The US 7th Circuit has struck down Illinois’ civilian firearms carry ban:

The state of Illinois would have to allow ordinary citizens to carry weapons under a federal appeals court ruling issued today, but the judges also gave lawmakers 180 days to put their own version of the law in place.

In a 2-1 decision that is a major victory for the National Rifle Association, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said the state’s ban on carrying a weapon in public is unconstitutional.

“We are disinclined to engage in another round of historical analysis to determine whether eighteenth-century America understood the Second Amendment to include a right to bear guns outside the home. The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside,” the judges ruled.

And there’s your importance of Heller and McDonald, right there.

“The theoretical and empirical evidence (which overall is inconclusive) is consistent with concluding that a right to carry firearms in public may promote self-defense. Illinois had to provide us with more than merely a rational basis for believing that its uniquely sweeping ban is justified by an increase in public safety. It has failed to meet this burden.

Boy, has it ever.

David Sigale, an attorney who represented the Second Amendment Foundation in the lawsuit, called the decision by the appeals court in Chicago “historic.”

“What we are most pleased about is how the court has recognized that the Second Amendment is just as, if not at times more, important in public as it is in the home,” he said. “The right of self-defense doesn’t end at your front door.”

I loved the little bit of closet fascism buried in this next graf (emphasis added):

 Mayor Rahm Emanuel said through a spokesman that he was “disappointed with the court’s decision.” The city is reviewing the opinion and will work with others “to best protect the residents of Chicago and still meet constitutional restrictions,” Bill McCaffrey added.

Comandante “Mayor” Emanuel:  your city is a war zone.  The best thing you can do to “protect the residents” is require each of them to become proficient at firearms.

(more…)

Retired SCOTUS Justice Stevens is many things.

• He’s a liberal dinosaur.
• If you are either a pro-Second-Amendment Democrat or a Gary Johnson voter, he is a big reason to suck it up and vote for Mitt; the thought that another Obama term means three more “justices” like him should keep you up at night.
• He’d seem to be one of those lawyers that you just want to punch when they’re in their twenties and thirties and strutting around showing everyone how much smarter than everyone else they like to think they are.
• He’s either hopelessly ignorant, or he’s senile

This piece in the WashEx is evidence for all of the above:

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens called for Congress to tighten gun laws in the wake of shootings such as the one that took place in Aurora, Colorado.

So Aurora can be as safe as Chicago!

Stevens noted that the legal precedent for restricting gun rights — United States vs. Miller — still stands, despite the ruling in the 2005 Heller case that overturned the Washington, D.C., ban on owning handguns, even in one’s own home.

Which proves the “dinosaur” case.

The “senile” case?  That comes next (with emphasis added by me):

“[Miller] was generally understood to limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to the uses of arms that were related to military activities,” Stevens said today during a question-and-answer session after a speech today with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s Legal Action Project. “The Court did not overrule Miller [in Heller].

That’s technically true.  Heller overruled a specious, logically-vacuous train of opinion in lower courts that Miller meant that the Second Amendment was not a right “Of the People”, but that it might refer to assemblies of people like the National Guard.

Remember the bolded bit.  We’ll be coming back to it very shortly.

Back to Justice and Dolt Stevens:

Instead it ‘read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns . . . Thus, the Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations permitting the ownership or the use of the sorts of the automatic weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado, or Arizona in recent years.”

For starters, Stevens – like the entire generation of bobbleheaded activists that spawned him – contradicts himself; he said Miller was limited in scope to the use of military weapons – which are, largely, “automatic”.  Meaning…

…well, not what “Justice” and senile fool Stevens thinks.  Here’s some remedial firearms education:  this is “automatic”:

This is “Semi-Automatic” – a mode found on many hunting firearms and possibly the majority of personal defensive handguns:

It was semi-automatic weapons that were used in virtually every major shooting – not full automatic.  The death tolls were not a function of gun’s firing mechanism, but of the fact that the victims were packed into small spaces and rendered defenseless…

…by the laws the likes of Justice Stevens foisted on us.

Stevens also had a recommendation for people who keep a weapon in their homes for self-defense purposes. “Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 911 in the number at your bedside and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun which you’re not used to using,” he said to laughter.

My next 200 rounds at the range is dedicated to you, “Justice” Idiot Stevens.

As will be my next semi-automatic rifle purchase.

