So many power grabs now get packed into an international human rights mold: here come claims that IHR requires laws aimed at restricting private access to guns in the U.S. [Leila Nadya Sadat and Madaline George on Harris Institute initiative at Washington U. Law; Patricia Illingworth; Jeremiah Ho] I wrote about the proliferation of international human rights claims in my 2011 book Schools for Misrule, and this site has previously covered efforts to invoke international human rights law against such practices as cultural appropriation, financial privacy and national fiscal austerity, gender-stereotypical speech, liberalization of labor markets, making city dwellers pay for water, failure to return land to long-displaced Indian tribes, disconnecting people from Internet service, lack of hate speech laws (and more and also see), non-recognition of a right to health care, Stand Your Ground rules on self-defense, videogames about war and depiction of rights violations in popular entertainment, evicting homeless encampments, “atrocity speech,” lack of affordable-housing programs, factory livestock farming, and foundling baby boxes. On the gun angle, see also the controversy over the small arms treaty.
Posts Tagged ‘guns’
Banking and finance roundup
- Using regulation to stomp political adversaries endangers rule of law: Gov. Cuomo directs New York financial regulators to pressure banks, insurers to break ties with National Rifle Association (NRA) [J.D. Tuccille, Reason]
- My opinion piece on New Jersey governor’s scheme for a state bank has now escaped its WSJ paywall; WSJ readers respond [letters] And Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand [D-N.Y.] has now introduced a plan to get the federal government into retail banking via the post office [Daniel Marans, Huffington Post, quoting Gillibrand’s interesting claim that “Literally the only person who is going to be against this is somebody who wants to protect payday lender profits.”] More: Nick Zaiac on postal banking;
- “From Kelo to Starr: Not Merely an Unlawful Taking but an Illegal Exaction” [Philip Hamburger on federal government’s acquisition of a dominant equity stake in AIG]
- Court’s opinion on consumer debt contract formed in New York specifying Delaware law undermines “valid-when-made” doctrine that promotes liquidity of secondary debt market [Diego Zuluaga, Cato]
- “Some blockchains, as currently designed, are incompatible with” the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation [Olga Kharif, Bloomberg via Tyler Cowen]
- And if you’re interested in the legal constraints holding back the extension of banking services to the cannabis industry, tune in to a Cato conference on that subject May 10.
The gun research ban that wasn’t
From a new Trevor Burrus article on which policy ideas might significantly reduce firearms death rates, and which almost certainly won’t:
Allow the CDC to make recommendations for gun reform: First of all, the CDC is not “banned” from studying gun violence. Here is a 110 page CDC study on gun violence from 2013. The CDC is banned from advocating or promoting gun control, which makes sense because such advocacy is not science. Advocacy from the CDC is problematic, such as when it advocates state-controlled liquor sales, and the imprimatur of the CDC can confuse as well as illuminate.
David Harsanyi has more on the supposed research ban that wasn’t. And Ilya Shapiro responds to former Justice John Paul Stevens’s proposal that the Second Amendment be repealed. [Washington Examiner]
New Yorker on Stand Your Ground
A big piece by Mike Spies in the New Yorker on the history of Florida as a battlefield on gun issues asserts that 1) Florida enacted the nation’s first Stand Your Ground law in the early 2000s, and broadly hints that 2) the law resulted in a jury’s 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin.
Is that so? Though both points are often claimed, as we’ve pointed out in the past, neither stands up to scrutiny. As Peter Jamison of the Tampa Bay Times noted in this 2014 piece, the “truth is that Florida did not pioneer the controversial rules” abolishing duty-to-retreat in favor of Stand Your Ground; many states had long since done so through case law development. Much more on the legal background in Ilya Shapiro’s 2013 Senate testimony, which points, for example, to a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1895. (Florida’s statute did introduce new procedural protections at the charge stage for defendants, which is a different matter.)
Meanwhile, Zimmerman’s acquittal came after his lawyers advanced a conventional self-defense theory as opposed to one rooted in Stand Your Ground.
The magazine’s celebrated fact-checking system does not seem to have functioned well in this case.
