“…Insofar as the Framers focused at all on the tiny fraction of the population living in large cities, they would have been aware that these city dwellers were subject to firearm restrictions that their rural counterparts were not. They are unlikely then to have thought of a right to keep loaded handguns in homes to confront intruders in urban settings as central. And the subsequent development of modern urban police departments, by diminishing the need to keep loaded guns nearby in case of intruders, would have moved any such right even further away from the heart of the amendment’s more basic protective ends…”
—-Justice Breyer, dissenting in the 2008 landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that the Second Amendment indeed protected as an enumerated right an individual’s right t”o possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”
Brava to Ann Althouse, who recalled the passage above while discussing still more of the increasingly infuriating fact now emerging about the failure, incompetence and cowardice of the Uvalde, Texas police when a homicidal maniac began shooting kids in the Robb Elementary School.
I wrote, before seeing this, “The argument that citizens shouldn’t have access to guns isn’t supported by the alleged conduct by the police in this tragedy. In fact, the opposite is the case. If police won’t take risks to save endangered children and use their weapons, then citizens must have the tools to do the job the police won’t.”
Ann wrote, in response to the Times report that “when specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the elementary school…the local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman…according to two officials briefed on the situation.”:
If the police don’t arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.
Children were calling for help, shots were being fired, kids were dying, and the Uvalde police were waiting for…something.
- “Police admitted to a stunning string of failures — including driving right by the gunman — in responding to the Texas school shooting while children were being massacred inside, with the head of the state’s Department of Public Safety saying the time for making excuses about the botched response was over.”
Waiting to confront the shooter for nearly an hour was, NBC reports authorities as admitting, “the wrong decision.”
YA THINK????
It would be profoundly ironic if this horrific tragedy immediately seized upon by anti-gun zealots as exemplifying the need to remove individual gun rights emerged as a persuasive example of why they must be protected.