You’re welcome.

Matt Bai of WorldNet Daily, in the intro of a piece that tries to separate fact from self-indulgent liberal fiction in re the Citizens United case’s impact on politics.

Libs, of course, have been telling themselves and (mostly) everyone else that Citizens United completely swept away the foundations of democracy.

As a matter of political strategy, this is a useful story to tell, appealing to liberals and independent voters who aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about the administration but who are concerned about societal inequality, which is why President Obama has made it a rallying cry almost from the moment the Citizens United ruling was made. But if you’re trying to understand what’s really going on with politics and money, the accepted narrative around Citizens United is, at best, overly simplistic. And in some respects, it’s just plain wrong.

Read the whole thing.  And pass it on to your liberal and propaganda-addled (ptr) friends.

UPDATE:  Whoops – it wasn’t in WorldNet Daily.  The piece appears in that noted conservative tool, the NYTimes.

I regret the confusion.

UPDATE 2:  Bai, not Sai.

Congresswoman Betty McCollum – my “repreentative” – put out a press release after yesterday’s SCOTUS decision:.

“Two years ago, I was proud to vote in support of the Affordable Care Act. Today’s historic Supreme Court decision affirms President Obama’s leadership to extend healthcare coverage to millions of Americans.

…and destroying the healthcare system and Americans’ sovereign rights to make key life decisions for themselves, rather than having them mandated by the government.

It is now time for Republicans in Congress to end their vitriolic repeal campaign and work on effectively implementing this law to the benefit of the American people.”

And there you go,.  “Vitriolic”.

Dissent is hate!

We need to repeal Obamacare.  And we need to repeal Betty McCollum’s job as Congresswoman.

If you can spare a buck or two – or an hour or two – please donate or volunteer for the Tony Hernandez campaign.

From SCOTUSBlog’s liveblog of the Obamacare decision:

The money quote from the section on the mandate: Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.

And so like any other unjust or intrusive tax, we need to aboliish it.

If this isn’t the call to wake up, organize Republicans and get to the polls to vote airtight straight tickets for conservatives who wijll win, and who will go to Washington focused like laser beams on expunging Obamacare, then nothing is, and this nation is doomed.

…for the SCOTUS to hand down their decisions on Stolen Valor and that other case, here’s something you can use at the water cooler when your lefty friends inevitably call the Roberts court “activist”:

Here’s the data on the first five years of the Roberts Court (gleaned from this NYTimes infographic):

 

(1) The Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts overturned precedent decisions at an average rate of 2.7, 2.8 and 2.4 per term, respectively. By contrast, the Roberts Court overturned precedent only at an average rate of 1.6 per term.

(2) The Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts overturned laws at an average rate of 7.9, 12.5, and 6.2 laws per term. By contrast, the Roberts Court struck down only 3 laws per term.

 

Just three laws per term! Far, far from being “eager” to overturn legislatures, as hack Toobin dribbled, and obviously, indisputably playing no unusual role in “second-guessing laws,” as Fallows alarmingly squeaked, the Roberts Court has been a model of restraint. Restraint is, naturally, one of Chief Justice Roberts’ well-known characteristics and it was remarked upon during his confirmation hearings. One could even creditably call the Roberts Court the most restrained, incrementalist Court of the modern era. (I assure you, these numbers have not changed appreciably in the past two years.)

So historically the Roberts court is quite conservative, and by that i’m talking in terms of judicial restraint.

But to a wahhabi lefty, “activist” means “rules against us”:

Should the mandate be overturned today, liberals will repeat their lie endlessly in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and to tarnish the Chief Justice’s good name.

Anyone taking bets on whether Ed Schultz, in a fit of self-righteous fury, tells his fans to storm the court with pitchforks and torches?

Remember when Obama’s career as a “Constitutional Scholar” was supposedly a signal qualification for his bid for the presidency?

As we career toward the Supreme’s – ahem, the “Death Panel’s” – decision on Obamacare, either does law professor Glenn Reynolds:

Perhaps if Obama had ever written any scholarly articles on the Commerce Clause, he’d have had a better understanding. But then, he never wrote any scholarly articles on anything. As former Obama colleague Richard Epstein said: “I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.”

Not that being an intellectual is especially a qualification for the Presidency either; career academic Woodrow Wilson was not only one of our most disastrous presidents ever, but one of the most disastrous leaders in world history, whose incompetence caused problems we’re still paying for in treasure and blood (although he’s criminally overrated by the same academy he sprang from).

