It’s On

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

After 68 years of silence, the United States Supreme Court finally agreed on Tuesday to rule on the meaning of the above text; the Second Amendment – after dancing around it way back in 1939.

What we will hopefully know by the end of this year’s term: does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual right to have (keep and bear) a gun for private use, or does it only protect the collective right of an organized military (National Guard)?

The city of Washington’s appeal (District of Columbia v. Heller) seeking to revive its flat ban on private possession of handguns that was ruled unconstitutional by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to be heard in March with a decision a few months later.

Teacher Fights for Right to Self-Defense

Despite schools being a favorite target of mass-murders, one teacher’s fight to take her gun to school appears to be a loosing battle:

MEDFORD, Ore. – High school English teacher Shirley Katz insists she needs to take her pistol with her to work because she fears her ex-husband could show up and try to harm her. She’s also worried about a Columbine-style attack.

But Katz’s district has barred teachers from bringing guns to school, so she is challenging the ban as unlawful, since Oregon is among states that allow people with a permit to carry concealed weapons into public buildings.

“This is primarily about my Second Amendment right and Oregon law and the simple fact that I know it is my right to carry that gun,” said Katz, 44, sitting at the kitchen table of her home outside this city of 74,000.

“I have that (concealed weapons) permit. I refuse to let my ex-husband bully me. And I am not going to let the school board bully me, either.”

In an eerily similar fashion to what Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said about students being able to feel safe on their “gun-free campus” a year before it became the theater for the worst school-shooting massacre in U.S. history, Superintendent Phil Long insisted employees and students are safer without guns on campus at South Medford High School, where Katz teaches. The district plans to make that argument when the case comes before a judge on Thursday.

Katz won’t say whether she has ever taken her 9 mm Glock pistol to school, but she practices with it regularly and has thought about what she would do if she had to confront a gunman. She would be sure students were locked in nearby offices out of the line of fire, and she would be ready with her pistol.

“Our safety plan at our school now is that if somebody threatening comes in, you try to avoid eye contact, and do whatever they say, and that is not acceptable anymore,” she said. Shootings at Virginia Tech University and the one-room Amish school in Pennsylvania, “reinforced my belief we have to take action, we can’t just acquiesce as we have been taught to do.”

But the school board and superintendents are unlikely to respond to such rationalism and will instead allow everyone at the high school to remain lambs waiting for the slaughter.

UPDATE: Hopefully this story will get a lot of attention. Michelle Malkin just posed her comments on the case.

When Cops Have Guns

Today’s horrendous story out of Wisconsin, albeit an extremely rare event, flies in the face of gun-control advocates that argue citizens shouldn’t be allowed to own and carry firearms but law enforcement officers should.

The difference between a cop and a citizen is that one has a badge and the other doesn’t. Why does a small metallic emblem give gun-control advocates a sense of security that cops can be trusted while the thought of the average law-abiding joe packing heat in a supermarket (or say, a college campus) invoke fear and paranoia?

Maybe They Should be Disassembled Too

Unsurprising findings from a surprised pediatric researcher:

Few American families that keep firearms in their homes store them safely, a pediatric researcher says.

Nearly 200 million guns are privately owned in the United States, and more than one third of all American homes report keeping at least one gun in the house, according to previous studies.

“Over 70 percent of families surveyed reported not storing their firearms safely in their residence,” said Robert DuRant of the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. “This concerns us a great deal because having guns in the home increases the likelihood that they will be used in a suicide or unintentional injury.”

DuRant encourages all pediatricians to talk with parents about safe gun storage practices. The safest practice would be to remove guns from the house, but if parents are unwilling to do that, they should lock them and store the ammunition separately, he said.

The survey defines “safe storage” as a locked, unloaded firearm stored separately from ammunition. Or in other words: a well-secured paperweight.

Logically the reason so many households fail to “safely” secure their firearms is because they own them for self-defense. In the event of a home robbery an inaccessible gun is pretty useless; only slightly more advantageous than calling the police.

It is generally the case that in my household a loaded weapon is within an arm’s distance of me at all times. As of this writing, I’ve yet to accidentally shoot someone. I guess my life isn’t a horribly biased episode of Law & Order where crazy right-wingers randomly shoot innocent people when they’re not killing high school teachers for teaching evolution.