America’s shooting gallery
by digby
And here I thought that the answer for gun violence was to have a lot more guns around:
The number of homicides committed using guns has gone up by nearly a third nationwide in recent years, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC found a 31 percent increase in homicides involving firearms from 2014 to 2016. In 2014, 11,008 homicides involved a gun. The number rose to 14,415 by 2016, the CDC team said.
Guns were by far the most common weapon used in homicides, the CDC team found.
[…]
Daniel Webster, a gun policy expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said one surprising factor behind the recent increase in gun killings is the outcry against police killings of unarmed people.Gun deaths went up in Baltimore, he said, alongside the unrest that followed the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody. Police pulled back from much of the day-in, day-out patrolling they had been doing in many parts of the city. “That kind of policing activity dropped substantially,” Webster said.
“Policing was preoccupied with quelling the riots. There is evidence of a pullback of general policing activities by Baltimore police,” Webster, who wrote a detailed report on the effect in January, told NBC News.
“When you add a breakdown in trust between communities and police, I think that is a recipe for more violence.”
Webster also noted that more states had loosened rules on gun ownership and the carrying of guns at around the same time that firearms homicide rates went up.
Yeah, I’d guess that might have had something to do with it too.
By the way, the Supremes agreed to hear a new gun rights case today:
In an ominous sign for potential victims of gun violence, the Supreme Court announced on Tuesday that it will hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, a challenge to New York City’s gun licensing regime.
It’s the first Second Amendment case the Supreme Court will hear since 2010, and only the second such case since 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, which held for the first time in American history that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. It’s also the first Second Amendment case since Brett Kavanaugh, who penned a starkly pro-gun dissent as a lower court judge, took over from the more moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy.
And the Court’s decision to hear New York State Rifle should trouble gun violence advocates for another reason. The case involves such a minor and incidental burden on gun rights that it is unclear why the Court would pick this case as their first foray into Second Amendment litigation in nearly a decade. If the Court sides with the plaintiffs in this case, that would suggest that many gun laws must fall in this decision’s wake.
New York law requires handgun owners to obtain a license to possess such a gun, and it provides for two different kinds of licenses. A “carry” license permits individuals to carry a handgun for “target practice, hunting, or self-defense.” Meanwhile, a “premises” license permits individuals to “have and possess in his dwelling” a handgun, but they can only take the gun outside of the home for limited purposes. In New York City, that includes bringing the gun to seven different firing ranges where the gun owner may practice shooting.
The individual plaintiffs in this case, each of whom have premises licenses, do not challenge this overarching regime. Instead, they raise an exceedingly narrow grievance. As the appeals court explained, each of them “seek to transport their handguns to shooting ranges and competitions outside New York City.” One of them is also wealthy enough to own two homes. Yet he objects to the fact that he must buy a second gun if he wishes to keep a firearm in each residence, rather than being permitted to transport one gun between the homes.
Yet, the fact that New York State Rifle is not a grand showdown over some massively important gun rights question should trouble supporters of gun regulation far more than if this case struck at the heart of the Second Amendment. Though the Supreme Court has not heard a Second Amendment case in nearly a decade, nearly all federal appeals courts agree on a broad framework that should apply in such cases. As ThinkProgress explained last summer,
Under this framework, “severe burdens on core Second Amendment rights” are subject to a test known as “strict scrutiny,” the most demanding test courts typically apply in constitutional cases. Meanwhile, “less onerous laws, or laws that govern conduct outside of the Second Amendment’s ‘core,’” are more likely to survive judicial review.
Thus, laws that impose major burdens on gun owners are especially likely to fall, while more incidental burdens will typically be upheld. And the specific burden at issue in New York State Rifle is hardly an attack on “core Second Amendment rights.”
[…]
New York State Rifle in other words, is a huge case because it concerns a tiny issue. If the Supreme Court is willing to declare that even very minor burdens on gun owners violate the Constitution, then it is unclear what can still be done to prevent gun violence.
Sounds great.
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