But as to those who said Obama’s tenure as a “constitutional law professor” was some sort of dispositive qualification for office?  Baked wind.  A President needs to know the Constitution about as well as a good policeman.  He’s got people to do the detail work.

Although with any luck, Obama’s going to need some new ones tomorrow.

The SCOTUS kicked the can for the Obamacare ruling down the road to next week.

Predictions?

Remember back in 2008, when liberals would stare all starry-eyed into space with that look teenagers used to get when Leif Garrett or Nick Carter appeared in Tiger Beat: “Oooh, Barack Obama was a constitutional lawyer!  That’s an ideal background for a President!”

At best, it’s irrelevant; a President needs to know about as much about Constitutional Law as a good cop does.  He’s got people for the complicated stuff.

At worst?  It’s one of the worst possible backgrounds for a President; the last think you want to do is turn lawyers loose around the law with nearly unlimited power.

Thom Lambert – a lawyer and former law student of President Obama – knows better:

Imagine if you picked up your morning paper to read that one of your astronomy professors had publicly questioned whether the earth, in fact, revolves around the sun. Or suppose that one of your economics professors was quoted as saying that consumers would purchase more gasoline if the price would simply rise. Or maybe your high school math teacher was publicly insisting that 2 + 2 = 5. You’d be a little embarrassed, right? You’d worry that your colleagues and friends might begin to question your astronomical, economic, or mathematical literacy.

(That’s one of the things I always wondered about people who went to law schools or “elite” universities; the idea that the institution one attends defines one’s personality, or indeed personhood.  To the extent it does, it’s in the sense of say “Hey, look at me, I went to Cornell, Go Tigers” – or, for that matter, “I’m qualified for a job because I went to an Ivy League school” – at in appropriate times).

(But I digress).

Now you know how I felt this morning when I read in the Wall Street Journal that my own constitutional law professor had stated that it would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the Supreme Court to “overturn[] a law [i.e., the Affordable Care Act] that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Putting aside the “strong majority” nonsense (the deeply unpopular Affordable Care Act got through the Senate with the minimum number of votes needed to survive a filibuster and passed 219-212 in the House), saying that it would be “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” for the Supreme Court to strike down a law that violates the Constitution is like saying that Kansas City is the capital of Kansas.

The Democrats, presiding as they have over four years of rot and decay, have switched to the “say what you’d like the truth to be and hope people buy it” school of public relations.  History shows it’s not a bad choice, albeit it’s still wrong…

Thus, a Wall Street Journal editorial queried this about the President who “famously taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago”: “[D]id he somehow not teach the historic case of Marbury v. Madison?”

I actually know the answer to that question. It’s no (well, technically yes…he didn’t). President Obama taught “Con Law III” at Chicago. Judicial review, federalism, the separation of powers — the old “structural Constitution” stuff — is covered in “Con Law I” (or at least it was when I was a student). Con Law III covers the Fourteenth Amendment. (Oddly enough, Prof. Obama didn’t seem too concerned about “an unelected group of people” overturning a “duly constituted and passed law” when we were discussing all those famous Fourteenth Amendment cases – Roe v. Wade, Griswold v. Connecticut, Romer v. Evans, etc.) Of course, even a Con Law professor focusing on the Bill of Rights should know that the principle of judicial review has been alive and well since 1803, so I still feel like my educational credentials have been tarnished a bit by the President’s “unprecedented, extraordinary” remarks.

Read the whole thing.

And then get a friend to come out to the polls to vote The Light Worker out of office this fall.

Judicial Activisim.

To a conservative, it’s writing new law from the bench.

To a liberal / neosocialist?  It’s upholding the Constitution.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

President Obama said:

“And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example, and I’m pretty confident this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

Judicial activism. You keep using that phrase. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Which is true.  But the real point is, just watch; this’ll be the opening salvo of an effort by the Administration, Media Matters and the left and media (ptr) to reframe “Judicial Activism” as a synonym for “Originalism”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I am willing to bet a crisp new $1.00 bill that Obamacare will be upheld in its entirety by the US Supreme Court.

The four liberal justices will say it’s fine – indeed, doesn’t go far enough.

The four conservative justices will say it’s abhorrent to the concept of enumerated powers and must be stuck down.

