Morning!
So while I have been slightly bored by the Presidential campaign (and even annoyed by Obama’s support for the shit FISA compromise), I have been completely intrigued by recent Supreme Court decisions. I blogged the first one, about mentally ill defendants’ right to defend themselves, and of course we’ve got the death-penalty-for-child-rape one, which Linda Greenhouse pointed out today is based on flawed reasoning.
As a death penalty opponent, I was happy to hear a conservative court strike down any use of the death penalty. I think that each time they do they make the case for its continued use in any circumstances weaker, and I see that as a good thing. Plus, I do agree with the logic stated that child rape is based on the notoriously unreliable testimony of children, and therefore more likely to result in the execution of an innocent (we won’t even start on the likelihood of executing innocent people in murder cases with little evidence, will we?). I can’t stop thinking about this GQ story by Andrew Corsello, the tale of a man who spent 22 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. (Read it. Cry.) Of course, there are similar stories every day about people imprisoned for murders they didn’t commit. Plus, I just think the moral argument for the death penalty fails.
But the most interesting thing I’ve read thus far this morning was this Op-Ed in the Times about the increase in availability in nonlethal weapons, which would theoretically decrease the need for handguns as self-defense.
I want a Taser. Guns terrify me, but reasonably–I’m a young woman living alone in a big nasty city. I have a good-sized dog and several years of muay thai and krav maga, but that ain’t going to stop someone with a weapon. While Tasers and such can be overused and can cause injury, the likelihood of killing someone with one is much less than, of course, a gun. So if you happen to say, overreact and shoot someone with one who had no intentions on harming you, they’re not dead.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a pretty hard-core civil libertarian and I’m not trying to take away your damn guns. But living in Philly, which averages about a murder a day, while surrounded by the rest of Pennsylvania, where the State Senate won’t even pass a law requiring people who have guns lost or stolen to report them so, makes me think long and hard about gun control. On one level, it doesn’t work, so why bother, right? But the post-Virginia Tech laws being passed (like in Georgia right now) that are allowing more guns rather than less don’t seem to me go be helping the problem.
There’s a Wendy Kaminer article from the Atlantic about 12 years ago where she, a First Amendment hardliner, investigates life among the Second Amendment hardliners. One of the things she noticed was their ardent defense of the need to have guns as a protection against the possibility of political oppression. An idea which, I have to say, after the last eight years of Bush presidency, I can sympathize with.
So who knows? Apparently Obama decided to agree with this ruling (or at least not disagree), but that’s just one of the things I’m a little annoyed with him about (article states the others. Stop running right, Barry, we chose you over HRC because we thought you were less likely to).
And by the way? This? Yeah. Exactly.
Posted: July 2nd, 2008 under Politics.
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