This article was published by the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, October 21, 2015:
Vladimir Lenin's famous quote, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” seems to apply to Jose Cabranes, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. His parents were both school teachers, he attended public high school and then studied history at Columbia College. After that he got a law degree from Yale and then returned some years later to serve as Yale's first general counsel at the invitation of Yale's president, Kingman Brewster.
He served as a consultant to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance for two years. He joined the ultimate insider's club, the Council on Foreign Relations, and was appointed by President jimmy carter to the President's Commission on Mental health. He just missed being nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton who instead nominated far-left Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In other words, Cabranes had no choice but to adopt the worldview that government is a good thing, and more of it is better. When it comes to the Second Amendment to the Constitution, Cabranes considers it a minor impediment to doing whatever it takes to keep the public safe.
Take, for example, his ruling on Monday when he wrote the Second Circuit's unanimous three-judge panel's decision upholding unconstitutional infringements in New York and Connecticut, all in the name of public safety. At issue were nearly identical infringements in each state, declaring that certain features turned an ordinary semi-automatic rifle – the popular AR15 – into a terribly dangerous weapon of mass destruction that must be removed from the hands of innocent citizens.
In New York's ban, the definition of “assault weapon” was expanded to include any feature enhancing the appearance of an ordinary rifle, “including a telescoping stock, a conspicuously protruding pistol grip, a thumbhole stock, a bayonet mount, a flash suppressor, a barrel shroud, [or] a grenade launcher.” Connecticut's ban was nearly identical, defining an ordinary rifle as an “assault weapon” if it included “a telescoping stock, a thumbhole stock, a forward pistol grip, a flash suppressor, a grenade launcher, and a threated barrel capable of accepting a flash suppressor or silencer.”
Without explaining, in his 57-page ruling, exactly how these features made a weapon seriously more deadly, Cabranes repeated the lie that those monstrous weapons were being used more and more frequently in school shootings, and something had to be done! The public interest overruled precious rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment, according to Cabranes, calling it “important – indeed, compelling … in controlling crime.”
Even if, as was pointed out by the plaintiffs bringing the complaint, such restrictions wouldn't have kept Adam Lanza from committing his atrocity at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, 2012. Nor was he impressed by proofs brought by the plaintiffs that the media has consistently, since that horror, gotten it wrong: public shootings in the country are a rare if horrific event. He said, “These weapons are disproportionately used in crime, and particularly in criminal mass shootings.”
He even admitted, in his summary, that such restrictions and limitations would likely have had little impact on Lanza's actions, or on other future behavior by psychopaths seeking unarmed victims: “That may be so, but gun-control legislation need not strike at all evils at the same time [in order] to be constitutional.”
This is the conclusion arrived at in the brain of an individual who has been sipping at the cup of collectivism since he first was able to draw breath. That the facts prove him a liar doesn't matter.
Just released was a government study from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) that proved Carbanes a liar. It showed conclusively that mass shootings, despite the hype and howling by the press to the contrary, continue to be rare events in the United States. James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, whose analysis is covered at length in the study, says that “there is no solid trend” in the number of such crimes, adding that “No matter how you slice it, there's no epidemic.”
According to the CRS study, as reported by the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action:
71 percent of mass shootings and 79 percent of their fatal victims over the 15-year period 1999-2013 were family- or felony-related.
Public incidents, while accounting for the vast majority of mass shootings covered by the news media, accounted for only 21 percent of such incidents and 29 percent of their victims. (Emphasis added)
Said the NRA:
Anti-gun groups and their allies in the news media portray mass shootings as common events that place the public at extreme risk. However, between 1999 and 2013, mass shootings covered by the CRS study accounted for a microscopic 0.004 percent of all deaths, about 0.66 percent of all murder victims, and less than one fiftieth the number of non-firearm murder victims in the United States.
Stated another way, during the same 15-year period, the chance against a person being killed in a mass shooting in the United States was about 517,000:1.
Finally, the CRS concluded that, between 1999 and 2013, less than 10 percent of mass shootings were committed with any firearm capable of using a detachable magazine holding more than 10 rounds.
None of which has any chance of changing the mind of a liberal who, from the very beginning, saw the world as a place that government could improve, even if it had to slip a few bonds in the process. Some, as a consequence, have concluded that a liberal judge is more to be feared than a liberal politician.
Sources:
Wall Street Journal: Appeals Court Upholds Core Parts of Two Post-Newtown Gun Laws
The Appeals Court's opinion by Jose Cabranes
ABC News: US Appeals Court Upholds Gun Laws After Newtown Massacre
Mass Shootings Rare, Government Study Says
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