Anthony Kennedy will decide that ordinarily, the federal government can’t reach so broadly under its power to regulate interstate commerce. But he’ll find that the right to decide when and where to have a family is a Constitutional right and some people can’t afford birth control pills or abortions, so the entire nation can be forced to buy health care insurance in order to fund poor people’s birth control choices. In this one unique situation, the constitutional right to abortion is so important that any means the government uses to fund it, is justified.

5-4 to uphold.

Place your bets now.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

No action on that bet.

It’s waaaaaay too plausible.

…it’s almost reassuring to see that gun violence in Washington DC, which along with Chicago is the model city for gun control, is skyrocketing…:

Violent crime so far this year in the District has spiked sharply — a 40 percent increase that includes twice as many robberies at gunpoint than at this time last year.

Across the city, all police districts are reporting increases in violent crime, and all but one have had double-digit percentage increases, according to internal Metropolitan Police Department documents. The documents contained preliminary crime data for the city as of Thursday.

The crime rate is increasing this year after a downward trend — the number of reported homicides last year dropped to the lowest level in a half-century.

Homicides were the only category of violent crime to decline in the first six weeks this year. As of Thursday, the city had recorded 10 homicides compared with 11 at a similar point last year.

Overall, though, incidents of violent crime — homicides, sexual assaults, robberies and assaults with deadly weapons — are rising at an alarming pace.

…even as the Democrat orcs that govern our federal cesspool continue to stonewall the law-abiding gun owner and the defy post-Heller law of the land.

Democrats! The blood of all those innocent victims is on your hands!

Government’s assault on human rights finally hits it where it lives; in its budget.  

The District of Columbia owes the plaintiff in Heller Vs. DC for legal fees and expenses:.

Dick Heller sued the city in 2003 over its ban on handgun ownership and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban in June 2008, saying it violated the Second Amendment.

A federal judge on Thursday issued an opinion awarding Heller’s attorneys $1,137,072.27 in fees and expenses. The attorneys had argued they should be awarded $3.1 million. Attorneys for the city said the figure should be closer to $840,000.

Governments can try to ignore speedbumps like “the Constitution” and “the law” and “morality”. But once you start talking money?

This could get fun.

Government loves to accrete power unto itself.

Because, say it and its adherents, there are some jobs that government just plain does better.

And in some cases, arguably, they have a good case.  Defense?  Sure.  Courts?  Yep.  Law Enforcement?  Sure, usually.  Public education?  Enh.  Roads?  Well, that’s the way we do it, I guess. Welfare?  Ugh. Economic planning?  Heh.  No.

Now, some believe government just plain does it all better.  Larry Pogemiller’s a great example – as he himself once said, “I think it’s silly to assume that people can spend their own money better than government can”.

Anyway, opinions vary.  But either way, one of the ways government does things is by “eminent domain” – basically, taking private property for the public benefit, whether that benefit is a road (mkay) or a hospital (sure) or…

…well, the projects range all over the place.  Being a government program, it can be used to further pretty much any government agenda.  It’s been used in the Twin Cities to seize the property of businesses in downtown Minneapolis to build the Target headquarters, and around 494 and Penn to make room for Best Buy – because government decided it just plain knew better than the people who were already there.

Anyway – one of the signal events in the history of Eminent Domain was the “Kelo” case, a SCOTUS case decided in 2005.  Pfizer wanted New London, Connecticut’s government to seize some private property to build an office/R’nD facility.

Pfizer won.

Everyone lost.

Brian Garst at Breitbart notes the rest of the story:

The public response was one of outrage. Facing the potential wrath of voters, politicians across the country moved to add new protections against such abusive seizures. But that wasn’t enough to save the homes of the folks in New London, whose property never would be developed. Pfizer, the intended beneficiary of the land theft, walked away years ago from their development plans.

Now, to add new insult to injury, the vacant lot is a dump. Literally.

 

But via » Years Later, Land Seized in Kelo Decision Used for Debris Dump – Big Government.

In 2005, Kelo v. City of New London made eminent domain infamous. The widely reviled Supreme Court ruling gave the go ahead for the city of New London to use eminent domain for taking private property in order that it be given to a private company for “economic development.”

