According to Firearm Chronicles
Gun rights are a fundamental part of the American experience. The Bill of Rights protects some very specific rights for Americans, rights that shouldn’t need protection but clearly do. After all, they’re trampled on in every other nation on Earth.
One of those rights is expressed in the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, our right to own arms–regardless of what form they might take–is protected as being essential to our nation’s security.
Yet anti-gunners continually reject that.
Today, we have a writer over at The New Republic trying to blame police excesses and brutality on the Second Amendment.
Law enforcement has been infected by America’s gun culture, as Derek Thompson has recently argued in The Atlantic. “[C]elebrating widespread gun ownership,” he writes, “makes it all but inevitable that the United States has more armed police than similarly rich countries, more panicky officers, more adversarial police encounters, more officer shootings, and more civilian killings.” Underscoring this domestic arms race, a larger philosophical issue looms: Police have adopted the same fundamental societal outlook as gun rights advocates: Arms are synonymous with law and order. Whatever process of public safety reform may await the United States, a radical reform of gun culture must be part of the conversation.
Consider how our gun culture makes American society needlessly treacherous, for police and citizens alike. The U.S. lacks the most basic of firearms regulations: universal background checks on all gun purchases and transfers. In the absence of such constraints, gun rights advocates have promoted laws enabling armed citizens to carry their guns in public—and, in many states, shielding them from criminal and civil liabilities for causing damage to people and property.
Oh, that last paragraph is a mouthful, ain’t it? What a blatant misrepresentation.
Those laws simply bar people from being sued for the lawful use of a weapon, particularly in self-defense. What it means is that if I am forced to shoot someone to protect my life, neither he nor his family can file a lawsuit against me for having shot him in self-defense. There’s no state in the nation that prevents people from being sued for damages resulting from an unlawful shooting.
Yet the writer doesn’t frame it that way. He doesn’t see it that way.