The Congress finds the following:
(1) Police cannot protect, and are not legally liable for failing to protect, individual citizens, as evidenced by the following:
- (A) The courts have consistently ruled that the police do not have an obligation to protect individuals, only the public in general. For example, in Warren v. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App. 1981), the court stated: ‘[C]ourts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community.’.
(B) Former Florida Attorney General Jim Smith told Florida legislators that police responded to only 200,000 of 700,000 calls for help to Dade County authorities.
(C) The United States Department of Justice found that, in 1989, there were 168,881 crimes of violence for which police had not responded within 1 hour.(2) Citizens frequently must use firearms to defend themselves, as evidenced by the following:
(A) Every year, more than 2,400,000 people in the United States use a gun to defend themselves against criminals--or more than 6,500 people a day. This means that, each year, firearms are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.
(B) Of the 2,400,000 self-defense cases, more than 192,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse.
(C) Of the 2,400,000 times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, 92 percent merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8 percent of the time, does a citizen kill or wound his or her attacker.Isn't that interesting? If you read the whole bill you'll see it's pretty much like the "Castle Doctrine" we have here in Texas. Let your Members of Congress know you want this to pass.
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Findings are totally superfluous. Who gives a crap about all this? I know it's a practical argument, but any firearms regulation is immoral and unconstitutional.
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I agree with you, but...
Having worked in a legislature before, it is almost imperative that you convince your fellow legislators to vote for something. Often times you must make practical arguments as well as principled ones. This is also because in a bill (as opposed to the other method of passing a law, a Joint Resolution) has no preamble laying out the purpose of the bill.
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