The ACLU gets an earful from their readers

From the ACLU Blog page on the Heller Decision, the ACLU starts by posting their official position on Heller...

The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller. While the decision is a significant and historic reinterpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, the decision leaves many important questions unanswered that will have to be resolved in future litigation, including what regulations are permissible, and which weapons are embraced by the Second Amendment right that the Court has now recognized.

Their readers, however, seem none too happy with this "retro" view of the 2nd Amendment. (Let's face it: Not even Justice Stevens pressed the moldy, old "collective rights" argument!) Here's a few choice comments...

• How can the ACLU (of which I’m a member) seriously consider the 2nd amendment to be a collective right, when there is not a single amendment in the bill of rights that refers to any collective or state rights, but rather individual rights and freedoms? Maybe this is something that the ACLU should logically address before taking this kind of a stance.

• I thought the ACLU’s purpose was to uphold the rights of American citizens, as dictated by the Supreme Court.

  Am I missing something?

• I just took the money I had slated to re-up my lapsed ACLU membership and used it to re-up my NRA membership.

  Sorry ACLU you lost me.

• ACLU, You’ve lost another American here. I will never donate a cent to your organization of crazy, intolerant lefties. The right to “keep and bear arms” as recognized by the 2nd Amendment is very clearly stated in the Bill of Rights. Only those who are either outright liars or power-hungry liars see it differently.You lose and will continue to lose. Your arguments are incredibly lame.

And my favorite...

• Q: How does an ACLU lawyer count to 10?
  A: 1, 3, 4, 5 . . .

Many have accused the ACLU of being nothing more than a front for the liberal/progressive movement in the US; that they promote partisan political causes rather than protect freedoms. Their prior lack of support for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and their current stance on Heller give credence to that view. This is why we so often refer to the NRA, and not the ACLU, as being "the oldest and largest civil rights organization in America".

A right to what, exaclty?

David Kopel asks: What is the right protected in the Heller dissent?

I have not yet studied the Stevens dissent in depth, but on my initial read, I was confused as what exactly is the scope of the individual right that Justice Stevens thinks the Second Amendment does protect?

Of course, as Kopel points out later, no right is protected. Stevens' argument it merely a "continuing repackaing of efforts to deny the validity of the Standard Model." The opinion, and the amici supporting Stevens, are trying to say "not an individual liberty" without using the word "not"; an impossible task. Maybe Bill Clinton could do it, but he's the master at that sort of doublethink; in a class by himself. Others ply his trade at their own peril!

The antis want an individual liberty that guarantees the right to gun laws; or, maybe a right to a cityscape undisturbed by gun stores. What they don't want is you having the right to own a gun. They especially don't want you using that gun to defend yourself or your family from a criminal assault.

Maybe they want to preserve your right to be beaten, raped, and murdered. Silly, you say? The truth is that they really don't mind you dying so long as no one suspects their cowardice. You see, they can't picture themselves doing what many gun owners have steeled themselves to do if, God forbid!, the occasion arises: To use their own arms to defend themselves without the government's help. To them, that's the stuff of action movie heroes, not them. They are convinced of their own cowardice. The last thing they want is a mere mortal like you doing what they fear they cannot. That would draw attention to their own inadequacies. Or so the tortured logic plays out in their minds. Thus, they rage against the very idea of self defense.

Are you saying to yourself "That's sick"? You should. This is what we have been fighting for all of these years. We have been fighting against laws written to cater to the irrational fears of a small, but politically influential, group of people. Now, thank God, the era of "gun control" is drawing to a close.

A new national holiday?

From FreeRepublic.com: An Annual Celebration?: Heller Day

He was for it before he was against it...

Where have I heard that before?


From Hot Air

San Francisco: Fighting to keep gays and lesbians disarmed

In response to that city's stubborn efforts to deny the rights of its citizens, the NRA sues to overturn San Francisco gun ban in city housing.

The San Francisco challenge includes an anonymous individual plaintiff, identified as "Guy Montag Doe," who is a gay man living in a San Francisco Housing Authority unit who said in court papers that he keeps a gun in his home to protect himself against hate crimes based on his sexual orientation.

In response, Mayor Newsom has vowed to keep his city's underprivileged unarmed and vulnerable. (Well, no... He didn't put it in exactly those terms. He used much nicer sounding words. But if you were on the receiving end of what Hizzoner would undoubtedly call a "hate crime", you'd be hard pressed to see the difference.)

And so it begins...

SCOTUSblog » New case tests Second Amendment’s reach

A lawsuit (McDonald, et al., v. City of Chicago, et al.) has been filed against the city of Chicago alleging that their DC-esque handgun law violates the 2nd and 14th Amendments.