The public response was one of outrage. Facing the potential wrath of voters,  politicians across the country moved to add new protections against such abusive seizures. But that wasn’t enough to save the homes of the folks in New London, whose property never would be developed. Pfizer, the intended beneficiary of the land theft, walked away years ago from their development plans.

It gets worse.  After all that – the legal wrangling, the government arrogance at all levels, the failure of the “devleopment” plan and the evaporation of the promised “economic development”, what happened?

Now, to add new insult to injury, the vacant lot is a dump. Literally.

Following hurricane Irene, the city designated the site as a place to dump storm debris, and citizens can be seen doing just that in this video on the local paper’s website.

Doesn’t that make you feel all warm inside? The Supreme Court reassured us in Kelo that the government orchestrated theft “would be executed pursuant to a “carefully considered” development plan.” What they forgot to mention is that careful consideration from politicians is worth about as much as the city’s new debris dump, which is to say: diddly squat.

It’s a metaphor, really, for most government action; it’s a fiction that government, choked with special interests, bureaucrats motivated toward accreting power and politicians who crave votes, can plan anything better than the invisible hand of the market.

The fact of the matter is that the development of the property was already being “carefully considered” by the folks that owned it, as is the case for all privately held property, and in their careful consideration they wanted to keep living on it. The lesson of Kelo is not merely on the illusory nature of our property rights. It’s also about the abject failure that is central planning, and the inability of political forces to better plan economic activity than the private sector.

Robert Merrill – a veteran Marine officer who spent three years at Harvard Law –   leaps to Elena Kagan’s defense, at least in re

If Elena Kagan is “anti-military,” she certainly didn’t show it. She treated the veterans at Harvard like VIPs, and she was a fervent advocate of our veterans association. She was decidedly against “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but that never affected her treatment of those who had served. I am confident she is looking forward to the upcoming confirmation hearings as an opportunity to engage in some intellectual sparring with members of Congress over her Supreme Court nomination. I would respectfully warn them to do their homework, as she has a reputation for annihilating the unprepared.

In my opinion, Kagan’s positions never affected the services’ ability to recruit at Harvard. Behind the scenes, the dean ensured that our tiny HLS Veterans Association never lacked for funds or access to facilities. Recruiters simply could not use the school’s Office of Career Services. Does this demonstrate an “activist” streak, as some have proclaimed? I don’t think so. The school’s policy against discrimination was akin to black-letter law. If anything, Kagan was an activist in ensuring that military recruiters had viable access to students and facilities despite the official ban. A Boston-area recruiter later told me that the biggest hurdle he faced recruiting at Harvard Law was trying to answer the students’ strangely intellectual questions.

There may be a lot of reasons to keep Elena Kagan off the Supreme Court – she’s a preening elitist on a court already so full of Ivy Leaguers, she’s a not-so-closeted authoritarian, whatever.  Maybe hatred of the military isn’t one of them…

To:  Mayor Richard Daley

From: Mitch Berg, Real American

Re:  Your priorities

Mayor Daley,

Your city is overrun by gang-bangers who, despite your gun ban, make your city more violent than Baghdad today.

Your city is broke – and that great legacy of your city’s corrupt, stupid system, Barack Obama, is doing the same to the rest of the nation.

So now that the Supreme Court has strapped your city’s moronic gun ban – itself a racist concoction and a legacy of your notoriously corrupt father’s tenure in office – into the chair and gotten the switch ready to flip, I suppose it makes sense that you’ll focus on the “real problem”, the law-abiding gun owner:

As expected, Mayor Daley and Chicago’s City Council are circling the wagons to defend against an unfavorable decision by the Supreme Court concerning the city’s gun ban.

Daley said the city would have in place a new ordinance aimed at making it difficult to purchase and own a gun in Chicago.

“We’ll publicly propose a new ordinance very soon,” Daley said at an afternoon press conference concerning the gun ban.

Great to see you’ve got your priorities straight.

That is all.

As Real America celebrates the judicial whack the SCOTUS gave the City of Chicago, even the ChiTrib notes how miserably Chicago’s gun ban has failed; Justice Alito, in his majority opinion, noted:

“[A group of Democratic Illinois legislators who proposed calling in the National Guard to try to re-take Chicago’s blood-drenched streets] noted that the number of Chicago homicide victims during the current year equaled the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the opinion stated.

