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- Title
MASS MURDER: AMERICAN UNEXCEPTIONALISM, D.C. V. HELLER, AND "REASONABLENESS".
- Authors
Cramer, Clayton E.
- Abstract
Lower courts have used a variety of techniques to largely ignore District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010), primarily by defining various categories of gun ownership outside a narrow definition of the "core" of the right protected by the Second Amendment. Will this same approach be used by a future Supreme Court to effectively reverse Heller by declaring some weapons too effective for mass murder to be protected? Is mass murder exceptionally American? If so, can America's relatively laissez-faire gun control laws be the cause? Could a narrow reading of the Second Amendment, post-District of Columbia v. Heller, qualify as "reasonable" or "rational" because of the social costs of this supposed American exceptionalism? makes little sense for rare events to drive public policy. Much of the current panic is about semiautomatic rifles such as the AR-15 Not only are rifles of all types rarely used in murders in the United States (2.5% of all murders) but even among the highly publicized mass murders, "A third of mass killings didn't involve guns at all," and of the firearms used in mass murders, only 8.6% are semiautomatic rifles." Thus, only about 5.7% of mass murders involve semiautomatic rifles, of which only some are the fearsome "assault weapons" that the courts of appeal increasingly regard as outside the Second Amendment's "core" protections.
- Subjects
DISTRICT of Columbia v. Heller; MCDONALD v. City of Chicago; FIREARMS ownership laws; UNITED States. Constitution. 2nd Amendment; MASS murder; AMERICAN exceptionalism
- Publication
Southern Illinois University Law Journal, 2018, Vol 43, Issue 1, p43
- ISSN
0145-3432
- Publication type
Article