A Michigan man whose 2-year-old daughter shot herself in the head with his revolver last week pleaded not guilty after becoming the first person charged under the state’s new law requiring safe storage of guns.
Michael Tolbert, 44, of Flint, was arraigned Monday on nine felony charges including single counts of first-degree child abuse and violation of Michigan’s gun storage law, said John Potbury, Genesee County’s deputy chief assistant prosecuting attorney.
Tolbert’s daughter remained hospitalized Wednesday in critical condition from the Feb. 14 shooting, Potbury said. The youngster shot herself the day after Michigan’s new safe storage gun law took effect.
It will get challeged to the Supreme Court and struck down.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/
“In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense. Assuming that Heller is not disqualified from the exercise of Second Amendment rights, the District must permit him to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.”
I just don’t understand the US and the 2nd. You’re not allowed to have a lot of various weapons and it just states that people can be “armed”, which could mean a lot of things. And even then, having a gun stored away safely is absolutely not infringing on that right either, as long as you have access to it. This is just obsessive gun fetishism and it constantly gets people killed, including little kids.
It’s literally gun fetishism. Full stop.
The people who will angrily defend 2a are perfectly happy watching children die if it means they get to keep their guns. They’ll give you all kinds of excuses, they’ll come up with all manner of justifications, but the truth is, they just like feeling powerful and are willing to sacrifice innocent lives for it.
Don’t forget the racism. The NRA’s perfectly fine with throwing away gun rights if it means making sure only white people are armed. For example, even as Harlon Carter was ramping up his crusade to turn the NRA from a sportsman’s organization into the gun lobby, the NRA still supported the Mulford Act, because at least that was taking guns away from those damn ni- I mean, “violent extremists”. They were dead silent when a legal, responsible gun owner like Philando Castile was killed. They never said anything when the textbook definition of a “good guy with a gun”, Emantic Bradford, was killed. And we all know damn well why.
The Harlon Carter school of gun rights comes with a major caveat present in many strains of conservatism: no restrictions as long as you’re part of the right group.
I will say this though, the issue is still pretty complicated, because basically both sides have some history of racism (gun control first started as ways to assuage fears of black uprisings, plus the aforementioned Mulford Act), but then, what part of American society isn’t in some way permeated by our racist history?
Where does the 2A say anything about “immediate self-defense”? Oh that’s right, no where. Fuck SCOTUS
Doubt SCOTUS ever touches this.
The language matters A LOT: Michigan’s mirrors California’s, which would absolutely hold up to any constitutional challenge because it requires negligence with an adverse outcome. Michigan’s and California’s basically say you’re a criminal if two things are met: you had any plausible expectation of a child being around, AND something bad actually happens.
Every states are a little different, and at the other end of the intelligence spectrum are New Jerseys and New Yorks, and nobody even cared to challenge those yet. New Jerseys statute says you’re a criminal, regardless of circumstances, if the guns are not locked up per some collection of criteria at all times when you’re not actively accessing them. I do know that most of New Jerseys rare prosecutions are actual bullshit, for example a cop going door to door to gun owners because of some local crime, asking to see someone’s gun to check it and not liking that the safe in the room he was in when they showed up was not completely locked (never mind he lives alone). Expect any challenge to arise there.
If SCOTUS does throw out all storage laws, it’ll be because of politicians who care more about their resume than about writing really good laws.
IIRC there’s already a storage law being challenged, I can’t remember if it’s California or somebody else. CA also has the magazine size ban.
I’m sure there’s every kind of law being challenged, anyone with a conviction can challenge a law and any idiot city council can pass garbage statute. Don’t let political rhetoric cloud judgement (can’t say “common sense” because common sense actually ignores deep analysis). Magazine size ban is wildly different from California’s implementation of a safe storage law. Magazine bans are as constitutional as would be a law limiting the number of words you may post online in one go.
This isn’t preventing him from getting a firearm this is charging somebody with improper storage of a firearm. Not sure how likely it is the supreme Court will rule against it but it’s different than the laws challenged so far
Doesn’t seem much different than a parent getting charged when their kids find their stash of drugs and consume them or take them to school.
It isn’t. But the freedom to own guns without any sort of restriction is much more loudly, enthusiastically, and financially supported than the freedom to consume drugs in your own home.
And thus it won’t matter that the key thing is being irresponsible. Being irresponsible with guns and drugs in the home are completely different things in the Modern Republican mind.
Not to mention both major parties are anti-drug, no matter that conservative originalism would have long ago recognized that the founding fathers were all stoners, but both parties packed the court with their own flavors of authoritarians.