“If (the) safety of . . . law abiding members of the community would be enhanced by the possession of handguns in the home for self-defense, then the Second Amendment right protects the rights of minorities and other residents of high-crime areas whose needs are not being met by elected public officials.”

If you can say anything about the government of Chicago, it’s that it doesn’t meet the needs of the people for safety.

And if there’s anything we can count on Richard Daley for, it’s that he’ll do his best to reinforce failure.

Just what kind of idiot is Chicago’s mayor?

In an interview with the Tribune, the mayor said his primary goal would be to protect police officers, paramedics and emergency workers from being shot when responding to an incident at a home.

Right – because cop-killers obey gun bans.

Now, if the NRA doesn’t print Daley’s next statement on T-shirts, and if the GOP doesn’t post it on billboards, and if the Illinois Tea Party isn’t harping on it at the top of their lungs, then all of them need to leave their jobs and never come back:

 He said he also wants to save taxpayers from the financial cost of lawsuits if police shoot someone in the house because the officer felt threatened.

Got that?   The law-abiding should remain unprotected so Daley’s cops don’t get the city in trouble for blazing away at people in their own homes.

It’s East Germany on Lake Michigan.

Come to think of it, maybe they do need the National Guard. 

They should storm City Hall.

Today, the United States Supreme Court issued a legal groin-kick with steel-toed boots to the idea that the human right of self-defense exists at the sufference of governments and bureaucrats, in ruling for Otis McDonald XXX to XXX in his seminal lawsuit against the Duchy City of Chicago.

Monday’s decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that they would eventually fall.

Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities “limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values.”

Now, it’s our turn.

———-

If you know me, you know I love a good analogy from military history.

The late sixties?  Those were, metaphorically, the years when the Germans rolled across Europe at will; gun control essentially won the battle for the hearts and minds of…well, much of the American “elite” and “intelligentsia”, and it felt like there was litte Real America could do about it.

1987, when Florida became the ninth state, and by far the largest, to adopt “shall-issue” concealed carry?  That was the Dieppe Raid raid; a bold counterstroke that showed Real America may have been down, but not out.

1991, when Dr. Sanford Levinson released The Embarassing Second Amendment in the Yale Law Review?  That was the battle of El Alamein; not a definitive battle in and of itself, it showed the world that the anti-freedom juggernaut was not invulnerable, and could be defeated.

2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in Heller that “Right of the People” meant people, not “National Guard”?  That was the bloody, ugly battle of the Atlantic, and the air battle over Germany, which made what was to follow feasible in the first place.

And this, today?  The McDonald decision?  It’s D-Day.  It’s the day all the preparatory work – the Yaltas, the raiding, the negotiations, the legal scholarship, the bombing, the posturing – all comes to an end.  It’s the day the big players – the Churchills and Hestons, the Mussolinis and the Lillehaugs, the Montgomeries and Guras, the Hitlers and the Heather Martens, the Pattons and the Kopels, the Swiss and the Laurence Tribes, the Goerings and the Daleys, the Eisenhowers and the Scalias – find their work, if not “done”, at least receding to the rear.  It’s now the job of the infantry.

That’d be us.  The grass roots.

The decision makes the court’s opinion in Heller, that the Second Amendment is a right of the people, binding on lower levels of law – as it should – but doesn’t toss out local laws wholesale.  Again, rightly.  A principled judicial conservative doesn’t legislate from the bench.

And so it’s up to us – the grass roots, the “infantry” of the Human Rights movement – to take up the battle now.  To take this battle to every pillbox of fascism and racism, the gun-grabbing city halls and state legislatures and county commissions, and turn the flamethrower of reason, the satchel charge of the Constitution, and the bayonet of human liberty on them, and destroy them, one by one, all of them.  To pound them out of existence through the weight of our numbers, the unstoppable passion of our attack, and the rightness of our cause.

And many of us “infantry” in the Higgins boats today won’t be here in the front lines when the news finally comes down that Gun Control, holed up in its bunker in San Francisco, has stuck a metaphoric (and ironic!) gun in its legal and social mouth and brought an end to the war.  This, as Churchill said, isn’t the end, or even the beginning of the end.   It’s the end of the beginning.

