As the supreme court upends precedent again and again, the liberal justices reveal the divisions within the legal body
On Friday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered an acidic sermon against the court’s 6-3 decision to end lower courts’ practice of issuing nationwide injunctions to block federal executive orders, reading her dissent directly from the bench in a move meant to highlight its importance.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” states Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown-Jackson. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”
This leads me to believe that you were raised in a household/community that was extremely gun-friendly. Not everybody has the same experience. I’m in my 50s and could count on one hand the number of people I’ve ever met who owned or have ever handled a firearm, and the idea of allowing a 6 year old to use a firearm even in a supervised environment would probably get you a visit from child protective services around here.
And there’s also a major difference between shooting targets in a supervised environment and actually pointing your gun at a human being who is firing back at you.
Rural living in the USA is an interesting thing, I wouldn’t say my family was extremely gun friendly. My mother hates them but my father wanted to start hunting again and it was a good way for him and I to bond as there wasn’t many other mutual interests. The vast majority of boys (and some girls) in my grade school through high school all hunted and “owned” several firearms before they were able to drive a car. I knew how to maintain my weapons, hunt, prep, and butcher all kinds of wild game before I was out of high school. It’s just a culture thing. These days I’m a city slicker so it seems like a different world in my past now but it’s certainly where I came from.
And you are right, it is a different thing in a gunfight. But life and death situations make people do extreme things.
Look at it this way. Think of the “city slickers”, as you put it. I’m going to assume you’re not talking about cities like Dallas or Houston, where gun ownership is obviously much more common. I’ll assume you’re talking about those who weren’t raised around guns. If push came to shove right now, how many of them would you trust with a weapon? How many of them are more likely to hurt themselves or you than they are their adversary? Would you want any of those people covering you in a shootout?
A majority of people fall in that category. I know people I’d barely trust with a Super Soaker, let alone an actual firearm. And while I fully agree with you that extreme situations make people do extreme things, especially when they have nothing left to lose, there are limits to that. It’s not going to turn your average first grade teacher or bank teller that barely got their firearms license into a military sniper just because bullets start flying at them. At most, it’ll help someone to stop pissing their pants out of fear to grab the gun and control their terrified shaking long enough to fire off a few rounds that at least go in the direction they want the bullets to go.