Bench Appointment is too often the dumping ground of incompetent, political lawyers - New York’s Fact-Free Gun Ruling

Maybe if a judge would rear and comprehend the Second Amendment in stead of wiring about what a lefty reporter will say about his opinion, reasonable rulings would continue to flow rather than dribble. m/r

New York’s Fact-Free Gun Ruling | National Review Online

JANUARY 3, 2014    By John R. Lott Jr.

Most of New York’s new gun-control laws have been upheld — on a totally dubious basis.

New York’s new gun-control law, the so-called SAFE Act, largely survived its first federal-court challenge on this past Tuesday. The more than 1,140 New Yorkers it’s made felons will remain so. But even the testimony of the state’s own expert witness failed to show that the law will cut crime.

The judge in this case is William M. Skretny, chief federal judge for the Western District of New York. His decision upheld the state’s gun-registration requirements and ban on assault weapons, but he rejected the seven-round limit for magazines, deeming it arbitrary.

The decision relied heavily on testimony by George Mason University criminology professor Chris Koper, who argued “that the criminal use of assault weapons declined after the federal assault-weapons ban was enacted in 1994, independently of trends in gun crime.” Judge Skretny wrote in his opinion: “Because New York’s regulations are tighter than those in the federal ban, [Koper] believes, quite reasonably, that the affect [sic] will be greater.”

But Koper’s two studies on the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban don’t support his claims. The first study, with Jeff Roth for the National Institute of Justice, found that “the evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect [of the weapons ban].”

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