- After Gov. Martin O’Malley signs one of nation’s most restrictive gun laws, Beretta says it intends to move out of state [Guns.com]
- Unfortunately, high cigarette taxes promote this sort of thing: “Ocean City cigarette smuggling ring had ties to terror groups, police say” [Baltimore Sun, Tax Foundation]
- Responding to critics (such as), legislature caps the vessel excise tax in hopes of reviving ailing boating industry [Annapolis Gazette]
- New law backed by O’Malley will require educators to pay dues to teachers’ union whether members or not [Trey Kovacs, Open Market and Workplace Choice; Harford County Dagger]
- State has among nation’s highest per capita medical malpractice outlays, behind only five Northeastern states (NY, PA, NJ, MA, CT) and D.C. [Diederich analysis of annual payouts via TortsProf]
- Chronicle of Rogues: Maryland gets a D minus, ranking a dismal 40th among the 50 states, on corruption-rating State Integrity Report Card [Center for Public Integrity via Tom Coale]
- It’ll be held in D.C. this year rather than Annapolis, but that’s no reason you shouldn’t join us for the acclaimed Cato University [Jul. 28-Aug. 2]
- Politicos scramble to defend “correctional officers’ bill of rights” after FBI affidavit blasts measure for helping entrench corruption at Baltimore jail [AP, earlier]
Tagged as:
guns,
Maryland,
taxes,
tobacco
- “Victory For Blogger Patterico In Free Speech Case” [Ken at Popehat, earlier]
- “Watch ‘disparate impact’ become the new HUD jihad if it succeeds in [Westchester]” [Jackson Jambalaya, earlier]
- “Big Tobacco uses Big Government to keep out Small Competitors” [Tim Carney, DC Examiner]
- Casinos or no, Connecticut tribes want the federal dole [AP]
- High cost of litigation to California municipalities [L.A. Daily News, new CALA report in PDF] “San Francisco’s iconic cable cars cost city millions of dollars in legal settlements” [AP]
- Morning sickness drug Bendectin, famed casualty of unfounded litigation, returns to market renamed diclegis [MedPageToday, David Bernstein; background here, etc.; classic account from Peter W. Huber's Galileo's Revenge] Another Bendectin sequel: Barry Nace, former ATLA/AAJ head, draws 120-day suspension from West Virginia high court [Chamber-backed WV Record]
- “Tennessee’s ‘guns in parking lots’ bill a net drain on liberty [George Scoville; similarly Bainbridge and earlier] Another pro-gun but anti-liberty idea: Colorado lawmaker wants to force firms to hire guards if they deny armed customers access to their premises [KOAA, SecurityInfoWatch, Durango Herald (idea nixed in committee)]
Tagged as:
California,
Colorado,
competition through regulation,
Connecticut,
guns,
Indian tribes,
taxpayers,
tobacco
- “Who killed gun control?” [David Boaz] Democratic senators from rural states are in touch with public opinion back home. Is that actually sinister? [Jennifer Rubin]
- Failed bill applied tough regulations to gun “transfers,” not just sales, and the difference was often not well explained in the press [Kopel via Lynch] The un-empirical debate [Sowell via Lynch]
- We’re informed the late Margaret Thatcher was “divisive” in tone. What are we to think of Pres. Obama’s tone on gun bills? [Jacob Sullum; similarly]
- Hometown paper: “As lead sponsor in House on gun legislation, Rep. Diana DeGette appears to not understand how they work” [Denver Post, followup in which DeGette digs in deeper]
- Argument that making insurance obligatory for gun owners would generate insurer records documenting who owns guns, to which government might in due course demand access [Tom Blumer; related, Alex Pappas/Daily Caller; earlier here, here, here]
- Bloomberg’s armed Bermuda bodyguards draw critics’ fire again [Cheryl Chumley, Washington Times; earlier]
- “Connecticut’s Gun Control: A Rush To Pass Laws That Couldn’t Have Prevented Tragedy” [Tuccille, Sullum]
Tagged as:
Barack Obama,
Connecticut,
guns
- Appalling: pursuing the logic of equality arguments, prominent constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky has proposed abolishing private/religious/home K-12 schooling [Eugene Volokh, Rick Garnett, Marc DeGirolami]
- How wrong is the NRA on school security? So wrong that even Marian Wright Edelman makes more sense [Gene Healy]
- Schools, marriage, and self-replicating elites: Ross Douthat tells some secrets of the NYT-reading class [NYT]
- Critics flay Connecticut bill to require school mental health checkups of children [Raising Hale]
- “How the Anti-Bully Movement is Hurting Kids: An Interview with Bully Nation’s Susan Porter” [Tracy Oppenheimer, Reason]
- Montgomery County, Maryland pols concerned some public schools might become unfairly good [DC Examiner] Also in Maryland, there’s a push to emulate a truly bad New Jersey idea by shifting the burden of proof onto schools in special education disputes [WaPo]
- Telephone frustration in New Haven: “How public schools drive us away…” [Mark Oppenheimer]
Tagged as:
bullying,
Connecticut,
disability & schools,
Erwin Chemerinsky,
guns,
Maryland,
New Jersey,
psychiatry,
schools
