gun control

A finding that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to own a gun could also provide more solid ground for recognition of the right to abortion, to sexual privacy, to gay marriage, and to a wide variety of other rights that conservative justices on the court and “originalist” Constitutional scholars have long opposed.

As the Senate begins deliberation today on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the outcome of the vote is pretty clear. As the Los Angeles Times points out, “the only remaining questions are whether the National Rifle Assn. can claim to have swayed votes against her and whether President Obama can claim [...]

Over the weekend, NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported that a senior aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed that McConnell, at a meeting of conservative groups, asked the National Rifle Association whether it would score the vote on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a critical vote hostile to gun rights, with the intent [...]

Big day for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on the gun-control front. First she introduced a bill to prohibit foreign felons from buying firearms; now she’s pushing a proposal to end the practice of hunting from airplanes. Co-sponsored by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the bill aims to close a loophole in the ban against aerial hunting [...]

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a longtime member and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, today said he will vote against President Obama’s first Supreme Court pick, Sonia Sotomayor, because “her statements and record were too much at odds with the principles about the judiciary in which I deeply believe.”
Hatch aggressively grilled Sotomayor during [...]

Despite asking some of the harshest and arguably most patronizing questions of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor over the past three days, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appears to be leaning toward voting for her.
Although he just used his questioning time this morning to charge her with engaging in “identity politics” and making speeches that he [...]

Claiming that Americans must “Stop Sotomayor” from wreaking havoc and terrorism on the country from a perch on the nation’s highest court, this new Committee for Justice ad warns that like “Barack Obama’s buddy, Bill Ayers,”  Judge Sonia Sotomayor led a group supporting violent terrorists. That support apparently took the form of a statement by [...]

A new report has renewed the call among gun-control advocates for tighter firearms laws, but such reforms face tough opposition from the powerful gun lobby and its congressional supporters.

Two separate votes. Two high-profile legislative reforms, wrapped together, are on their way to the White House for a signature.
The first installs sweeping consumer protections for credit card users, including a prohibition on rate hikes for existing balances (unless payments are more than 60 days late) and a minimum 45-day warning when rate hikes are [...]

There’s been a great deal of talk about how the ease of buying weapons in the United States might be helping to arm the Mexican gun cartels responsible for so many border-region killings in recent months. But here’s an element of the gun control debate that goes largely ignored: Under current law, there’s nothing to [...]