“Gun control’s Potemkin village”

“The agenda includes mostly measures that will have little or no effect on the problems they are supposed to address. They are Potemkin remedies—presentable facades with empty space behind them. … The assault weapons ban was irrelevant to fighting crime before, which is no reason it can’t be irrelevant again.” [Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune/syndicated] The Washington Post interviews Bob Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute and a key mover of the Heller v. D.C. individual-rights litigation, on what types of gun controls he sees as consistent with the Second Amendment as explicated in Heller. And don’t assume the gun debate breaks down along lines of urban vs. rural, liberal vs. conservative, or individualist vs. communitarian; it often doesn’t [David Kopel, NYT “Room for Debate”]

More from Cato: Tim Lynch on what happened to gun crime in D.C. after Heller, and on the civil rights history of “Deacons for Defense”; Trevor Burrus on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s move to toughen the state’s already widely evaded gun laws; video with Tim Lynch and Caleb Brown on the Obama gun agenda. And from Damon Root, commenting on an Akhil Amar article, some surprising (and at times Cato-mediated) connections between gun rights and gay rights [Reason]

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