- Defeat of proposed assault-weapons ban is setback for demagogy [Taranto] “If You Don’t Support an ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban, You Hate Children and Want Them to Die” [Jacob Sullum on New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica]
- New York snitchline offers $500 rewards for turning in neighbor in possession of unlicensed gun [USA Today] “Andrew Cuomo Realizes He Mandated Gun Magazines That Don’t Exist” [Sullum]
- “Colorado’s New Gun Controls Promise Dubious Public Safety Benefits and Lurking Legal Perils” [Sullum] Democratic sponsor “didn’t realize that her bill would outlaw practically every magazine currently for sale in the state” [Daily Caller] In empty gesture, inevitably to be pre-empted by PLCAA, some Colorado Dems sought to legislate liability for “assault weapon” owners, sellers and makers for crime [Denver Post, Daily Caller]
- Maryland state senator J.B. Jennings introduces bill restraining school discipline of students who simulate “guns” by way of pointing fingers, nibbling breakfast pastries into shapes, etc. [Easton Star-Democrat, Joanne Jacobs, earlier]
- “Survey: Federally licensed firearms retailers overwhelmingly oppose ‘Universal Background Checks’” [Daily Caller]
- “Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak?” [Maggie Koerth-Baker, BoingBoing]
- Hope springs eternal on legal mandates for personalized guns, though even the Violence Policy Center doesn’t think much of the idea [San Francisco Chronicle]
Tagged as:
Andrew Cuomo,
Colorado,
guns,
Maryland,
schools
“Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Gambling, and Guns: The Synergistic Constitutional Effects” [David Kopel (Independence Institute/Denver U.) and Trevor Burrus (Cato), Albany Government Law Review/SSRN]
Tagged as:
guns
I’ve got a guest column up at the widely read PowerLine blog, my first there, countering misleading criticisms of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in the Washington Post and elsewhere. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is trying to rally efforts to gut or repeal PLCAA in line with the critics’ charges, but his efforts have picked up little traction thus far.
P.S. Thanks to Eugene Volokh for the link and kind words (“I generally quite agree with it, except that the title (‘six myths about the law that bans gun lawsuits’ is imprecise — the law bans many lawsuits against gun manufacturers and dealers, but by no means all,” citing the law’s sec. 4(5)(A).)
Tagged as:
guns,
tort reform
- Report: White House at pains to hush anti-gun groups from voicing their more extreme ideas [Washington Times]
- If we were really serious about reducing gun violence… [Steve Chapman] Futility of gun buyback programs [Trevor Burrus podcast, Cato]
- Lawyer hit with $20,000 sanction after federal judge says he didn’t adequately vet client’s dubious gun-malfunction case [Legal Intelligencer/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
- No one’s talking about gun confiscation, right? Right? [Gateway Pundit, Christopher Fountain, more]
- D.C. councilmember sponsors bill requiring gun owners to buy $250K liability insurance [WaPo, earlier] Discussion of mandatory liability insurance for gun owners with Jacob Sullum, Don Taylor of Duke, and Michael Barry of the Insurance Information Institute [Reason/HuffPost]
- “Obama’s gun agenda is at least as much about provoking Republicans to say and do things to alienate women voters as it is about passing laws.” [@davidfrum]
- “The Second Amendment Protects Both Keeping and Bearing Arms” [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
Tagged as:
guns,
Washington D.C.
What could be more perfect than the tale of the Maryland 7 year old suspended from school for nibbling his breakfast pastry into the form of a gun? This: the school is now offering counseling to any students traumatized by the incident. [Lowering the Bar]
Tagged as:
guns,
Maryland,
schools
“Liability insurance” may be a misnomer, since some of the proposals would require the purchase of bonds against both intentional acts commonly excluded from ordinary liability coverage, and also misadventures for which owners would not presently be held legally responsible (such as third party criminal use of a gun following a theft not occasioned by owner negligence.) [Reuters, Nelson Lund/GMU, Jessica Chasmar/Washington Times, New York Times via Fed Soc, Taranto/WSJ, Josh Blackman]
Would a mandatory insurance scheme survive judicial scrutiny if it were motivated by a desire to burden the exercise of a constitutional right? David Rifkin and Andrew Grossman, WSJ:
Several states… are considering gun-insurance mandates modeled after those for automobile insurance. There is no conceivable public-safety benefit: Insurance policies cover accidents, not intentional crimes, and criminals with illegal guns will just evade the requirement. The real purpose is to make guns less affordable for law-abiding citizens and thereby reduce private gun ownership. Identical constitutionally suspect logic explains proposals to tax the sale of bullets at excessive rates.
