Carrying / Self-Defense – Page 40 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Man With a Gun Report

It is reported that there was a man with not just one, but two loaded guns at a local Hibachi in Roanoke, VA. Somehow this man restrained himself from shooting anyone, and also complied with the Virginia law about not drinking while carrying. Additional eyewitnesses report the same man was seen back at a residence just outside Roanoke consuming cocktails while firearms were safely stored away in the guest room. Gun control advocates are skeptical such a gun owner exists, since it is well known your average person is incapable of acting with such restraint when in the presence of firearms.

Heading home first thing tomorrow. Might buy a new pistol when I get back to PA. Will explain later.

Deadline Approaches for Castle Doctrine

Rendell has until tomorrow. The clock is ticking. So far, no veto. If we don’t see a veto by tomorrow, Castle Doctrine is law. Here’s hoping.

Pretty Outrageous

From Students for Concealed Carry on Campus:

Dr. Bill Holda, president of Kilgore College in Kilgore, TX, will have to do some fast backpedaling if heâ€™s to have any hope of outrunning his recent comments about the 1991 massacre at a Lubyâ€™s Cafeteria in Killeen, TXâ€”the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, surpassed only by the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.Â Dr. Holda recently angered both survivors of the shooting and concealed carry advocates by claiming that some of the victims of the massacre (which became a rallying cry for supporters of lawful self-defense) actually shot each other.

It’s not even close to true. This was before Texas passed right-to-carry. The only one shooting anyone that day was the killer. This statement was made in response to a bill introduced in Texas that would repeal the current prohibition of carrying on college campuses.

That’s Kind of the Point

Eugene Volokh linked to this criticism of National Opt-Out Day:

The day before Thanksgiving is the busiest airport day of the year.Â The airport is full of families, many of whom are not frequent fliers, going home to see Grandma for the holidays.Â People who fly long distances between non-hub airports generally have to make connections.Â When you have a connection, a delay is not just a delay.Â It may mean not making it to your destination at all.Â Most families planning to travel tomorrow have nonrefundable tickets.Â Canceling is not an option.

I am sympathetic to the overall argument, but I would point Kent Scheidegger and Professor Volokh to Ilya Somin’s excellent body of work on the problem of political ignorance. That Opt-Out day is going to cause disruption to people who may only interact with TSA once a year is entirely the point. The point is to make them understand what their government is doing, instead of just quietly passing through security, blissfully unaware that a government agent in a remote room is looking at naked pictures of their children. They will see out in the open and clear as day what the government we voted for is doing, and what the consequences of it are.

So yes, it sucks that this is going to be a serious problem for some people. But we didn’t create this system. TSA did. And I don’t see that any American has any obligation to play along with their game for the sake of efficiency or expediency. To cause any social change you have to raise awareness first. That’s the first rule of activism. In this sense, National Opt-Out Day is a good idea.

I find it difficult to accept that there are people who value freedom out there suggesting that everyone should submit to a virtual strip search for the sake of everyone else’s convenience. The choice is now between that and groping. There’s no longer an option to just go through under the old procedures. It seems we have to endure quite a lot of hardship for the sake of freedom. Many have died for it. Missing grandma’s mashed potatoes seems a small price to pay in comparison.

More Debate on Gun Free Zones

From our favorite Brady Board Member:

If you spent any time with Colin Goddard and heard him describe the scene at VT, you would know that his having a gun would not have made a difference. In fact, he has said that if he had had a gun that day, he probably would have been shot to death by Cho.

This is the scene as described by Colin Goddard at the time of the Virginia Tech mass shooting:

Goddard’s ordeal began during French class, when he and fellow students first heard gunfire coming from a hallway, his mother said.

Professor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak told her students to dial 911, just seconds before Cho entered the room and sprayed bullets, wounding Colin in the leg. Cho “went first through one row of desks and started shooting just randomly,” Ann Goddard said.

Cho then left the classroom, she said, and returned minutes later.

Colin lay on the classroom floor, playing dead. He “turned his head and actually saw the shooter’s shoes come right up next to his body,” Ann Goddard said. “The shooter was standing right next to him.”

