PITTSFIELD
Ironically on the same day that a shooter went on a rampage at Fort Hood and shot 13 people dead and wounded 29, oral arguments were taking place in two cases before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court challenging state gun control laws. Both these incidents reflect what is going on in America with the gun issue.
The name of the Texas gun store "Guns Galore" where the Ft. Hood shooter reportedly bought at least one of his guns exemplifies the proliferation of guns in America which in part is responsible for the gun violence in the nation. Meanwhile these court cases illustrate the constant legal sniping against laws to impose at least some regulation regarding the problem of gun violence.
In the case of Commonwealth v. DePina, the defendant convicted of unlawfully carrying a loaded firearm and the unlawful possession of ammunition without a firearm identification card, is challenging the constitutionality of the state laws under which he was convicted. And in the other case of Commonwealth v. Runyan, the defendant is challenging the state law requiring the safe storage of firearms in a home. The decisions in both cases are pending.
These court challenges are based on the U.S. Supreme Court case of the District of Columbia v. Heller. The justices in that 5 to 4 split decision ruled that the general ban of all handgun possession was too broad and violated what the court declared for the first
Until the Supreme Court ruling in the Heller case, gun owners and their organizations were concerned about all gun regulations as steps toward the eventual ban on their ownership of firearms. And this is why they challenged just about every law that regulated gun possession. One of their often used slogans underlying these challenges was that "guns don't kill people, people do."
Now one would think, however, that since the Supreme Court has alleviated this law-abiding gun owners' worst fear by ruling that the government cannot take their guns away because of the constitutional right to bear arms, that both that worn-out and misleading slogan would no longer be used and that their legal and political challenges to reasonable gun regulation would diminish.
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But in a Massachusetts case earlier this year, the dissenting justice, Judith Cowin, ridiculed the majority opinion, written by Justice Francis Spina, for implying and reiterating that slogan about guns not killing people.
That case involved a legal challenge to the practice of the Bristol County district attorney of cutting down gun violence in his area by seeking the pretrial detention without bail of every defendant charged with the crime of illegal gun possession under the state dangerous person law. The majority of the court ruled against this practice and Spina in writing the opinion stated that illegal gun possession is a "passive and victimless crime."
Cowin in her dissent stated the obvious that the purpose of a firearm is not passive, rather it is to injure or kill and that the reiteration of that "tired slogan that ‘guns don't kill, people do' (as implied by Spina's opinion is) a dangerous oversimplification. The fact is that people kill people with guns. . . "
It is obvious that firearms were not invented for target shooting or pleasure. The original purpose of guns was the use of such an instrument to defend oneself against deadly force by killing the threatening person, to participate in fighting a war for one's country by killing the enemy and to kill game to survive in a wilderness without today's supermarkets. The operative word is kill. I would add that people are now able to kill many people with guns that they otherwise could not do unarmed, or armed with what are now the old fashioned six shot revolvers or seven shot automatics of the 1960s and 70s.
It should be quite obvious that shooters like the one at Virginia Tech last year and the shooter at Fort Hood could not have caused the massive killings and injuries they did without the use of today's state of the art automatic handguns. It was reported that the Ft. Hood shooter may have used a so-called "cop killer" gun, a FN 5.7 that is powerful enough to penetrate armored vests and can hold up to 31 rounds with an extended clip and a round in the chamber.
My point is that now with the right to bear arms being belatedly declared a constitutional right, law-abiding gun owners and their organizations should, especially in view of the of the latest mass killing at Ft. Hood, support laws to realistically, reasonably and now constitutionally to at least begin the process of finally trying to make some headway in decreasing gun violence.
Robert "Frank" Jakubowicz, a Pittsfield lawyer, is a former FBI agent and assistant district attorney.
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