Supreme Court will decide if police can enter home to seize guns without a warrant

[HanzMcFeely]

Yea, I don’t see this going over too well. I’m sorry but If you enter a place without a warrant (officer or not) or a valid reason/invitation to be there, expect to be met with force.

We already see the ramifications of no knock warrants...

[JenniferG]

Whatever is common sense and Constitutional the exact opposite will be decided as long as Roberts and his lefty colleagues decide. The 4th amendment spells out exactly the requirements of searches. Justices that don't follow the Constitution and legislate from the bench are anathematic to the Constitution and a free society. In today's world the communists are attempting to change our society into something that will be unrecognizable as "America, land of the free and home of the brave" with the approval of like minded communists that pronounce judgements in cases like these. You should have no confidence that our form of Constitutional elected representative government will survive with these people in control.

[Yoder]

It's for the greater good.

[JustinR]

If he wasn't in the house, why wasn't there time to apply for a warrant?

Case closed.

[JustinR]

Yea, I don*t see this going over too well. I*m sorry but If you enter a place without a warrant (officer or not) or a valid reason/invitation to be there, expect to be met with force.

We already see the ramifications of no knock warrants...

They'll make resisting a no-knock warrant a default crime before they ever actually get rid of them.

It pretty much is now, but I mean fully codified.

[HanzMcFeely]

They'll make resisting a no-knock warrant a default crime before they ever actually get rid of them.

It pretty much is now, but I mean fully codified.

That’s if the person actually survives and doesn’t get shot in the process of “serving” the warrant.

[R.A.D.]

They'll make resisting a no-knock warrant a default crime before they ever actually get rid of them.

It pretty much is now, but I mean fully codified.

THAT should be a peach, resisting something in a split second... Hmmm, choose between dying in a break-in or try to verify the validity of the no-knock warrant? that's a hard one...

[Bang]

It's an easy problem. Make no-knock mean no-knock. That battering ram hitting the door is one loud knock. They are violating the no-knock at the outset.

[win67]

Yep. I'll keep my 4th amendment, thank you. No obligation to protect is fine with me. It's unrealistic to expect them to be able to anyway, so that responsibility ultimately falls to the individual regardless of what anyone wants in an ideal world. We don't live in an ideal world.

The police can't be there 24/7 to protect us even if we wanted them to, so we have to take responsibility for our own safety and be equipped to do so. There's no getting around that, ever.

Excellent points here, and you made me think of something else- another common principle of jurisprudence is that arbitrary enforcement of the law should be avoided when possible. Given the police can't protect everyone, any effort to protect anyone will necessarily lead to arbitrary enforcement of the law. In other words, the police will pick winners and losers. Any government ever, in the history of the world, that endeavored to do that, has done a spectacularly terrible job of it.

In Warren v DC the trial judges held that the police were under no specific legal duty to provide protection to the individual plaintiffs.

In general, mistaken understanding of the case expands the finding to include the general public at large. Not so. The case examined whether a person fearful for life and/or limb could demand that a police officer be assigned to guard them personally.

What is soon to go before SCOTUS carries the speculation that a household containing guns (like the trunk of a car) might be broken into and the guns within stolen and carried away, endangering the community at large. If this specious argument persuades, be ready for mandated securing of guns in a manner dictated by governing bodies.

Very true, but it's worth noting this is a TERRIBLE test case for that principle. Unless the wife was being detained too, the guns never would have sat there unattended.

The "guns in impounded car" case was a better test, although I don't agree with the ruling they made. Tow company employees are notoriously scummy- I've never heard of a tow company where less than 50% of the employees are felons. Anecdotally, I know several guys who were tow truck drivers for years, during which time they had no drivers' license and often drank and used crack on the job. While towing for the police, no less. One could argue that taking guns from the trunk of an impounded car is as much to protect the gun owner, as it is to protect the community, provided there was some reasonable basis to conclude the trunk wasn't lockable with a valet key or some similar mechanism. Courts are spectacularly bad at understanding the technical details of cars, and without having been on the scene I can't really say much about how likely it would have seemed to the officer that a tow truck driver could have stolen the gun without leaving enough damage to implicate himself in the crime.

Perhaps most importantly from a rights standpoint- in the "car trunk" case, the police never attempted to take ALL guns from the owner. They acted more narrowly, and stopped at securing one particular gun that was at a high risk of being stolen. This is the same theory behind impounding cars, or any property for that matter- it's not about guns and the police acted narrowly enough to avoid depriving someone of their right to keep arms altogether. I don't think anyone takes issue with that system or the theory behind it. In the case at issue in this thread, however, the police took ALL of Mr. Caniglia's guns, when none of them were at risk of being stolen or used in a crime. Which is a far broader action, with far greater implications for civil liberties, than in the "car trunk" case.

[Bang]

Courts are spectacularly bad at understanding the technical details of cars

Here's one. I was in Highway Patrol cruising south Philly. A guy in a Duntov'd '60 Chevy wound out first from a stop sign on one of those incredibly narrow streets. At the hearing, I testified in those terms. The (magistrate, back then) looked at me like I was something he'd never seen before, exclaimed, "First gear? FIRST gear?? How fast could he have been going?! DISMISSED! Next case!