Her son was “absolutely scared to death,” she said. “He kept his wits about him, but he was scared to death.”

If you had time to hear the gunshots, you had the time to draw a gun had you had one. Probably even time to find or create reasonable cover. A reasonably trained shooter can go from leather to well placed shot in under 2 seconds. You had the advantage of knowing where the shooter was going to appear from and that he was coming. It’s certainly not a guarantee you won’t get shot. Gunfights aren’t exactly safe, even if your opponent is a lousy shot. The key to winning a gun fight is to be mentally prepared to win, and to keep landing well placed shots on your attacker until he’s down. I’d be curious to know what Colin thinks the fundamental tactical difficulty would have been in taking Cho down had he had a firearm that day, other than his emotional state, which can’t be discounted.

Goddard was frightened into inaction, by his own account. I don’t mean that as any kind of admonition; the same thing happens even to trained soldiers and police officers. No one can predict what their reaction is going to be when bullets start flying, and I won’t blame anyone for being petrified by fear in a situation like that. Since I’ve never been in a situation where someone is shooting at me, I have no idea whether I’d react any better.Â Dan McKown certainly wasn’t exempt in a similar situation, even though he was carrying a firearm.

But just because being frozen by fear was one person’s reaction doesn’t mean it will be everyone’s. Many of the young adults involved in the campus carry movement are people who are not unfamiliar with being shot at, since a lot of them are veterans completing their education after serving our country in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m skeptical that enough college students are going to carry firearms to make any significant difference in a potential mass shooting situation, but the odds at least won’t be zero. I don’t see any reason why someone who is licensed to carry everywhere else shouldn’t be able to carry onto campus. In short, I just don’t see any reason not to allow it.

Idiot

The guy in Virginia who’s become a Brady poster child after ordering a beer in a restaurant and having his unholstered gun go off in his pocket is losing his permit for a year, and forfeits the gun he was carrying. He also pays a 500 dollar fine. The 30 day jail sentence was suspended.

Tiller told the courtÂ Latham reached in his pocket to payÂ the bartender when either his hand or something else in his pocket set off the unholstered gun.

Bennett told the court that carrying a pistol asÂ Latham did, without a holster and with other items in his pocket possibly jammed into the triggerÂ guard, was reckless.

So this didn’t really have anything to do with drinking and carrying, but rather had to do with carrying without a brain. BTW, how the hell do you pocket carry a Glock 36? Those have to be some pretty big pockets.

Is PA Castle Doctrine Law Constitutional?

One of the big arguments about pushing the HB1926 route is that it runs into problems with Article III, Section 3, which says:

No bill shall be passed containing more than one subject, which shall be clearly expressed in its title, except a general appropriation bill or a bill codifying or compiling the law or a part thereof.

The short answer is there’s a pretty good case to be made for constitutionality, but that it’s not a slam dunk. The case law on this goes back more than a hundred years, and there’s enough of it that our opponents could find an argument to make. But there’d be a very strong case favoring Castle Doctrine’s constitutionality. A more recent case, you get quotes like this:

In broad terms, Article III’s aim was to “place restraints on the legislative process and encourage an open, deliberative, and accountable government.” City of Philadelphia, 838 A.2d at 585 (quoting Pennsylvania AFL-CIO ex rel. George v. Commonwealth, 563 Pa. 108, 757 A.2d 917, 923 (2000)). More specifically, Section 3 was designed to curb the practice of inserting into a single bill a number of distinct and independent subjects of legislation and purposefully hiding the real purpose of the bill. City of Philadelphia, 838 A.2d at 586. Related thereto, the single subject requirement prohibits the attachment of riders that could not become law as is, to popular legislation that would pass. An additional benefit of the Section 3 requirements is that there will be a greater probability that a bill containing a single topic will be more likely to receive a considered review than a multi-subject piece of legislation. Id., citing Millard H. Ruud, No Law Shall Embrace More Than One Subject, 42 Minn. L.Rev. 389, 391 (1958)(offering that an additional purpose served by the one-subject rule is to facilitate orderly legislative procedure). As we indicated in City of Philadelphia, the single subject requirement proscribed the inclusion of provisions into legislation without allowing for “fair notice to the public and to legislators of the existence of the same.” *296 City of Philadelphia, 838 A.2d at 587. Thus, reasonable notice is the keystone of Article III, Section 3.

