

Error detected. Let me re-phrase.

Who did not think that "stand your ground" gun-laws would result in increased deaths by guns?"

Then there is this, http://www.tampabay.com/...rials/article1242570.ece

The most recent analysis of more than 100 fatal "stand your ground" cases by Tampa Bay Times staff writers Kameel Stanley and Connie Humburg found that nearly 60 percent of people claiming the self-defense legal protection had been previously arrested, and one in three were accused of a violent crime. All told, 119 people who invoked "stand your ground" after killing someone had been arrested 327 times, not counting traffic violations or other minor arrests.

This is a far cry from the scenario lawmakers envisioned when passing the most expansive self-defense law in the country at the urging of the National Rifle Association.

G-Man @6 wrote:

Who does not see that the U.S. is the greatest exporter (besides Israel) of arms and armaments?

The small arms trade is dominated by the U.S. and Russia --- the same two countries who have now blocked the small arms treaty.

I do not doubt that Israel is an exporter of small arms, but I don't believe their numbers even begin to approach those of the US & Russia.

If you are aware of any articles that reveal otherwise, please furnish a link to the same.

COMMENT #5 Nunyabiz

... the NRA still comes out saying Obama is trying to take their guns away.

The phrase, "take your guns away" is just one part of the propaganda espoused by the NRA and its ill-informed supporters. In this current presidential campaign their target may be Obama, but over the last few decades that phrase, epitomized by the "from my cold, dead hands" refrain, has, basically, always been used to frighten their base.

What better way to rally people together than by scaring them with talk of the other side wanting to "take away from you your rights/property/liberty/happiness"?

The "right to keep and bear arms" is, they tell us, to protect us from the evils of (if only potentIal it may be) our own government, contrary to scholarly evidence that the 2nd Amendment was meant more for protection from outside aggression--it was, after all, written at the end of a revolution against a "far away" tyranny (see the Declaration of Independence).

One can imagine (and I am not directing this comment at you, Nunyabiz, but to all readers) that the authors of the Bill of Rights had no concept of automatic weapons--they did, after all, live in a world of flint and muskets, where soldiers would stand on the battlefield in colorful uniforms, in uniform arrays, and fire directly upon each other, re-load, fire again, and repeat, until those soldiers remaining declared victory.

The Americans very often did not do that. They hid behind rocks and trees as they engaged the British; they were declared "guerillas". The American revolution was the start of "guerilla" warfare and a populous rebelling against the tyranny of "another country's oppression" of its own autonomy.

And we Americans have this deep-seated belief of greatness ("God bless us and God bless America" even Obama always says) created at the point of a gun. This country was established by violent revolution. Whether or not some non-violent resolution was viable seems beside the point, eh?

In American culture, "goodness" is achieved by killing. With guns.

Yeah, I loved the movie "Shane". I admired Audie Murphy. I was emotionally moved by "Sergeant York". But the facts of death by guns in this great country of ours undermines our greatness.

--
"I would rather be not understood than mis-understood." Buckminster Fuller

Ernest @8

Thank you for the elucidation. I may be wrong in the "small arms" vs. general "military exports".

To everybody: Corrections are always welcome.

So how do you explain Switzerland's low murder rate, where EVERY adult male is required to own an assault rifle? Are you just angry because you were drafted and didn't get to bomb Government buildings? I'm being facetious of course, just as you are with this entire article.

According to data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, via Wikipedia, Israel is the TENTH largest exporter of arms.

I am still looking for the reference I thought I saw that stated Israel was the top or second exporter of arms.

I will reiterate: Corrections are mandatory and required of readers! Please, all, never hesitate to add your say to these discussions, especially with regard to "facts".

Thank you.

--
"I would rather be not understood than mis-understood." Buckminster Fuller.

Michael Horn @11 wrote:

So how do you explain Switzerland's low murder rate, where EVERY adult male is required to own an assault rifle?

Aside from the fact that it is not "every" adult Swiss male, but only those between the ages 20 and 30 (34 for officers), Michael Horn, like most subscribers to the NRA Big Lie, chooses to ignore the Second Amendment's "well regulated militia" language.

Switzerland is the embodiment of the true purpose of the 2d Amendment, which was to insure that "well regulated" state militias prevent the threat to state sovereignty posed by a national standing army.