“Tread Carefully on Mental-Health Reform”
Compulsory civil commitment under a lighter burden of proof, or with less advance process? Government lists of those who have sought help with mental health problems? “Conservatives who are understandably concerned about the potential slippery slope of gun control [should] recognize a similar slickness when it comes to mental illness.” [Mike Tanner, National Review/Cato]
Baltimore will sponsor student anti-gun protests
Taxpayers will shell out $100,000 so the city of Baltimore can bus public school students to an anti-gun rally. And that’s only the start of what’s wrong here, I write in a new Cato post. “A protest outing that is ardently enabled or even meticulously organized by the authority figures in your life can be like the ninth-grade English course that ruins Macbeth or Moby Dick for you.” I quote Lynda C. Lambert in the Baltimore Sun: “Part of protesting is finding your own way, for your own reasons….. Government sponsorship is destructive to these ends.”
My parting shot: “As for the separate question of whether compulsory attendance and truancy laws should be enforced against students for skipping school in a favored cause, I’ll see and raise: don’t enforce those laws against anyone period.”
Great moments in public accommodations law
Gabriel Malor summarizing this Eugene Volokh post: “An age discrimination suit against Dick’s for refusing to sell long guns to individuals between age 18 and 21 looks like a winner in Oregon, where it is lawful for an 18 year-old to purchase one and which has heavy-handed public accommodation laws.”
“State police must rehire trooper who isn’t allowed to carry a gun”
“The Pennsylvania State Police must reinstate a trooper who is barred from having a gun because a female officer secured a protection from abuse order against him, a state appeals court has ruled.” One judge dissented, “arguing that Acord’s firing was justified since, without a gun, ‘he cannot perform the basic and essential duties for which he was hired as a trooper.'” [Matt Miller, PennLive]
December 20 roundup
- Craft brewery regs, Peter Angelos has another special bill in Annapolis, county council vetoes on development, and more in my latest Maryland roundup [Free State Notes]
- Oh, that pro bono: celebrity lawyer’s pro bono contract for sex accusers included up to one-third commission on selling their stories to media outlets [John Solomon and Alison Spann, The Hill]
- Forget that Viking cruise down the Mississippi River, Jones Act makes it a no-go [WQAD] “The Jones Act costs all Americans too much” [Bloomberg View editorial; earlier here, etc.]
- Cato Daily Podcast with firearms policy expert David Kopel on interstate right to carry and restricting bump stocks;
- Not-so-nastygram in beer biz: “As far as cease and desists go, this is about as good as it gets.” [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt]
Supreme Court roundup
Mostly Cato links:
- Today, Monday afternoon: Ilya Shapiro and John Paul Schnapper-Casteras preview Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission from different perspectives on eve of oral argument, Roger Pilon moderating [watch online, earlier] Why, on cakeshop case, “it won’t surprise me if the court comes up with something a little muddled and a little bit hard to read” [Chris Johnson, Washington Blade, quotes me] More: George Will (cakes are not expression; but while couple who sued cake-baker “might be feeling virtuous for having done so… siccing the government on him was nasty.”);
- “Christie v. NCAA: Anti-Commandeering or Bust” [Jonathan Wood and Shapiro, earlier here and here] “Supreme Court’s Sports Betting Case Could Redefine Relationship between Feds and States” [Shapiro]
- Federal courts were politicized before the Federalist Society came along, and promoting the cause of textualism helps de-politicize them [Roger Pilon]
- SCOTUS should use Janus v. AFSCME to recognize public employees’ First Amendment rights against forced union agency fees [Shapiro, Trevor Burrus, and Aaron Barnes] More: Shapiro and Frank Garrison, National Review; Cato Podcast with Jacob Huebert and Caleb Brown;
- Silvester v. Becerra: Ninth Circuit errs on individual gun rights, SCOTUS should correct [Shapiro and Matthew LaRosiere]
- Assuming patents = property, structure of Patent Trial and Appeal Board may flunk constitutionally required norms of judicial independence [Shapiro and Barnes on Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene’s Energy Group, LLC; Federalist Society panel video with Gregory Dolin, John Duffy, Arti Ray, and Robert Greene Sterne; Jeffri Kaminski, WLF]
- Collins v. Virginia gives Court a chance to protect the integrity of the home against warrantless searches [Jay Schweikert] And mark Dec. 13 for the 2017 Cato Surveillance Conference;
- Extending Commerce Clause to prairie dogs gnaws at constitutional principle [Shapiro, Burrus, and Reilly Stephens on Cato amicus brief urging certiorari in PETPO v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; Jacob Sullum]