Not a Theme---I Promise

I couldn't resist writing about this. And I had no intention of doing so--really. It's just what's on the local news.

I like to check the website of my local NBC affiliate to catch up on local news. The site has four top stories highlighted with photos and brief descriptions of the stories. Today's really caught my eye.

First, there was a story about a fourteen-year old elementary student today who was found with a handgun in his backpack. The story relates that the student will likely be expelled and sent to an alternative school. By the way, the handgun was reported to be unloaded. (Yes, I too wonder about an elementary student who's fourteen, but it can happen.) The child was arrested and charged with carrying a gun on school property. (this, the same day I received a moving mailing about 13- and 14-year-olds sentenced to life in prison with no opportunity for parole.)

Anyway, the next story up: Our dear mayor has announced that all junior high and high schools will have metal detectors installed.

I want to know one thing: who's in charge of updating our mayor on what's going on in the elementary schools?

Aside from that, though, it's sad. Still, we've had two shootings in eight days in schools in the Memphis City School system. One school board member this morning called for all schools to be shut down until safety can be assured.

Memphis. Sigh.

Pistol Packing in SD . . . in Class?

According to a news source (I no longer link to outside sources; sorry), it seems as if the South Dakota legislature is trying to make it possible for concealed guns to be allowed on university campuses. (Currently, the proposed bill died in a committee, but some are trying to override this committee action.) The initial reaction from many is “heavens, no!” We don’t want people carrying guns on campus—legally!

Now, even given my stance on guns (see here (I will link to my own stuff)), I realize the above thoughts initially miss the point. As most all studies show, it’s not the people who carry guns legally who cause the most alarm. When someone goes through the process of obtaining and maintaining a concealed-carry permit, this person is probably a little more stable than the person who goes on the rampage we’ve seen in the past.

But not always or in all circumstance.

Consider law school, as just one example.

In law school, people who start out as mild-mannered, in control people don’t always wind up there. This is the first time many of my students have ever dealt with what is, in their eyes (and those of their family members), a sort of failure. And this is not just the people who actually fail. I’m talking about the people who, for the first time in their lives, make a C. Or some, even a B-. This is quite common in law schools all across the country. And those are not people I want thinking that it’s perfectly fine to walk into my class with a concealed weapon.

Consider also the student I call on—perhaps, for one, it’s the first time the student is called on during law school. Although I consider what I’m doing “asking questions,” my students call it “grilling” (especially as I wait patiently for them to work through some legal analysis to get to the answer, having to apply a just-understood law to a whole new factual scenario). This is someone who’s perhaps under the most stress this poor little 23-year-old has ever dealt with. Again, this is not someone I want carrying a concealed weapon, even legally. The stress level and immaturity are both cumulative. Add a weapon, and the hat trick might lead down a scary path.

Or consider the student who, if she has one more absence in my class, will not graduate. Period. Is this a person I want, when she gets that news from me after she next misses class then reappears, to think it's fine to have a weapon on her (if she has a permit to carry concealed) . . . after she’s spent the last five or six years pursuing this degree? Not really.

And so, while I agree with the initial reaction we should have concerning concealed carry permits and the general person who gets them, I think putting them in the hands of people this young who are at an unbelievably stressful time in their lives is a mistake.

(This does not even address the issue of universities being prevented from letting family know if a student has become mentally unstable--an area I plan to write about next fall perhaps.)

I had said I was open as to where I taught. Not so sure I couldn’t mark South Dakota off the list. This would give a whole new meaning to the “Badlands.”

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Related: today thirty-one states, led by Texas (not surprisingly), filed a brief in support of the respondent, Heller, in the Supreme Court case to be heard next month. The basic argument raised by those states is that the handgun ban in DC should receive strict scrutiny review—a review type that hardly ever works well for legislation prohibiting something. For the constitutional right to be infringed upon, there must be compelling state interest,” the law must be narrowly tailored, and the law has to be in the least restrictive means to get that interest met.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Thirty-one states are part of this Texas group. Fourteen states have chosen to remain neutral, and five states have joined up with DC. A fellow prof broke it down:

Of the 31 pro-Heller states, 26 voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential election, while five (Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington) voted for John Kerry.

Of the 14 "neutral" states, five (Arizona, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, and Tennessee) voted for Bush, while nine (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin) voted for Kerry.

And all five of the pro-D.C. states (Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York), as well as the District of Columbia itself, voted for Kerry in 2004.

Interesting indeed.

Now, I am a huge supporter of our constitutional rights—trust me. (This is where I first really figured out I was not the conservative I thought I was.) Still, I am uncomfortable with where this could go, which, no doubt, is why we’ve not had a true Second Amendment case in so very long. But I'm also horribly uncomfortable with constitutional rights being infringed.

