The_Shootist
Member
Just curious...
....but where did Sotomoyer ,Breyer etc get this stat about Chicago's gun ban saving "hundreds of lives". I mean, I thought SC decisions were high octane enough to prohibit throw away nonsense like that - unless backed by reasonable facts.
The fact that they tossed that in to an opinion (if unsupported) makes them at best look like idiots, at worst the usual caricature of some left wing judicial toady .
By the way - how hard it it to impeach/remove a SC justice?
Quote:
The dissenters drew different conclusions from the historical evidence.
“The reasons that motivated the framers to protect the ability of militiamen to keep muskets available for military use when our nation was in its infancy, or that motivated the Reconstruction Congress to extend full citizenship to freedmen in the wake of the Civil War, have only a limited bearing on the question that confronts the homeowner in a crime-infested metropolis today,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his last dissent before retiring from the court.
He said the court should have proceeded more cautiously in light of “the malleability and elusiveness of history” and because “firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty.”
“Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders,” he wrote, “they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims. The threat that firearms will be misused is far from hypothetical, for gun crimes have devastated many of our communities.”
In a dissent joined by Justice Ginsburg and Sotomayor, Justice Breyer said history did not provide clear answers and that the empirical evidence about the consequences of gun control laws are mixed. But there was evidence, he said, that firearms caused 60,000 deaths and injuries in the United States each year and that Chicago’s handgun ban has saved many hundreds of lives since it was enacted in 1983.
All of that, Justice Breyer wrote, counseled in favor of deference to local elected officials in deciding how to regulate guns.
....but where did Sotomoyer ,Breyer etc get this stat about Chicago's gun ban saving "hundreds of lives". I mean, I thought SC decisions were high octane enough to prohibit throw away nonsense like that - unless backed by reasonable facts.
The fact that they tossed that in to an opinion (if unsupported) makes them at best look like idiots, at worst the usual caricature of some left wing judicial toady .
By the way - how hard it it to impeach/remove a SC justice?
Quote:
The dissenters drew different conclusions from the historical evidence.
“The reasons that motivated the framers to protect the ability of militiamen to keep muskets available for military use when our nation was in its infancy, or that motivated the Reconstruction Congress to extend full citizenship to freedmen in the wake of the Civil War, have only a limited bearing on the question that confronts the homeowner in a crime-infested metropolis today,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his last dissent before retiring from the court.
He said the court should have proceeded more cautiously in light of “the malleability and elusiveness of history” and because “firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty.”
“Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders,” he wrote, “they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims. The threat that firearms will be misused is far from hypothetical, for gun crimes have devastated many of our communities.”
In a dissent joined by Justice Ginsburg and Sotomayor, Justice Breyer said history did not provide clear answers and that the empirical evidence about the consequences of gun control laws are mixed. But there was evidence, he said, that firearms caused 60,000 deaths and injuries in the United States each year and that Chicago’s handgun ban has saved many hundreds of lives since it was enacted in 1983.
All of that, Justice Breyer wrote, counseled in favor of deference to local elected officials in deciding how to regulate guns.
