Heller’s distinctive focus may well have created a blind spot. But the Court did not address scenes in which guns threaten the exercise of liberties by other law-abiding citizens, whether those threats occur in the home or in public. In doing so, the Court assumed a paradigmatic scene of gun use: a “law-abiding citizen” defending his or her household against a criminal invader. Heller, the Supreme Court found that Americans have a right to keep and bear a handgun in their home for self-defense.
Is the Second Amendment an obstacle to gun regulation intended to protect the public sphere against weapons threats? In 2008’s District of Columbia v. If legislators and judges do not focus on the freedoms that gun regulation protects, guns will threaten those freedoms. America must regulate guns not only to protect life, but to protect its citizens’ equal freedoms to speak, assemble, worship, and vote without fear. As gun-brandishing protesters and armed invasions of legislatures demonstrate, guns inflict more than physical injuries-they transform the public sphere on which a constitutional democracy depends.
Why regulate guns? The standard answer is that gun laws can prevent needless deaths and physical injury. The jury doesn’t buy it.War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength One might argue for the defence that this is meant to be provocatively subversive, with the ‘good guys’ becoming indistinguishable from the bad. Foxx’s Nick seems merely peeved that his own hypocrisy and superiority are being challenged, while Butler’s Clyde acts like he has rabies. The film lurches from one massacre set-piece to another, the manner of each death telegraphed with clumsy glee before it happens. Director Gray is a money-maker (Friday et al), but taste isn’t his hallmark.
What ensues would just be silly if the cat-and-mouse game weren’t so vicious, a series of indiscriminate slaughters when Clyde has flipped from betrayed victim to maniac on a senseless mission. He’s like the Count Of Monte Cristo if Edmond Dantès had mad IT skills and a degree in engineering. Ten years pass, which seems an arbitrary time lapse - until it emerges it would have taken at least that long for inventor Clyde to have amassed a fortune, accrued hitman expertise and constructed a lair only a Bond villain could love, packed with surveillance equipment, explosives, gadgets and clothes racks for 101 disguises. And he gets even more when the lesser of two evils is condemned to death while the devil “co-operates” with the prosecution and gets a pass. After a horror-movie opening sequence of a home invasion, in which Butler’s ordinary, decent guy Clyde is stabbed and bound, helpless while his wife and little girl are at the mercy of a rapist murderer and burglar sidekick (and is inexplicably left alive to identify his tormentors), he has all our sympathy.
His hotshot ADA, Nick, is arrogant, detached and no great shakes as a husband and father, either. No sooner has Jamie Foxx demonstrated commitment to his art with The Soloist than he takes complete leave of his senses to play an unbelievable character utterly unlikable from start to finish. But this is the kind of film that leaves you so disappointed in humanity, the planet would be better left to the cockroaches.ĭeath Wish vigilantism goes too far when you no longer grasp who you are supposed to be rooting for. They pander to lust for retribution, and get away with murder by appearing to offset wrong with right. Revenge thrillers never appeal to our better natures.