Nope. I'm saying that until a person is adjudicated to be a "nutjob" by a court of law, after a hearing at which neutral mental health professionals who have examined the individual for symptoms of mental illness that would render that person a risk to himself or others if armed, testify to the mental defect and establish it beyond a reasonable doubt, every adult enjoys the a priori assumption of competence unless and until they demonstrate otherwise by reason of mental defect or criminal activity.rEvolutionist wrote:Why are you calling me an idiot? I thought you were agreeing that every nutjob on the planet should be armed.
The problem with your statement is that your definition of "nutjob" is, I'm quite certain, extremely broad and includes everyone who has not been examined by mental health professionals and adjudicate by a court of law to NOT be a risk to himself or others if armed, which in your estimation probably includes literally everyone who is not a professional soldier or law enforcement official.
Hoplophobes operate from the position of a priori prior restraint on the exercise of a fundamental human right and would deny arms to everyone except those who can "prove" they have a "need" to be armed and can "prove" that they are mentally competent to be armed. The problem with this system is that "need" is a subjective term, as is "mentally competent to be armed," and precisely those sorts of judgments have been used by those who issue permits for gun and/or to carry them, and in most cases those authorities, for personal, philosophical or political reasons, refuse to approve almost everyone simply because they can.
Since in the past the usual arbiter of a citizen's "need" to carry a gun was a police department official, and since police department officials (not line officers) worldwide have an inbred bias against an armed citizenry, until the "shall issue" movement came along, it was extremely rare for the average citizen to obtain a CCW permit, or, in the case of places like DC, NYC and Chicago, a permit to even own a handgun.
It was this ubiquitous abuse of authority to deny law-abiding citizens the right to have or carry firearms for self defense that fomented the "shall issue" movement, which has been incredibly successful, with all 50 states now being compelled to provide at least some sort of licensing system for concealed carry, with Illinois being the final holdout that was ordered by the federal courts to do so.
This doesn't mean that all jurisdictions have "shall issue" laws, but the majority (more than 40 states) do. Those that don't are continuing to be recalcitrant and obstructive to the maximum extent possible, and they get sued again and again as gun-rights advocates chip away at their repeated attempts to weasel around the 2nd Amendment and deny their citizens their fundamental human rights. The District of Columbia, NYC, California and Chicago are the most notorious and egregious violators of citizens civil rights, but they are, as the article shows, continuing to lose in court. Eventually I expect a federal preemption law that will command CCW permit reciprocity in all 50 states.
In sum, the reason I disagree with you is that you are engaging in smarmy evasions with flip and dismissive comments that show no scholarship or erudition, much less reason or logic, with respect to a very important subject you are entirely unwilling and incapable of discussing reasonably and rationally and because I'm way smarter than you are I refuse to rise to your bait.