Lawsuit against NYS’s tough gun law: it’s unconstitutional

You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? So here’s the Daily News piece about this new lawsuit: Court action blasts N.Y.’s tough gun law as unconstitutional  – NY Daily News.

At what point do we citizens of the great majority loudly object to the image of any of our neighbors keeping heavy weaponry in our apartment buildings? There is a not-so-subtle threat in that image: “Don’t object or else I’ll be coming after you.” They don’t even want us to know who they are.

And clearly these gun owners who propound limited views but expansive threats are polemically pointing their weapons at the heads of our legislators. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for why we have no meaningful gun control. Not all our politicians are owned by the NRA.

This vision, this hideously ontological anxiety—”Does my neighbor own a sub-machine gun? If I ring his bell to chat, or to complain about noise, will he use it against me?”—is a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie. It should not be a vision of our own actual society. It’s one thing to exploit paranoia in a film; it’s awful (and probably apocalyptic) to induce it as the central psycho-dynamic in our country, in our collective lives. Imagine the USSR in the mid-20th century, and Germany in the 30’s and 40’s.

PS. I keep wondering whether all these people who fling the world “constitutional” around have ever read the entire Constitution? With all the twenty-seven amendments, including the 19th Amendment permitting me to vote, and the 18th amendment and the 21st amendment repealing the 18th amendment? Can they grasp the ebb and flow of the Constitution beyond worshiping the Founding Fathers?

Or is the literacy of these people limited to the 25-words-or-less second amendment?

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