W. Kiernan: heh.

Why is there a movement to remove this right from citizens?

Listen, I live in Red State U.S.A., and all this talk about terrism and self-defense is just hogwash. What my red-necked fellow citizens genuinely want is the legal privilege to get all drunked up and drive their God damned pickups around and shoot off their guns for fun and don’t nobody give ‘em no shit. They’ll passively watch the likes of Dubya steal their Social Security pension while they just stand there and go, “Wha? Duh,” but they’ll get up off their asses every time to vote down any man who threatens to encroach upon their play toys. That’s the fact. Yee haw. God damn gun freaks.

Don’t conservatives believe in local, specific solutions to problems, rather than blanket one-size-fits-all claims?

Now that the “it fights terrorism” angle falls apart, Kopel may follow pattern and move on to the humanitarian argument.

I’m confused at the notion that you need a specific reason to find an NRO article ridiculous. It’s an NRO article. It’s pretty much ridiculous by definition.

The very first line has a claim (‘One of the important reasons for the sweeping election victory of Silvio Berlusconi and his House of Liberty was concern about public safety’) which is completely false; the electoral campaign was always based on an economic agenda, like promises to increase work opportunities (the infamous ‘one million more jobs’), reducing taxation, while at the same time promising more benefits for families and public sector workers, decreasing public spending and cutting the deficit, all promises that have miserably failed to be kept, but safety was never top of the list, unless they’re somehow including immigration laws on that, but personal safety in American right-wing libertarian terms has never been a major concern in Italian public debate and is not ‘leading some Italians to rediscover the virtue of people being able to protect themselves’. That kind of personal-protection interest in guns has always been pretty much exclusive to the far right and now has been exploited in populist terms to pass a law that makes it look like the government is doing something, while the economy is spectacularly tanking.
That’s just the first paragraph. The second starts with a reference to a poll from ‘Publiweb (a major Italian web portal)’. Do please click on that link in the article, you’ll find a page that makes the Sun’s Page 3 look tame. It’s an entertainment portal with links to soft porn sites. Just the kind of source to get reliable polls from.

The rest is the massive projection of the author’s own political positions onto a completely different social and political reality. Interestingly how they quote specialist magazines about guns. If you met anyone in Italy who reads or subscribes to that kind of publication, you could bet 500 euro that they’re neofascists. There is simply no one else pushing for easier access to guns than those far right circles. The kind who were recently arrested for participating in a shady para-military underground secret service operation that aimed at targeting terrorists (such shady underground operations not being new in Italian history).

The examples cited – and pasted above by Steve Burton – are not ones I recall hearing of in recent news, but if they’re supposed to be an indictment of the application of principles of proportionality in self-defense, well, it must be a matter of point of view, personally I don’t see what’s wrong with charging an adult for failure to store his firearm safely to avoid minors in his family getting a hold of them and killing other minors.

As for the fact the exiting laws are remnants of the fascist regime: the entire criminal code was created in that period. Some of the parts that remained unchanged are more debatable than others (like laws punishing offenses to public officials, or burning of the flag), some less (many of the professional orders date from that period). But the regime’s confiscation of weapons from dissenters back then has little to do with today’s gun license system.

This is an interesting bit: Italian gun owners, however, rarely defend a comprehensive right to arms, but instead focus narrowly on the interests of their particular shooting discipline. Hunting groups do not support gun ownership for target shooting, or for self-defense. Target shooters ignore the rights of hunters. And almost no-one discusses the most important element of the right to arms: the duty of a free people to resist tyranny

I suppose it doesn’t cross Kopel’s mind that this is quite simply because of a huge difference in culture between America and Italy on the issue of gun ownership and personal safety and political relations between citizen and state. There just is no such widespread interest in owning guns, period. Enough with the projection.

Also, the Italian libertarians Kopel cites and links to are a very marginal right wing group – the more common libertarians are economic libertarians (within the centre-right) and/or civil rights libertarians (the Radicali mainly, a mix of neoliberalists and secularists). The context and usage of that word is just different.

I’ve never seen such shameless appropriation.

(1) & (2) “prosecuted” or “convicted”?

(3) and correctly so.

exactly, but that basic fact didn’t register in the brains of those who shouted “injustice!” because the shooter was charged for what they thought was simply defending himself.

rea: This “proportionalty” business is not unique to Italy—it’s the law in the United sStates as well.

I thought so too, that’s also why I find the NRO article ridiculous. I don’t know of any country where there isn’t some kind of limit on the notion of legitimate defense.

On the new law giving carte blanche for ‘pre-emptive’ attacks all round – it isn’t actually that crazy, it is not a cancellation but an exception to the existing criminal code article on legitimate defense, the scope is limited to response to intrusion in private property (houses, shops and offices) and when a principle of self-defence can be deemed to apply. So it will be still up to judges to decide for each case wether that principle applies in that specific case. In all other cases where it’s not about intrusion in private property, the strict proportionality principle would still apply. (Not saying this to defend the new law, only to clarify).
There have been disagreements within the centre-right governing coalition itself, and most interestingly, since shop owners were addressed by proponents as main beneficiaries of this law, the Italian association of shop owners is completely against it, stating it will only increase risks for them, and calling for more police efforts instead, as defending citizens is the duty of the State.

(1) “In one case in southern Italy, a man was relaxing in his terrace, when a gang started to shoot in his direction. He returned fire, and shot a 15-year-old gangster. The man was criminally prosecuted for injuring the gangster, under the theory that he should have taken shelter behind a parapet, rather than shooting back.”

(2) “In Brescia, a man had been robbed three times. One a night, he heard suspicious noises from the courtyard. He looked out the window and saw a gang trying to jimmy his door. He took his gun and fired, killing one. He is being prosecuted for intentional homicide.”

(3) “A hunter kept his gun in an armored cabinet, as the law requires. One day, his son stole it and used it to shoot another adolescent. The hunter was prosecuted for failing to store his weapon safely.”

In another article, he discusses the terrorism angle.

I don’t know that the State provides “personal” protection to anyone. The State provides a body of law, law enforcement, and a judicial system to punish lawbreakers. It is the responsibility of citizens to live within those parameters.

Further, setting aside your faulty premise of an entitlement to personal protection, the conclusion that a gun is “essential” as a result does not follow. Move to where there are no brown people, put in a security system; hire a guard, build a fence, learn tae kwon do, etc. Lots of other options for you fearful types to feel secure. Living in an armed camp is not essential.