Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

New York lawmakers: check people’s past social media posts before gun purchases

I write at Cato about this appalling proposal. “The only way to make this proposal better – by which I mean worse – would be to arrange for New York to quarter troops on the homes of applicants with especially bad social media postings. That way the sponsors could achieve a straight flush of Bill of Rights violations.”

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3 Comments

  • The problem for Democrat-statists is that we live in a society where people have rights, and those rights interfere with their goal of imposing their policy choices. Obviously, we can make the moral judgment that Klansmen should not have access to firearms. But how do you square that with the First Amendment? Would it extend to Communists? Black separatists? Once government gets to pick and choose who has rights (based on amorphous standards), the potential for mischief is great. Take one look at the Colorado baker—government, not to put to fine a point on it, engaged in tyranny. Yeah, it was soft tyranny, but tyranny nonetheless.

    I’d rather live in a society where the rights of kooks and evil people are respected. Where they are not, the government will not stop at the kooks and evil people (even assuming we could perfectly identify those people).

    • By SPO

  • SPO, you hater.

    Why do you support the Klan? Don’t you know that these folks, Mr Adams and Mr Palmer, just INTEND for the right thing to happen, and that is good enough? Here you go wanting to put guns in the hands of bigoted, white nationalists. Why do you hate everyone so much?

    /wakes up/

    Oh, wait, sorry for that….I was in a nightmare where I could only “discuss” matters like the hard core lefites.

    OK there Mr. Adams and Mr. Palmer, so, what do you have to say when, not if, but when, your worst nightmare, say an orange hair from NY, gets into the Governorship there and uses the power you propose against your side or your favored groups?

    [speak it like the soup nazi]
    Support BLM? No Gun For YOU!
    Support the democrat party? No Gun For YOU!
    Antifa? No Gun For YOU!
    Anti-nuclear protestor? No Gun For YOU!

    Yeah….if I wouldn’t trust my worst nightmare with the power, I won’t trust my best friend with it either.