Down the memory hole

I've noticed a funny trend in stories about Heller. Nearly all, as might be expected, make mention of Miller. But in pre-decision stories, Miller was usually characterized as saying the 2nd Amendment applied only to State militias; i.e. the National Guard. This is quite incorrect. Today, stories on Heller now correctly state that Miller was about the applicability of the 2nd Amendment to a sawed-off shotgun. I guess the previous Miller mythos has gone down the memory hole.

Not even one page in...

I kinda hoped I could get more than one page into Justice Stevens' dissent before I found myself shouting WRONG!! But alas, that wasn't to be. I got to the 3rd paragraph and just had to stop...

The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia.

That just isn't true. If that were the case, then the text of the amendment would read "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to maintain a well regulated militia shall not be infringed." I rather doubt that "keep and bear arms" was a typo or that the Founders simply misspelled "maintain a well regulate militia".

Update: I had to stop reading Stevens' dissent. The stubborn, don't-bother-me-with-the-facts nonsense was making my head hurt. I didn't even get to Breyer. I took a peek at it and it looks like Breyer is merely standing on Stevens' goofy shoulders.

Listen to the Brady Bunch squeeeeeal!!

Gun-Control Supporters Show Outrage - NYTimes.com - Am I having too much fun today?

The Antis are screeching and squealing over Heller. Of course, we knew they wouldn't be happy, but could they at least come up with some original material? Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is typical and predictable...

“Does this lead to everyone having a gun in our society?”
he said at a news conference. “If they think that’s the
answer, then they’re greatly mistaken. Then, why don’t we
do away with the court system and go back to the Old West? You have a
gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle in the streets.

The ol' Wild West gambit: Blood in the streets, gunfights in the parking lot, yada, yada, yada... Never mind that the "wild" west was considerably safer in its day than the "civilized" cities of the East. And the same holds true today. Those jurisdictions with lax gun laws are much safer than Washington DC, Chicago, New York, or any other gun control haven.

An end to some silly pontifications...

I'm really sick and tired of hearing aspiring intellectuals chatter on about how the text of the 2nd Amendment is vague, ambiguous, or "open to interpretation". Go read Justice Scalia's opinion. He makes it abundantly clear that there is one and only one possible meaning to the text; that individuals have a right to keep and bear arms for their own purposes, regardless of their status within the militia.

Justice Stevens gets a spanking

I'm about 1/4 of the way through the opinion. I wonder Justice Stevens' backside is stinging.

Heh, heh, heh...

Is it wrong of me to take delight in the fact that Justice Scalia quotes Justice Ginsburg in his discussion on the meaning of the phrase "bear arms"?

The Heller Decision

Posted here.

Quoting the syllabus: The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditional lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

And it get's better...

SCOTUSBlog's Tom Goldstein reports that there's only one majority opinion; so, there's no ambiguity about what the Court means in the Scalia-authored opinion.

Heller...

IS AFFIRMED!!!!!

This means that the lower court ruling, which recognized an individual liberty, is upheld! Details to follow.

Two down, one to go...

SCOTUS has released two opinions. Heller will be the last of the session.

A lot of NRA members are watching SCOTUSBlog

They've got a poll up on their LiveBlog...

SCOTUSBlog

Drum roll please....

Today's the day. Today we find out if the Court will respect the Constitution or if the Justices will mangle the language to see what isn't there and ignore what is.

I've been going back and forth over the last few months as to how optimistic/pessimistic I feel about this Court. They've had a few boners (Which I won't go into details about here since those cases aren't about firearms rights, the subject of this site), but more recent cases give me some hope. But we shall see if that hope is in vain in about 7 minutes.

Heller...

Not today.

The Court will issue more opinions tomorrow. There are still 3 cases outstanding for this term.

(And in an encouraging note, SCOTUSBlog is predicting that Justice Scalia is writing the Heller opinion!)

Heller this week

...or possibly today!

A good resource for all things Supreme Court is SCOTUSBlog.com. The Court begins releasing opinions shortly after 10am Eastern.

You'd think a former ConLaw prof would know better...

The Prof seems to have a bit to learn. From the Barack Obama campaign website...

Respect the Second Amendment: Millions of hunters own and use guns each year. Millions more participate in a variety of shooting sports such as sporting clays, skeet, target, and trap shooting that may not necessarily involve hunting. As a former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he greatly respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms. He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting. He also believes that the right is subject to reasonable and commonsense regulation.