And it’s our job – every one of us Real Americans – to bring this thing to its end.  A prudent end, with Real, law-abiding Americans in control and criminals cowering in fear; a just end, with banana-republic tyrants like Richard Daley groveling for forgiveness before the souls of the thousands killed for want of the human right to self-defense, perhaps waddling through the afterlife with the symbolic muzzle of a metaphorical Mosin-Nagant jammed into his nether regions as cosmic penance; a sane end, with “gun control” spoken with the same dirty sneer that “McCarthyism” or “racism” get today.

And that end got a little closer today.

And it’s all in front of us.

Congratulations, Real America.  Take a day to celebrate.  Tomorrow, you’ll earn it all over again.

God Bless America.

By a vote of 5-4 breaking upon straight “party” ‘lines, the Supreme Court of the United States at long last  ruled that the Second Amendment is as much a “right of the people” in New York or Tucumcari or Chicago as the Heller decision two years ago said it was in Washington DC; it’s a right of the people, not the militia or the police or, as usual in big Democrat-controlled cities, the favorited elites with political clout.

The decision rules that the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporates” the Second, making it a right binding on state and local law.

Alito, Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Kennedy stood with freedom, liberty and human rights.

Sotomayor, Ginsberg, Stevens and Breyer took the side of oppression, smug elitism and racism.

 While this decision doesn’t end the racist, authoritarian notion of “gun control” aimed at the law-abiding, it does give Real Americans the constitutional wherewithal to stomp it out of existence in the legislatures, city councils and lower courts around the country.

This is not total victory – no conservative justice would ever impose legislation from the bench onto the whole country.  But it’s a huge start.

More – much more – as this amazing day progresses.

God Bless America.

Chief Justice Roberts has announced tomorrow will be the last day of the Supreme Court term.  And it’s gonna be a doozy:

In eagerly awaited rulings, the nation’s highest court is expected to decide the constitutionality of a national board that polices auditors of public companies…

…AKA “Sarbanes Oxley”, itself a huge issue…

…and whether gun rights extend to every state and city in the nation.

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog writes:

I predict that Justice Alito will write the Court’s opinion in McDonald recognizing that the Second Amendment is incorporated.  But given Justice Alito’s sensitivity towards law enforcement, I doubt that the opinion will call into question a broad swath of firearms regulation.

That’s as it should be, frustrating as it may be in the short run; the case should set the stage for a  huge legislative effort to overturn fascist gun-control laws.  And if all goes well tomorrow, it’ll give Real America the constitutional tools it needs to exactly that.

I will, to say the least, be watching, and writing on the McDonald decision at my earliest opportunity.

It’s come down to Tuesday.

Next Tuesday is the final day of the Supreme Court session.  They are due to release their decision in McDonald Vs. Chicago.  It will likely make the Second Amendment binding on state governments at some level or another. 

We’ll come back to that.

If the good guys beat the orcs on Tuesday, it’ll be the capstone on a generally good year for freedom; the Second Amendment Human Rights movement has made many advances. 

But nobody ever expected the orcs to roll over and play dead; un-American anti-liberty sentiment is deeply entrenched in some of our nation’s more benighted, nanny-state-prone areas:

[“Brady Campaign for Victim Disarmament” state legislative director Brian] Malte points to states such as California, Illinois and much of the Northeast, where he says gun advocates have largely failed to make inroads. And gun-control advocates have played offense some this session, too. In New York State, for example, the Assembly passed “microstamping” legislation, before the bill stalled in the Senate, although supporters hope to revive it this fall. The bill would require that semiautomatic pistols made or sold in the state stamp cartridges with the make, model and serial number of the gun when it’s fired.

I’m not a gun manufacturer.  But if I were, I’d make sure the dies on the inside of my New York-bound chambers all gave the make, model, serial number, and a big clear “F*ck Michael Bloomberg”.   By the way, while I’ve heard some moderate gun-controllers throw this out as a “reasonable” possibility, all it’ll do in the short term is make for tidier criminals and a market for cartridge-catcher bags, and in the long run add to the state of New York’s level of criminal expertise in grinding off microstamp dies, to say nothing of making revolvers the preferred weapon of gangland assassins.

 In California, the Assembly passed a bill that would ban the practice known as “open carry,” which allows people to carry an unloaded gun in plain sight, even if the person also is carrying ammunition as well.

That should solve the violence problem.

The point is this; Tuesday may bring human-rights advocates a victory – but the legislative battle is going to go on.  A victory on Tuesday will clear some of the more insipid legal obstacles – but the orcs are still out there, and need to be killed off (rhetorically and politically), one at a time.