Emphasis mine. I think this would tend to favor Castle Doctrine being constitutional, since legislators were given fair notice as to what they were voting for, and what was in the bill. You also have this from a footnote:

While recognizing the importance of Section 3, we acknowledged that bills are frequently subject to amendments as they proceed through the legislative process and not every supplementation of new material is violative of the Constitution. Thus, “where the provisions added during the legislative process assist in carrying out a bill’s main objective or are otherwise ‘germane’ to the bill’s subject as reflected in its title,” the requirements of Article III, Section 3 are met. Id. Article III, Section 3 must have, however, some limits on germaneness, for otherwise virtually all legislation-no matter how diverse in substance-would meet the single-subject requirement, rendering the strictures of Section 3 nugatory. As stated by our Court in Payne v. School Dist. of Coudersport Borough, 168 Pa. 386, 31 A. 1072, 1074 (1895), “no two subjects are so wide apart that they may not be brought into a common focus, if the point of view be carried back far enough.” Thus, defining the constitutionally-valid topic too broadly would render the safeguards of Section 3 inert. Conversely, the requirements of Section 3 must not become a license for **396 the judiciary to “exercise a pedantic tyranny” over the efforts of the Legislature. City of Philadelphia, 838 A.2d at 588 (citing Estate of Rochez, 511 Pa. 620, 515 A.2d 899, 902 (1986)). Indeed, “[f]ew bills are so elementary in character that they may not be subdivided under several heads….” Payne, 31 A. at 1074.

Emphasis mine again. So the Courts have said it can’t be read so broadly as to be meaningless, but that it is not an excuse for the judiciary to “exercise a pedantic tyranny” over the efforts of the Legislature. Given that these two subjects in HB1926 both deal with criminal law and criminal procedure, and self-defense can be tangentially related to kidnapping, I think there’s a pretty solid case that can be made that HB1926 is constitutional.

Will Rendell Sign?

That’s the million dollar question. I wouldn’t care to take any bets on it. There are factors playing in both directions. Ed is a thoroughly lame duck, so your standard political calculations may not apply. He’s going to piss off an awful lot of Democrats if he vetoes, and I don’t know what kind of role Rendell wants in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party following his term as Governor.Â If he’s heading into his political sunset, he may do it just as a departing “screw you.”

There’s also the issue that a veto of Castle Doctrine is also a veto in favor of child molesters. More than a few state reps flipped on the concurrence vote because of that. Rendell’s line item veto is only valid for appropriations measures. He has to take this bill as a whole otherwise, so there’s no line item vetoing Castle Doctrine and letting the sex offender provision become law. I think it’s probably a safe bet Rendell will not sign the bill, but whether he’ll allow it to become law by waiting the required ten days, we’ll know on Thanksgiving. Let’s hope that on Thanksgiving, we can toast victory in Castle Doctrine.

Not Without Reform First

Maryland wants to make carrying a firearm a felony instead of a misdemeanor. To me this is unacceptable without first making Maryland a shall-issue state. Pennsylvania has a tiered approach. If you are otherwise qualified to have a license, it’s a misdemeanor for carrying without a license. Only if you’re prohibited from carrying a firearm does it become a felony. Why can’t Maryland take such an approach? Oh yeah, because locking up criminals isn’t the point.

Campus Carry, Round Two

Looks like there will be another effort to push campus carry again in Texas:

Simpson said he wants to file a substitute to his bill to allow private universities and colleges to opt out of the campus-carry law. Otherwise, any university or college in Texas could not stop â€œlicense holders from carrying handguns on the campus.â€

However, students would not be able to store handguns in their dorm rooms. Schools would not be held liable for any damages caused by the guns. If it passes, the law would go into effect Sept. 1, 2011.

This would be welcome, though, I’d want to know how they implement the opt-out practice. Will we need to carry a list of colleges and universities that opt out? It would seem to be that it’s perfectly within a private school’s right to expel someone for violating their rules, or to ask a person to leave their property. I’m not sure why the law needs to be involved.