The paper also quotes one neighbor, Debbie Mise, as saying she feared something bad would eventually happen at the Hain home. "She just wasn't right," Mise said of Meleanie Hain, the paper reports. "You don't bring a gun to a kids' soccer game, and you don't wear a gun when you go shopping at Kohl's."
Gun control means effective tools to keep firearms from disqualified persons. Melanie Hain should not have had a firearm let alone, a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
I know the usual, but disingenous, litany is to enforce the gun laws on the books, but the "gun rights" people have done everything in their power to make the laws unenforcable.
Besides, it is much easier to prevent than deal with the outcome of situations such as Melanie Hain's. It costs far less to prevent than to deal with the costs of medical care, police investigations, and suvivors.
There are three children who are now orphaned by a foolish attempt to bring "protection" to her family. Instead, the weapon was used to kill her.
Enough is enough,
I have long been tired of hearing talk of "gun rights". There are no such rights.
There is under our decisions no reason why stiff state laws governing the purchase and possession of pistols may not be enacted. There is no reason why pistols may not be barred from anyone with a police record. There is no reason why a State may not require a purchaser of a pistol to pass a psychiatric test. There is no reason why all pistols should not be barred to everyone except the police.
Critics say that proposals like this water down the Second Amendment. Our decisions belie that argument, for the Second Amendment, as noted, was designed to keep alive the militia. But if watering-down is the mood of the day, I would prefer to water down the Second rather than the Fourth Amendment. I share with Judge Friendly a concern that the easy extension of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, to "possessory offenses" is a serious intrusion on Fourth Amendment safeguards. "If it is to be extended to the latter at all, this should be only where observation by the officer himself or well authenticated information shows `that criminal activity may be afoot.'"
Both from Justice William O Douglas, Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S 143, 150 -51 (1972).
In 1991, Warren E. Burger, the conservative chief justice of the Supreme Court, was interviewed on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour about the meaning of the Second Amendment's "right to keep and bear arms." Burger answered that the Second Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud-- I repeat the word 'fraud'--on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime." In a speech in 1992, Burger declared that "the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to have firearms at all. " In his view, the purpose of the Second Amendment was "to ensure that the 'state armies'--'the militia'--would be maintained for the defense of the state."
I am amazed that The Supreme Court could have produced the Heller decision since it is based upon fraud and fallacy.
The dissent in Heller was correct.
I only hope that McDonald v. Chicago can correct the error made in Heller v. DC.