Source

As a "former constitutional law professor", Barack Obama should know that the Constitution doesn't "create" new rights; it recognizes pre-existing rights. History teaches us that politicians who fail to recognize this distinction also fail to truly respect the Right to Keep and Bear Arms as an individual liberty. They invariably see the firearms ownership as a privilege granted by, and therefore revocable by, the government; not as a God given right.

Defining The Second Amendment

Stephen Halbrook pulls out his copy of Noah Webster's dictionary in Defining The Second Amendment.

Anticipating the Supreme Court's expected late June decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which will decide the constitutionality of a D.C. law restricting gun-ownership rights, many analysts have turned to the Founders' writings in an effort to understand the Second Amendment. What analysts need to do - recognizing that language and word usage change over time - is turn to America's first dictionary.

Much of what passes as legal argument from the antis involves redefining the English language so that the 2nd Amendment says whatever they want it to say. But for the text of the Amendment, or any other part of the Constitution, to have any meaning, we must look at what the writers meant by the words they chose. What the antis and their fellow travelers on the left don't see is the long term danger contained within their desire to distort the meanings of simple words. Larry Elder quotes Alan Dershowitz warning liberals of these dangers:

liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz... scolds fellow liberals for twisting the words of the Second Amendment in a way that could come back to haunt them. "Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming that it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a safety hazard," said Dershowitz, "don't see the danger of the big picture." He added, "They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like."

There is hope, however. None of the Supreme Court Justices made any serious attempt to use the antis' redefinitions of the words of the 2nd Amendment. Predicting Court decisions based upon the Justices' questions is risky, but this bodes well in any event.

Heller (nee Parker) granted cert.

We're goin' all in...

Justices to Hear Gun Control Case - New York Times

The Supreme Court agreed today to consider an issue that has divided politicians, constitutional scholars and ordinary citizens for decades: whether the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects an individual right to “keep and bear arms.”

The article in the NYT goes on to note that arguments will likely be heard next Spring.

...Just in time for the Primaries!

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A liberal's lament: The NRA might be right after all

Professor Jonathan Turley finds himself in the uncomfortable position of admitting that the NRA's interpretation of "the Voldemort amendment" might be right after all. In an OP-Ed piece in USA-TODAY, Turley writes...

Like many academics, I was happy to blissfully ignore the Second
Amendment. It did not fit neatly into my socially liberal agenda. Yet,
two related cases could now force liberals into a crisis of conscience.

He refers, of course, to Heller and its parent case, Parker. Like other liberals before him, Turley noticed that one cannot engage in a fanciful reading of the 2nd Amendment without putting the rest of the Bill or Rights in peril.

Principle is a terrible thing, because it demands not what is convenient but what is right. It is hard to read the Second Amendment and not honestly conclude that the Framers intended gun ownership to be an individual right.

If only more liberals were more principled.

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A note on Heller...

You might notice that I still often refer to the Heller case by its old name, Parker. This is just to keep the various posts tied together using Blogger.com's labels feature. Also, some of the linked articles are using the old name.

Chi-town antis sweatin' Parker...

James Oliphant at the Chicago tribune notes that the D.C. gun case may hit Chicago.

On Tuesday, the district government appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. If the court takes the case, as many observers believe it will, it could place Chicago's handgun ban, as well as similar laws nationwide, in jeopardy.

To go back to that poker analogy, this is what it means to go all in.

Oliphant notes that the Chi-town ban is a "close cousin" to the DC ban. It also has a grandfathering clause that makes compliance with the ban's registration requirement impossible for new gun buyers. And like the DC ban, the Chicago ban has produced a thriving black market. Of course, illegal gun dealers don't check for IDs or ask a buyer's age in either city. Unlike what one finds in a legal merchant's shop, a 14-year old's money is just as good as anyone else's when the shop is the trunk of a '92 Camry.

(On our side of the argument, we call those "unintended consequences".)

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Parker reactions...

As part of The Federalist Society Online Debate Series, Glenn Reynolds made this comment on certiorari...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Supreme Court will deny certiorari on this case. I think that's likely because of the difficult position the Court would be placed in if it failed to find an individual right to arms under the Second Amendment. As Prof. Mike O'Shea wrote Concurring Opinions : How many Americans would view District of Columbia v. Parker as the most important court case of the last thirty years? The answer must run into seven figures. The decision would have far-reaching effects, particularly in the event of a reversal. Here is one way to think about the message the Supreme Court would be sending if it reversed the D.C. Circuit on the merits in Parker . . . That's a comparison between the Court's handling of the enumerated rights claim at issue in Parker, and its demonstrated willingness to embrace even non-enumerated individual rights that are congenial to the political left, in cases like Roe and Lawrence. "So the Constitution says Roe, but it doesn't say I have the right to keep a gun to defend my home, huh?" The Court's jurisprudence of unenumerated rights (with which I'm largely in agreement, by the way) would make it politically very difficult for the Court to eviscerate a clearly enumerated right to which many Americans attach great importance. At the same time, I don't think the Court is willing to affirm in Parker. If I'm right, a denial of certioriari is the only way for the Court to avoid a very difficult situation

An interesting observation. Might the Supremes simply run and hide?

