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A Right To Bear Firearms But Not To Use Them? Defensive Force Rules And The Increasing Effectiveness Of Non-Lethal Weapons, Paul H. Robinson
A Right To Bear Firearms But Not To Use Them? Defensive Force Rules And The Increasing Effectiveness Of Non-Lethal Weapons, Paul H. Robinson
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Under existing American law, advances in non-lethal weapons increasingly make the use of firearms for defense unlawful and the Second Amendment of little practical significance. As the effectiveness and availability of less lethal weapons increase, the choice of a lethal firearm for protection is a choice to use more force than is necessary, in violation of existing self-defense law. At the same time, a shift to non-lethal weapons increases the frequency of situations in which a person’s use of force is authorized because defenders with non-lethal weapons are freed from the special proportionality requirements that limit the use of deadly …
From Ballots To Bullets: District Of Columbia V. Heller And The New Civil Rights, Anders Walker
From Ballots To Bullets: District Of Columbia V. Heller And The New Civil Rights, Anders Walker
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This article posits that the Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment ruling District of Columbia v. Heller is a victory for civil rights, but not in the sense that most activists from the 1960s would recognize. Rather than a product of mid-century legal liberalism, Heller marks the culmination of almost forty years of coalition-based popular constitutionalism aimed at transforming the individual right to bear arms and the common law right to "employ deadly force in self-defense" into new civil rights. The implications of this are potentially great. By declaring the right to use deadly force in self-defense an "essential" right, the …