Rather than rely upon a standing army, "the Swiss army has long been a militia trained and structured to rapidly respond against foreign aggression. Swiss males grow up expecting to undergo basic military training, usually at age 20 in the Rekrutenschule (German for "recruit school"), the initial boot camp, after which Swiss men remain part of the 'militia' in reserve capacity until age 30 (age 34 for officers). Each such individual is required to keep his army-issued personal weapon...at home."

But the required possession is strictly for purposes of serving in a well-regulated militia.

Unlike the U.S., where Holmes legally (and privately) obtained and transported assault weapons and ammo, the Swiss cannot pervert their military obligation into acquiring a personal arsenal for their own private uses.

Compare that to the scene in Arizona in 2009 where a dozen private individuals sported loaded weapons when the President appeared during a healthcare debate in Phoenix --- ostensibly to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, though others saw it as an attempt to intimidate those who desired to exercise their first amendment rights.

In Switzerland, those same individuals would have be subject to an immediate arrest.

Get the picture, Michael?

The NRA is currently seeking legislation that will "strip the EPA's authority to regulate toxic lead in ammunition and fishing equipment,even though effective nontoxic alternatives exist..."

It has intervened in a pending environmental lawsuit seeking to block the EPA from protecting wildlife and people from toxic lead hunting ammunition left in the wild.

What do you want? Second amendment rights stomped on? Obviously you shouldn't be the writing articles about gun control, because you dont know anything about the topic other than the statistic and information that Amy Goodman gave you. Obama made the write decision although he may just be delaying his decision until a later time. Ernest Canning YOU ARE A PISS POOR JOURNALIST(CLOSE MINDED SHEEP)

GOD BLESS THE NRA

Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968)

I'm surprised by your credentials.You don't seem very bright or well informed.

While most of Brian's angry, fact-free diatribe is unworthy of a reply, I must say that I found the juxtaposition of his emotional challenge to my credentials @17 with his claim that "Obama made the write decision" (emphasis added) @15 extraordinarily amusing.

Brian, irrespective of whether the President caved to the NRA lies verbally or on paper, it was the "wrong" decision.

Incidentally, since you seem to think that God would bless the terrorist-enabling NRA, perhaps you can cite biblical text in which Jesus can be found carrying a spear or some other 1st Century weapon.

Brian @ 15, lacking a substantive argument, said:

What do you want? Second amendment rights stomped on? ...Obama made the write decision

Because I feel sorry for how much you've embarrassed yourself already, I'll not bother with your substance-free ad hominem attacks on Ernie, and just stick with the above.

How would the UN Arms Trade Treaty have "stomped on" the 2nd Amendment? Or are you just one of the dimwits who the NRA was able to play for a fool?

As I'm betting you were also one of the dimwits who was told to be outraged about guns walking to Mexican Drug Lords via Fast & Furious (while not being informed that the Bush Admin actually started the policy), I'm just curious why you think it's wise to send billions, rather than thousands, of dollars worth of arms to Drug Lords and terrorists and Human Rights abusers across the country, rather than helping to put a stop to that with the UN Arms Trade Treaty?

Why would you want to arm terrorists, even though stopping it would, in no way, have anything to do with the 2nd Amendment rights of U.S. citizens?

Or, are you just stupid and have no idea what you're "righting" about?

Ernest.

My simple careless clerical errors pail in comparison to your mental and journalistic errors.

What does blessing NRA have to do with citing Jesus yielding a weapon in the bible?

"Terrorist-enabling NRA" Cmom,,,, give me a break
Too much Amy Goodman and Alex Jones for you.

And Brad:

The NRA has never played me. I keep them at arms distance. The biggest tool gun advocate have even if I don't always agree with them.

Fast And Furious was a monumental disaster. People lost their lives,and the government got caught. And I knew Bush, a man I despise started the gun walking policies which led to F and F.

If you had any sense or knowledge about why most gun owners and gun advocates feel threaten by this treaty you might not be so blind in being fair minded in your en devours as a journalist.
Its just another chip knock off personal rights and the 2nd Amendment.

If the treaty was signed, and ratified by the Senate,It would trump constitutional law. It would be open for interpretation and change in the future. What seems good to some(A few) Could be a mess later.

Not when you can fill a pale with them.

With all due respect, Brian @20, your illiteracy is intolerable.

Something does not "pail in comparison." A pail is a bucket or a container. Your fact-free comments are "beyond the pale."

Gun owners don't "feel threaten by this treaty." They feel "threatened" by this treaty.

