Today's Columns on Guns

Amy Barnhorst in the New York Times: "The Mental Health System Can't Stop Mass Shooters"

Saul Cornell in The Conversation: "Five Types of Gun Laws the Founding Fathers Loved"

Steven Lubet in the Chicago Tribune: "What Liberals Miss about the Second Amendment"

Comments

[Anthony Gaughan]

Great op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, Steve. I never thought about the issue that way before.

[Enrique Guerra Pujol]

I loved Lubet’s piece too. I would retitle it “the symmetry of constitutional politics”.

[Steve L.]

Thanks, Tony and Enrique. Alas, I don't get to write the headlines for the Trib.

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

Professor Lubet hits it on the head. I would extend his argument to abortion, same sex marriage and all the other pelvis issues Conservatives jump up and down about. Even though I despise labels, aren't Liberals making the same arguments here? Why do we need the Second Amendment? Conservatives will tell you it reflects a fundamental right to be free from government tyranny. What right does the government have to put its hands on a woman's vagina? Isn't that tyranny?

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

Upon further reflection, the collateral consequences or risks associated with enforcement of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments compared to the Second Amendment is not an adequate or equivalent proposition.

In today's criminal justice world, the only time evidence gets "suppressed" is when some mope traveling in a 2003 Grand Prix on I-80 through Joliet gets 2 Grams of Rocks tossed. Hardly a threat to public safety. It is as rare as Vibranium when a judge suppresses the confession of an axe murderer. Judges know there are no political consequences if they let a mope go. But hell will be paid if they let a murderer go on a "technicality."