Thursday, June 26, 2008

Bang, Bang, Shoot, Shoot

I’m actually kind of relieved that the Supreme Court ruled the way it did on the D.C. gun ban.
If the decision had gone the other way, it would surely have thrown every rightwing gun nut into a state of hysteria and would probably have devolved into a huge, ugly issue during the fall campaign.
Instead, guns will probably become a non-issue in the campaign now that the court has basically affirmed what most people already accepted - that the 2nd Amendment gives people the right to own a gun.
That has never been an issue with me. Instead, it has been about how far out of whack some extremists try to push that “right” to the point where we have people walking the streets with sub-machine guns and cop-killer bullets.
I don’t know anything about the D.C. crime situation, but I doubt that the gun ban was very effective in reducing crime and I don’t think that the court’s decision today will make much of a difference in that respect one way or another. Rather, it will take some of the pressure off of gun control advocates who never wanted a complete ban in the first place, and it takes some of the steam out of the extremist faction of the NRA which has used the specter of the government taking people’s guns away to fool them into voting against their social and economic interests.

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