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It's official...

D.C. will appeal Heller. (nee Parker.)

SCOTUSblog has links to the city's pleading and other materials.

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Goin' all in...

SCOTUSblog is reporting that the DC city government will be appealing the Parker case to the Supreme Court. Oddly, they've left the filing for so long that they're requesting an extension to file their case. (The deadline was originally Aug. 8.)

In poker, that's quite a tell when the other guy take so long to chew on a bet. One wonders what lobbying was going on in Mayor Fenty's office. How many in the anti-gun lobby were pressuring him to let sleeping dogs lie?

They must not listen to much Country music in DC

There's got to be at least one Country music station in DC...

You got know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run

-The Gambler, by Kenny Rogers

Mayor Fenty, it's time to run!

The WaPo writes that the Parker Gun Ban Ruling Puts Fenty on the Spot.

"As he wades into a high-stakes debate over the Second Amendment, the new mayor of the nation's capital faces the possibility that the city could lose the case and undercut decades of hard-fought gun-control legislation across the country."

Fenty's hand looked good at the flop, but the wheels started to wiggle and jiggle at the turn. And when the river card hit the felt, the wheels came off. Even the most zealous members of the anti-gun lobby are sounding like it's time to make for the door.

Hopefully, the mayor will take the advice of those who counsel fleeing. And thus far, he's not harumphing and promising to "take this all the way to the Supreme Court!!".

The DC gun ban (And it is, in practice, a ban!) is a legislative mess. Legislative messes should be cleaned up by legislators, not judges. While there would be an undeniable advantage for gun owners to have a favorable pro-RKBA ruling from the Supreme Court to use as a club in States like California, it would be better for our Republic if our elected representatives behaved like adults and wrote laws that comport with the Constitution. Ultimately, it harms our nation if our legislatures cannot fulfill their role in government; leaning on the judicial branch instead of thinking for themselves.

Mayor Fenty will best serve his city and the Nation if he quits this case while he can. Lay your cards down and rewrite this flawed law, Mr. Mayor.

Parker update...

Appellate Judges Let Gun Ruling Stand - washingtonpost.com

The Federal appeals court for DC declined a request by the city for an en banc hearing. The court voted 6-4 to deny the city's request. The city, predictably, has its collective knickers in a twist. Mayor Fenty expressed a Daschlelian level of rage saying that he's "deeply disappointed". The city's ruling poobahs must decide now if they wish to go "all in" with the US Supreme Court or fold and re-write their laws.

Personally, I think that since their laws are a legislative mistake, a legislative fix is preferable to a judicial fix. Many on our side, however, would like to see a SCOTUS ruling. Would it not have been better to have never been in this situation at all; that legislators at all levels of government would have had such an ingrained respect for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms that laws such as the DC gun ban would never have been passed in the first place? The next best thing to such an alternative history is that lawmakers develop that respect now and start to dismantle their unconstitutional gun laws without a court order. We shall see if DC develops that kind of respect for liberty.

On a related note: This quote from the WaPo story deserves comment...

D.C. Assistant Police Chief Winston Robinson Jr. said he's sorry that some residents don't feel safe in their homes without guns but stressed that the recent massacre at Virginia Tech should remind them that guns don't increase safety.

"More than likely, that weapon in their home will be used against them," Robinson said. "Just think about what happened recently in Virginia: guns in the hands of people who shouldn't have them."

Chief Wiggum Robinson must not have been paying close attention. The VT massacre took place in a "gun free" zone; like they have in DC. The only ones paying attention to the gun ban were the victims; like it is in DC. What would it have been like at VT if the unarmed victims weren't legally required to be unarmed victims?

...like they are in DC.

Sandra Froman: Why You Should Care About Parker v. District of Columbia

Sandra Froman writes about Parker v. District of Columbia: "There is a case working its way to the Supreme Court that might settle one of the biggest unanswered questions in constitutional law: Does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual right to own a gun? Whether or not you own a gun, this is a case you should care about."

(A copy of the ruling can be found here.)