Joe Scarborough is now on the correct side of the gun control debate
The chilling video above of a 9 year old girl shooting an Uzi is bad enough. The instructor that was showing her how to use the gun first had the gun in the single shot mode. The little girl fired the gun with no problems. The instructor then foolishly placed the gun in semiautomatic mode. When the little girl fired the gun, she lost control and shot the instructor in the head killing him.
Shouldn’t an instructor be aware that the wrist of a nine year old girl may not be strong enough to fire an Uzi in semiautomatic mode even if she successfully fired one shot? Should he not have assumed she could lose control?
Joe Scarborough covered the subject on Morning Joe. He was livid. This is not the first time Joe Scarborough have been irate about unnecessary deadly gun killings and massacres. The Newtown massacre made him ‘rethink’ his position on gun control. He excoriated NRA’s Wayne LaPierre for his attempts to ‘racialize’ the gun issue.
Today Joe Scarborough showed righteous indignation toward those who think it is okay to have 9 year old girls use or fire Uzis or other semiautomatic weapons. “Who would put an Uzi in the hands of a 9 year old girl,” Joe Scarborough said. “What is wrong with these people? What is wrong with this culture? … What right is advanced by doing that? A man is dead and they’ve ruined a little girl’s life. For what?”
One of the panelist spoke out and reminded Joe Scarborough that these people believe the second amendment gives them that right. Scarborough then said they should read the constitution and case law, specifically what Justice Scalia had to say about the second amendment. Joe Scarborough may have been referring to the Fox News interview where Scalia said,
WALLACE: Let’s turn to an issue that is the news right now with the massacre in Colorado. And that is gun control.
You wrote in 2008, the opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, the majority opinion that said the Second Amendment means what it says, people have a right to bear arms. Question: how far does that constitutional right go? Can a legislature ban semiautomatic weapons or can it ban magazines that carry 100 rounds without violating an individual’s constitutional right to bear arms?
SCALIA: What the opinion Heller said is that it will have to be decided in future cases. What limitations upon the right to bear arms are permissible. Some undoubtedly are, because there were some that were acknowledged at the time. For example, there was a tort called affrighting, which if you carried around a really horrible weapon just to scare people, like a head ax or something, that was I believe a misdemeanor.
So yes, there are some limitations that can be imposed. What they are will depend on what the society understood was reasonable limitation. There were certainly location limitations where —
WALLACE: But what about these technological limitations? Obviously, we’re not talking about a handgun or a musket. We’re talking about a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute, SCALIA: We’ll see. I mean, obviously, the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried. It’s to keep and bear. So, it doesn’t apply to cannons. But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to be — it will have to be decided.
WALLACE: So, how do you decide if you’re a textualist?
SCALIA: Very carefully. My starting point and ending point probably will be what limitations are within the understood limitations that the society had at the time. They had some limitation on the nature of arms that could be born. So, we’ll see what those limitations are as applied to modern weapons.
What Joe Scarborough must concede is that America is watching an out of control Tea Party Right Wing either created or allowed to metastasize partially under his tenure in Congress and beyond. The no regulation, starve the government, no tax movement is what his ilk stood for. America is reaping the results of the seeds sowed by the Conservative laissez faire revolution in the 90s.
(h/t David Edwards)