The Folly of the Gun Ban

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HOMICIDE & OTHER VIOLENT CRIMES

554 U.S. 570 (2008) wherein it was held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm, unconnected to service in a militia and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. This individual fundamental right was reaffirmed in Otis McDonald, et al., Petitioners v. City of Chicago, Illinois, et al., Supreme Court of the United States, No. 08-1521, June 28, 2010 where it was held that “…it is clear the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.”

Gun-Control Laws & Regulations: The Indications of Anecdotal Evidence Notwithstanding the fact that the right to keep and bear arms is a natural and/or fundamental existential right, evidently the same does not entitle everyone to keep and bear or carry arms. As pointed out earlier on, the criminal (the convict) or the mentally ill or the child should not be allowed to own, let alone possess or carry arms. Equivalently, all the others—adults who are neither criminals nor mentally and/or emotionally defective—are, on ground of this basic natural right, entitled to keep and bear arms. However, various jurisdictions, while not infringing the same, have instituted a slew of gun control laws and/or regulations with varying strictness. Offhand, it can be said that there is a lot of emotionality and/or kneejerk reactions involved in the enactment of such laws/regulations—especially on the part of some citizens who are voluble and vociferous and who are by nature averse to arms, especially explosives and firearms. Their main thesis, viewed from a psychological perspective, is that placing the same beyond the reach and hands of the civilian population significantly decreases the individual’s tendency to use the same in a conflict situation and/or in a bloody or even


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