How gun owners "feel" is irrelevant, especially when that "feeling" simply reflects their ignorance about what the treaty stands for.

I see that, despite Brad’s reference to “your substance-free ad hominem attacks,” you have repeated them. But then, I suspect that you neither understand what an ad hominem argument is, nor have the intellectual curiosity to look it up.

It means an appeal to prejudices or emotions rather than to reason, which is precisely what you did when you claimed I made "mental and journalistic errors" without pointing to a single "fact" in which any error was made.

If you had bothered to follow the fact-check link Brad and I furnished in the article, you could have saved yourself the embarrassment of having made an assertion on constitutional law that is flat-out wrong. Specifically, you would have learned from that link of the "well-enshrined legal principle that says no treaty can override the Constitution or U.S. laws."

Your claim that Brad and I are "blind" to the need to be "fair minded" in failing to appreciate why gun advocates "feel" threatened by a treaty that has absolutely nothing to do with domestic possession of firearms in the U.S. reveals that you have spent far too much time watching the "charade of fair and balanced" on Fox "News."

As observed by Bill Moyers, in Moyers on America, he refuses to be taken in by:

Moyers is perhaps this nation's finest journalist. In this article, Brad and I applied those "objective journalism" standards by describing "the object being reported on" --- the President's capitulation on the arms treaty --- "including the malfeasance, deceits, hypocrisy and lies of" John Bolton and the NRA.

The problem, my dear Brian, lies not with our reporting but with the extent to which you've permitted others to so thoroughly deceive you that the truth causes you to lash-out at the messenger.

Brian @ 20 kept digging with:

The NRA has never played me. I keep them at arms distance.
...
If you had any sense or knowledge about why most gun owners and gun advocates feel threaten by this treaty you might not be so blind in being fair minded in your en devours as a journalist.
Its just another chip knock off personal rights and the 2nd Amendment.

If the treaty was signed, and ratified by the Senate,It would trump constitutional law.

I'll be kind enough to ignore the typos, and stick to the fact that while you delight in claiming Ernie (and now me) don't know what we're talking about, and need to improve our journalism, it's clear you are clueless about how Constitutional law and how international treaties work.

If it wasn't the NRA who duped you and "most gun owners and gun advocates" into "feel[ing] threaten[ed] by this treaty", by believing that international treaties trump the Constitution, who was it? Because they played you for stooges.

You may wish to look back about 50 years, and then another 50 before that, at the U.S. Supreme Court rulings that confirm, time and again, that International Treaties do not trump the U.S. Constitution in any way, shape or form.

You can play along with the NRA propaganda and pretend that they do, but you would be flat out wrong and would just be showing all of us what a dupe you've allowed yourself to be played for.

Feel free to do some journalism of your own, and show us where we are wrong. (Don't take a lot of time, though, because you'll be wasting it.)

It would be open for interpretation and change in the future. What seems good to some(A few) Could be a mess later.

Yes, I know, that's what the NRA says (who didn't play you at all), but unfortunately, like your claim about treaties and the Constitution, it's completely untrue.

If you bothered to read either the treaty or the actual facts about the treaty, you would have learned that it says, quite clearly, that each nation's own internal laws take precedence over the treaty (which has only to do with the international trade of arms, and nothing to do with the sale of arms inside each country --- of course, even if it did, which it does not, it would still not trump the 2nd Amendment, as long ago established by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

I suspect, however, it doesn't take much to make "most gun owners and gun advocates feel threaten[ed]" about anything. In fact, the NRA and the arms industry counts on them feeling threatened. It's their business model.

So if the NRA didn't play you for a chump, who did? Or are you willing to claim your chumpness all own your own?

I'm glad my grammatical errors give you some amusement. I can get amusement from the fact that I realized that know one reads your blog anyway. I guess I wasted my time.

I threw in the "KNOW

As our Brian rambles on about how unfair it was for Brad and I to classify the NRA as a "terrorist enabling" organization, another six people were gunned down today in an Oak Creek, WI Sikh temple.

Although the police have not, as yet, revealed what weapons were used, they did classify the incident as "domestic terrorism."

But hey, what weight can we assign to the right of innocent people to go on breathing compared with the NRA-supported right to have unlimited access to assault weapons and ammo?