The courts, however, are no more likely to allow government to undermine the Second Amendment than to undermine the First. A state cannot circumvent the right to a free press by requiring that an unfriendly newspaper carry millions in libel insurance or pay a thousand-dollar tax on barrels of ink—the real motive, in either case, would be transparent and the regulation struck down. How could the result be any different for the right to keep and bear arms?
(& slightly expanded/adapted version at Cato; The Hill “Blog Briefing Room”)
P.S. The American Insurance Association is opposed to the more ambitious versions of the idea, at least: “Property and casualty insurance does not and cannot cover gun crimes.”
Tagged as:
constitutional law,
guns,
insurance
- Federal taxpayers via National Cancer Institute grant dished out more than a million dollars to pay for laughable conspiracy-theory report smearing Tea Party [Hans Bader, more, Jacob Sullum on report from Stanton Glantz, whom we've often met before] “Rather than [being] a spontaneous popular phenomenon, opposition to the tea parties was nurtured by the government.” [@RameshPonnuru]
- Ken on why the relentless overuse of the epithet “bullying” gets on his (and my) nerves [Popehat; Clark at Popehat on New York police chiefs who feel bullied because someone won't sell them guns]
- On immigration, advocates of liberty can’t afford to ignore the future-polity angle [Eugene Volokh; Ilya Somin with a response]
- More on that wretched State of the Union retread, the Paycheck Fairness Act [Hans Bader, Ted Frank, 2009 DoL study, earlier here, here, here, here, here, etc.] Other dud SOTU ideas: federally paid universal preschool [Andrew Coulson, related, more, related on minority kids' results, yet more, Neal McCluskey on public infant care, Tyler Cowen] minimum wage hike [Chris Edwards, Veronique de Rugy]
- Woman sues fitness club over “sexually suggestive” exercises [CBS Dallas]
- Silent witness: undeveloped state of law, police, insurance contribute to widespread Russian use of dashboard cams [WaPo]
- Would-be assassin came dressed as postman: Danish free-speech advocate Lars Hedegaard interviewed [Spectator]
Tagged as:
bullying,
Denmark,
guns,
immigration law,
Russia,
traffic laws
From Cato Institute chairman Robert Levy, who was co-counsel in the landmark D.C. v. Heller case. [National Law Journal] More: Trevor Burrus, The Blaze. And the New York Times takes up the topic of guns and suicide, but with some pretty big omissions [Tom Maguire, Ira Stoll/SmarterTimes]
Further: “Senate Judiciary Committee Hears from Cato on Gun Policy” [Ilya Shapiro, citing contributions by David Kopel, Randy Barnett, etc.] And while Bing’s real-time reaction tracker isn’t a scientific voter survey (though the sample size is large, and there’s a partisan breakdown) it seems I was not alone in being put off by President Obama’s demagogic “they deserve a vote” State of the Union wind-up on gun control. [Mediaite]
Tagged as:
Barack Obama,
Cato Institute,
constitutional law,
guns,
psychiatry,
suicide
- Disabled kids and their parents among chief losers in NYC school bus strike [Richard Epstein]
- “School District to Spend $2.4 MILLION on Guards? A Mom Protests” [Free-Range Kids, N.C.] “Our Schools Are Safe Enough: A Movement to Stop Overreacting to Sandy Hook” [same] Shame that NRA would decide to push big government mandate at taxpayer expense [Brian Doherty]
- LSAC challenges new California law banning flagging applicants’ extra time on LSAT [Karen Sloan, NLJ]
- One year on job, 13 years in rubber room for NYC teacher accused of sexually harassing students [NY Post]
- Missouri lawmaker introduces bill criminalizing failure to report gun ownership to child’s school [Caroline May, Daily Caller]
- Suing for edu-bucks: “Court says Kansas must increase school funding, slams tax cuts” [Reuters, Severino/NRO]
- “Yay for Recess: Pediatricians Say It’s as Important as Math or Reading” [Bonnie Rochman, Time]
Tagged as:
guns,
Kansas,
labor unions,
NYC,
schools
“The agenda includes mostly measures that will have little or no effect on the problems they are supposed to address. They are Potemkin remedies—presentable facades with empty space behind them. … The assault weapons ban was irrelevant to fighting crime before, which is no reason it can’t be irrelevant again.” [Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune/syndicated] The Washington Post interviews Bob Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute and a key mover of the Heller v. D.C. individual-rights litigation, on what types of gun controls he sees as consistent with the Second Amendment as explicated in Heller. And don’t assume the gun debate breaks down along lines of urban vs. rural, liberal vs. conservative, or individualist vs. communitarian; it often doesn’t [David Kopel, NYT "Room for Debate"]
More from Cato: Tim Lynch on what happened to gun crime in D.C. after Heller, and on the civil rights history of “Deacons for Defense”; Trevor Burrus on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s move to toughen the state’s already widely evaded gun laws; video with Tim Lynch and Caleb Brown on the Obama gun agenda. And from Damon Root, commenting on an Akhil Amar article, some surprising (and at times Cato-mediated) connections between gun rights and gay rights [Reason]
Tagged as:
guns
