That is the govt putting a FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY requirement on any/all buyers. It does not prevent anyone from buying a gun. Otherwise, car insurance would also be “hindrance” to someone’s “right to move freely as they chose”. So would the price of ANY OTHER thing he/she might have to buy to do almost anything. Food? HINDRANCE (gotta pay for it). Clothing (same). And so on. There ARE laws about food, clothing, shelter, etc–so a financial hindrance violates the US Constitution for just about anything/everything. Nobody realized until now the US Supreme Court is a bunch of SOCIALISTS.
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People may have a “right” to move around “freely associate” or something like that in the Bill of Rights, but, from my earliest days in High School driver’s ed, I was told “driving is a privilege”, hence it can be rationed by ability to pay. Nothing else, food, clothing, housing, health care, safe drinking water, is an enumerated “right” in the Constitution. Only in the ownership and carrying of deadly weapons is government infringement prohibited. Of course, the “JCs” are free to charge for the guns and ammo, but they aren’t the government, as long as you ignore the “protected free speech” they pay out to government officials.
Steve
If that is the case how come people have to pay for guns? The government by your reasoning needs to supply them for free.
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You just hit the point made. If it is a “right”, it MUST be “free”–and so must the ammunition for guns also be free. Courts already ruled guns without ammunition are not protection (as they claimed the First Amendment declared). Basis for this statement: Court states laws requiring storing guns separately from ammunition violates the First Amendment, so NOT providing free ammunition–while ONLY selling guns–violates the First Amendment. Same $$$ argument. So, if the gun stores sell guns, they must supply unlimited ammunition “on demand”. Otherwise guns are stored separately (held by gun owners) from ammunition (held by gun sellers/dealers), which violates the First Amendment.
As we know, the Constitution is a restraint on the power of the Federal government. So, the government can’t make you pay anything, or inhibit your “right” to swagger down the street, or loiter outside a school, with an assault rifle. The Constitution does not constrain the actions of “JCs”, in this case, so the “JCs” can invoke “free enterprise” and ration firearms by ability to pay.
Steve
I was a well behaved teenager with unsupervised access to a gun.
It wasn’t a good idea. My neighbor friend shot a transformer with my 22 rifle one day since we had access to it without adult supervision. Luckily it did not explode or otherwise cause noticeable damage.
Edit: fixed a typo.
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Kids are unpredictable. Yes, it helps greatly if the parent watches over them and implements consequences for poor choices, but there are some people who are simply wired all wrong and no strong parenting is going to keep those kids out of trouble. It is rare that a kid is simply bad right from the start, but not impossible.
We watched our boys like hawks, and definitely handed out consequences. They are great young men at this point, but I will admit that there was a time when they seemed like psychopaths. Under the best of circumstances, parenting is a crazy hard job, but if you get a kid with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, it’s almost impossible. I worry for those parents if this law goes through. Seems like it was the right call for these parents, however. I am not a fan of hands off parenting and enabling.
IP
IP
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A trigger lock that will defeat a teenager is neither hard to find nor particularly expensive. If the objection is “well, guns shouldn’t have trigger locks” then I have no answer, and also no hope.
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The best thing my wife and I did when our kids were in their early teens was buying a pair of jet skis. We knew they were approaching the age where it wasn’t cool to hang around your parents, so we bought the jet skis and spent a lot of time at the lake with them. A bonus was that they always wanted to invite their friends to come along. It was a great time to get to know their friends and see how they behaved. And we also became friends with the parents of the friends because they wanted to know who was taking their kids to the lake. We had a lot of great weekends. Our kids still talk about those times.
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Then the requirement to have insurance would ADD to the PROFITS of the JCs. After all, they collect MORE MONEY (i.e. MORE PROFIT) with each and every double sale (gun AND insurance sold together). Or don’t the JCs want “MORE PROFIT”?
Hmm. I thought this was about “locking up parents of mass shooters.”
IP
It is. No need to be purposefully obtuse. Parents are responsible for the actions of their children. That means “supervision”. The use of guns should be supervised, which means “not used without the parent present.” Same as, say, a car, or liquor, or other things that are hazardous to humans, even as they also have some benefits.
Children should not be playing with guns. Period. If they must, they should be supervised at all times . Trigger locks. Simple, effective, cheap. Not really so hard to understand.
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As posted above, Detroit PD will give a city resident a trigger lock, free. All anyone has to do is walk in the police station and ask for one. In the local news report about a kid shooting himself in the head, in the metro Detroit burb of Warren, a Warren PD officer says they also offer free trigger locks. Police and the media have been begging people to secure their guns for years.
Steve
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I see a little more nuance to the issue. You don’t lock up every parent of a juvenile mass shooter. You only lock up those who actively enabled the shooting, as in this case. A parent who is trying to get help for their mentally ill child and taking reasonable precautions with their firearms are not the kind of parents that should be locked up.
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Sure. Sounds good, hypothetically speaking.
But what happens if you own an AK-47 for protecting your family and a bunch of liberals break into your house to force your wife to have an abortion? Not so easy to fumble around to remove the trigger lock, is it Mr. Wise Guy?
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You have freedom of speech but can be locked up for yelling fire in a movie theater.
News papers can be sued for slander.
There is plenty of reason to hold gun owners liable for stolen guns and gun shootings. Note those are not a restriction on gun ownership. Those are the actual liability costs.
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Reportedly so. Mark McCloskey said he had the safety engaged and did not finger the trigger. We know her gun was inoperable.
St. Louis prosecutor ordered crime lab to reassemble Patricia McCloskey’s gun
https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local/gardner-staffer-ordered-crime-lab-to-reassemble-patricia-mccloskeys-gun/63-be112149-d06c-4f54-a225-6545e74b5c2d?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot
The gun Patricia McCloskey waved at protesters was inoperable when it arrived at the St. Louis police crime lab, but a member of Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s staff ordered crime lab experts to disassemble and reassemble it and wrote that it was “readily capable of lethal use” in charging documents filed Monday, 5 On Your Side has learned…
Assistant Circuit Attorney Chris Hinckley ordered crime lab staff members to field strip the handgun and found it had been assembled incorrectly. Specifically, the firing pin spring was put in front of the firing pin, which was backward, and made the gun incapable of firing, according to documents obtained by 5 On Your Side…
Patricia McCloskey and her husband, Mark McCloskey, have said the handgun Patricia McCloskey waved at protesters was inoperable because they had used it as a prop during a lawsuit they once filed against a gun manufacturer. In order to bring it into a courtroom, they made it inoperable.
DB2
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The question was how much gun locks constitute unconstitutional infringement of the gun owner’s “right” to use the gun.
As for the luminaries in the pic having the safety on, or a gun being assembled incorrectly, if that couple had fit a particular demographic, and a policeman saw them aiming the guns at people in a threatening manner, the policeman quite possibly would have shot them dead.
Steve
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Agreed, requiring insurance is pointless. Hold irresponsible gun owners legally accountable for crimes committed with their guns.
The US would be better if citizens remembered that their rights come with responsibilities.
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