The NRA “leadership” are the bought and paid for toadies of the firearms industry. It's in the industry's interest to sell as many guns with a minimum of hassle or delay. If a buyer wants to buy 10 military grade automatic weapons and then sell them at a profit to some guy he doesn't know or want to know he (or she) can do so legally in many jurisdictions. The “narco tunnels” are two way streets - drugs go north and guns go south.
The licensed gun dealers or unlicensed gun shows that sell assault type weapons by the 6 pack aren't contained in any way by the “regulations” nor is much attention given to the guy that buys 10 or20 guns a month. And, you can bet , the industry has no concerns or curiosity about the huge quantity of guns being purchased by some dealers.

It is not the President. It's called election time and crazy Americans.

Earlier, G-MAN said:

"But, less guns equals less death by guns. This can not logically be refuted."

Funny, there's an entire book, now in its third edition, called "More Guns, Less Crime" by John Lott, that purports to do exactly that.

It's hotly debated for various reasons, the main one being that many different factors affect the crime and violence rates, not just gun accessibility. But it's worth looking up to have in your intellectual armamentarium.

(And if you're talking logic, less salt doesn't mean less high blood pressure, and so with any number of other correllations. Things are more complex than that.)

So, Luagha, how do you square your more guns, less crime theory with statistics showing that homicides in the U.S. are, per capita, 40 times greater than they are in the UK where weapons are tightly regulated?

Also, Luagha, you might want to peruse the Stanford Law Review article, Shooting Down the "More Guns, Less Crime" Hypothesis [PDF] by Ian Ayers & John Donohue, That scholarly work demolishes the academic basis for Lott's book.

Slate offered a less scholarly but even more severely critical piece which basically accused Lott of making up statistics from whole cloth.

But, of course, it comes as no surprise that Lott is the NRA's favored "academic" --- just like Dr. Richard Muller was at one time Koch Industries favored "academic" on climate science denial.

To correct G-Man from previously: "The Americans very often did not do that. They hid behind rocks and trees as they engaged the British; they were declared "guerillas"."

Whether or not the British called the Americans guerillas it is well documented that the Americans took great care to wear uniforms and when they could not they wore a strip of white cloth tied about an arm to designate themselves as lawful combatants. We know this both from eyewitness reports as well as records of the occasional soldier being punished for failing to do this.

For Ernest A. Canning: I'm looking, and my numbers don't say that homicide rates in the US are 40x those in Britain per capita. Not total homicide rates, not just firearm-based homicide rates. It kind of doesn't pass the smell test. My numbers say that they are certainly higher in the US, but not twice as high, and Britain is rapidly gaining on us. Of course, always remember that statistics are taken differently in other countries and what may be classified as a homicide here may not be classified as a homicide there.

If you read my earlier statement, I am not staking my life on John Lott's results, merely stating that there do exist logical refutations of the 'less guns MUST MEAN less gun crime' idea. And as I mention, and John Lott, and Ayers and Donohue and Gary Kleck all get into - many things affect the crime rate in a particular area.

Culture, population density, education level, current events, the recentness of a publicized execution, criminal enforcement, drug prevalence and more. The problem is how to figure out what effect heavy gun control has versus heavy gun freedom has, and it's not an easy problem at all.

For example, many heavy gun freedom policies were enacted just as the crack cocaine epidemic was winding down. Surprise surprise, the crime rate went way down at that time and with it the homicide rate. But we can't separate out the effect of the end of the crack epidemic with the gun freedom.

All we can say is that the gun freedom, in those states, did not have a deleterious effect greater than the decline likely caused by the ending of the crack epidemic.

Freakonomics is a great book too.

Luaga @32 wrote:

For Ernest A. Canning: I'm looking, and my numbers don't say that homicide rates in the US are 40x those in Britain per capita. Not total homicide rates, not just firearm-based homicide rates. It kind of doesn't pass the smell test

You didn't look very hard: Try Wikipedia:

Excellent. So following the link and looking further, I see that this statistic comes from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. In and of itself that might be enough to discredit it, but let's look deeper.

Going to the gun crime, homicide page we discover that the methodology of the UNODC study is simply to send a questionnaire to the government in question and accept whatever is received. The UNODC website for the study specifically states that the study makes no attempt to account for the different definitions of homicide and the different methods of tallying used in each country and so it cannot be used to compare different countries or even compare between years of the same country and these methods change even within countries.

So you are using a study that specifically states it cannot be used to compare different countries to compare different countries.