And so, the real question: just how much of a constitutional right is it to have a handgun. I know, I know---it seems obvious that it's part of the 2A. But do we extend that to an interpretation that we have a constitutional right to have assault rifles? I'll repeat my phrase from above: heavens, no! (please no.) Why on earth would anyone need a machine gun? But if the right is there for a handgun, why not for other firearms?

Ah, we must wait until June for the first round of answers.

To Bear and Keep?

While in Africa this past year, people there would ask me where I was from. In March, of course, that was an easy answer. This last trip, in December, I lengthened my answer: “I live in Tennessee, but I’m from Texas.”

The reply was often the same: “Oh, Texas? That’s where your President Bush if from, no?” I would respond, “No. Sure, he lived there, and he was even governor there, but he’s not from Texas.”

Texas is, of course, special—and special to me. And thus, with my opinion of W. slipping markedly since he moved to DC, I did want to be clear that he is not an actual Texan. (Yes, I voted for him as governor in 1998, but that’s where he should have stayed. (Was my vote because I actually supported him? No. It was because I didn’t think about it on my own but just went with what I thought I thought. Had I really investigated things, I have no idea who I would have supported; I don’t remember much of anything about Mauro at this time.)

Texas is also unique. This last trip of mine involved my spending a week with attorneys from East African countries (and Nigeria), and they had many questions about the United States. These questions were posed to me and my colleague who grew up on the east coast and for the last fifteen years or so has lived on the west coast—never in the south, never in the middle of the country, and never, naturally, in Texas. It was interesting to see the differences in our answers based on the perspectives with which we grew up and lived.

I had talked to my colleague about politics, and she knew that I grew up thinking I was conservative but had finally figured out who I actually was only in the last decade. She also knew my views about religion and tolerance; we shared those views. (Mine is, essentially, who am I to tell you that your faith is wrong? Leave me and my spirituality alone and I’ll do the same for you.)

So back to those questions in December . . . it was interesting when someone asked about guns. For one, in Uganda, many security personnel walk around openly with large guns—automatic types. That scares me something fierce. (I will never forget the first time I saw the police who were checking cars, when I was leaving the Nairobi airport in March, just walking around with what appeared to be an AK47-type weapon casually slung over a shoulder, or even worse, held in the hand with a finger in the trigger area.) And the local attorneys there discussed a tribe in the northern part of the country, all heavily armed, who did not seem to hesitate to shoot at people.

When, then, the question was asked about guns in the US, and my colleague gave a pretty typical response when you think of a liberal response, she was shocked when I said I’d had a license to carry a concealed handgun and would almost certainly renew that license soon (it is available in TN). Imagine also, then, her possibly double-shock at learning such an item had been give to me—as a gift—many years ago. As you might realize, this made for very lively discussions with our African colleagues.

I explained my decision to continue to be an owner—and to eventually again pursue my concealed-carry permit. But I also explained my distaste of firearms in general: the horrific ability they provide to allow multiple fatal results in an unbelievably short amount of time.

I didn’t use to think this way. Working on criminal cases, though, can change how one thinks. So many of the cases I read about and worked on in my three years with the State involved the use of guns. Too often, they were used by someone angry, enraged by passion, and/or intoxicated (or otherwise altered).

This is the problem: a firearm can do so much damage to a human body in such a short amount of time; it can do that amount of damage to multiple bodies in a short amount of time. And it can all be done from a considerable distance. For the person wielding the weapon, this often seems to occur without the foresight needed—because it’s so damned easy to just “do.”

Many of us know someone who could, in a fit of anger, grab a weapon and do something disastrous. That’s where it gets frightening. And that’s where I have my problem with the loose ownership laws we have.

This brings us to the happening yesterday in Missouri: five dead and two wounded when a man entered a city council meeting and opened fire. From what I’ve read, I understand he’d been arrested in the past for disorderly conduct—at city council meetings. He had ongoing problems with the government. Even his brother told a CNN affiliate, “The only way that I can put it in a context that you might understand is that my brother went to war tonight with the people that were of the government that was putting torment and strife into his life. . . . And he had spoke on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied him all access to the rights of protection, and therefore he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue.”

He went to “war with the . . . government.” Is this the “militia” our Second Amendment means to arm? Is this the purpose of freedom of gun ownership? I don’t think so. But how do we address this while preserving the Second Amendment?

(I have friends who were at Appalachian Law School when the student there shot and killed several people. We all remember Va Tech not too long ago. Columbine. Paducah, KY. Tragedies that happened so fast, so easily. Too easily.)

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case addressing the Second Amendment next month (District of Columbia v. Heller). The opinion, of course, will surely not be issued until June. The case will review DC's ban on handgun with the following issue:

Whether the following provisions — D.C. Code §§ 7.2502.02(a)(4) [banning handguns], 22-4504(a) [banning gun carrying, including at home], and 7.2507.02 [requiring all guns to be both unloaded and locked or disassembled] — violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?

The underlying questions, then, have been explained as follows:
(1) Are individuals’ rights protected under the Second Amendment?
(2) If so, is that right in existence regardless of affiliation with a “well-regulated” militia? (and what is “well-regulated”? Is that regulated by the State?)
(3) If so, what does the Constitution protect as far as the purposes exist to “bear and keep” a firearm?

The big question, conceivably, is the last one: what purposes are protected? And if you have the purpose of home and self defense protected, can the state prohibit your keeping one that is loaded or require it to be disassembled? Ah, but this applies only to handguns; you could still keep a shotgun.

Hard questions.

Allowing anyone (essentially) to have access, though, makes it easier for things like what happened in Missouri yesterday to happen again. And as I write this, a new report has come in: a female student shot two others then herself in a classroom at Louisiana Tech. Three dead. In seconds. Without a gun, that would be very unlikely to have happened.

Am I giving mine up any time soon? Of course not. As long as it’s so easy for criminals to own, I want to as well. But is that what the purpose is for my right to "keep"? Is that the "defense"? I don't know. And I don't know if we'll know come June. Frankly, though, I wish no one owned.

Happy Anniversary

. . . to Roe v. Wade.

That's right: today marks the 35th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision.

I realize that many people disagree on the issue. But to me, it still comes down to preserving life---with the best balance we've been able to come up with. And if you're at all confused about my meaning, I cannot recommend strongly enough that everyone watch the movie Cider House Rules.

I saw it for the first time while I was in law school, and like with so many other things, that's when I saw a bigger picture than I ever had before. The issues involved became broader, deeper, and much more meaningful.

Bravo Tennessee!!

No Sir. That's what they called the legislation that went into effect today: Tennessee's No Smoking In Restaurants. But the new law isn't limited to restaurants; the law prohibits smoking in all enclosed public places (with a very few exceptions). Bravo!

It was a fact of life in Texas--if you went out to a bar, you'd almost have to leave your clothes outside lest your closet take on the odor of stale cigarette smoke. And as an exsmoker, I was ickishly aware of that odor.

Now, one thing I've liked about Boscos here is that it went nonsmoking very soon after the Tennessee governor signed the bill into law (which happened in June), and so I've come to love enjoying a cold beverage and a bite to eat without leaving the place having to pony-tail my hair just so I wouldn't smell it. A couple of weeks ago, I visited a place called Hueys to check out their Sunday afternoon live music. The music was great, but I couldn't stay for dinner; the place was unbelievably smokey. But I told them I'd be back---after October 1. The bartender said I was not at all alone in that sentiment.

And now, October 1 is here! No more smoking in restaurants! WooHoo!! What about bars? Are they the exceptions? Not unless they want to NEVER allow anyone under the age of 21 in--including employees. In other words, if it's a place that does great family business in the early evening, like Buffalo Wild Wings, but is mainly bar for sporting events on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, it'll be smoke free. Fabulous!

With the exceptions, though, smokers will have places to go. Several places are going or remaining strictly 21 & up. The Blue Monkey, a place I've wanted to check out but haven't yet, is one example. But I must say that I'm not exactly in a hurry to go there now. There are too many other places I can go that won't give up their patrons---and employees---under the age of 21. That's right---think also of all the under-21 college students here in the service industry. They now can work only in places that ban smoking; the law is, after all, designed to protect employees.

With nonsmokers loving the new law, though, how will a 21 & up place convince the nonsmokers to keep coming in? After all, now we can expect an even larger gathering of smokers in each of those places. But what else is a place to do other than compromise! For example, the Flying Saucer has it (almost) all figured out. It's gone to 21 & up, allowing smoking in what's called "the Garden," but the true indoor room, by management decision, will be smoke-free. Now that's what I call a good idea. Granted, it could be better---you have to walk through the Garden (not open air, but huge garage-door style windows open up onto 2nd and Peabody Streets) to get inside. Hmph. Oh well, life isn't perfect.

But, then again, with the new ban comes another problem---actually, it's making an existing problem worse: the littering of cigarette butts. A local blogger here counted cigarette butts this morning on his side of the street for the course of his quarter-mile walk downtown, and he reported---get this---445 butts. Yowza! That's a whole lotta butts.

(Granted, not all smokers are litterers. I, for one, stopped littering as soon as a friend told the story about picking up a discarded cigarette and *politely* returning it to the woman who'd tossed it aside---by dropping it down her shirt. I don't know if she got the message, but I did.)

Back to the local blogger. He makes a good point: "You know, thinking about it, farting in public makes more sense as a socially acceptable behavior than smoking in public does. But there isn't a billion-dollar industry buying every conceivable type of ad to convince you how cool farting is."

Ah, well, at least now, in Tennessee, we can breathe a little cleaner. Bravo.