The Supreme Court released opnions on four cases on Monday, the third-to-last day for such releases (as I understand it, and stop me if I’m wrong) this term.

That leaves them 20 opinions to release over the next two Mondays, including McDonald Vs. City of Chicago, the likely-to-be-landmark Second Amendment case that, if all goes well, will force all state and local governments to treat the Amendment as the founding fathers wrote it; a right of The People . Not the National Guard or police; not people with political and administrative clout.  The People.

Anyone wanna lay odds they hold off until the last decision of the last day of the session, June 28?

The mystery, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce that has been Elena Kagan might be granted a little more clarifying light with the release of her Princeton and Oxford theses:

The battle for the Second Amendment, in my lifetime, has turned nearly 180 degrees.  When I was a kid (and a liberal), things were looking pretty bleak; US V. Miller was broadly (and mistakenly) accepted as a precedent; the media and big government culture largely regarded firearms as a social illness that needed to be controlled and then eradicated.

But in one of the greatest grass-roots political movements in American history, millions of law-abiding citizens have turned the tide, for now – vote by vote, state by state, and finally, even turning much of this nation’s bobbleheaded “legal elite” around, to the point where the forces of good prevailed in the Supreme Court two years ago, in the Heller decision.  And with any luck, sometime in the next month or so, the McDonald case will incorporate Heller to all fifty states, causing the “individual rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment to become binding on all lower levels of government.

This is good.

One thing one can not say is that the human rights and civil liberties interpretation of the Second Amendment won because the broad sweep of the extreme “progressive” movement got especially better informed on the subject.

Because if this post at Mahablog is any indication, we have a long, long way to go.

Not content with merely supporting an individual right to own firearms, the National Rifle Association is hellbent on eliminating all restrictions on any citizens carrying guns anywhere he or she wants, including churches, workplaces, and now bars and restaurants. This is in spite of the fact that even in the most 2nd-amendment lovin’ red states a large majority of people think it’s a real bad idea for a bunch of drunken yahoos to be packing heat.

So many responses.

For starters:  the term “packing heat” should be a signal that whomever is writing really knows nothing about the topic.  I know – it’s a correlation that doesn’t equal causation, but there is an extremely high correlation between people who use the phrase (which has been otherwise absent from American English since the 1930s, except in old gangster movies) and abject ignorance on the subject.

Next – “Maha” claims that “big majorities” oppose the rights of legal permit-holders to carry in churches, bars and restaurants.  I’m not sure where she gets this – I’d love to see a cite – but it reminds me of the polls the “progressives tossed about from the seventies through the nineties that claimed a huge majority supported gun control.  The devil was in the details; the vast majority approve of some controls.  Keeping guns away from criminals and convicted felons is “gun control”, and I favor it; I’d be part of that putative “vast majority”.  It’s fodder for giggly statistical games, but it’s not really honest.

Because the only numbers that really matter are these; a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit (which proves, in 40 states, that he or she has no criminal record, no documented drug or alcohol problems, and in many of them has passed a skills course) is vastly less likely to harm you or anyone else than the general public – as in “two orders of magnitude” less.

Yes, the new Tennessee law that lifts all restrictions on where a citizen can carry a concealed weapon, including into bars, provides that the carrier must abstain from drinking.

I have to wonder – do these people either read, or talk with each other?

Because it was two years ago that this blog humiliated the Minnesoros “Independent” on this exact question.   It’s been legal,l in überliberal Minnesota, to carry permitted guns in bars since 2005, provided one’s blood alcohol level is below .04 – half the level allowed to drive a car.   This is true in many other “shall issue” states.

You don’t have to look very hard to find stories of people shooting people in bars.  But you have to look long and hard to find any involving legal carry permit-holders.

The NRA pushed hard for the new Tennessee law:

The NRA’s argument is that while the militia may be “well-regulated,” any restriction on an individual citizen’s ability to carry a firearm amounts to an “abridgment” of the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This assumes that all such rights are absolute and untouchable by law under all circumstances, but we certainly have never treated any other right that way.

And we don’t treat the Second Amendment that way.

“Maha” writes imprecisely – which is as good as most “progressives” can do on the subject, to be fair.  The NRA is pretty absolutist about the rights of law-abiding individual citizens.  The NRA has also led the way on laws to punish gun possession and use by criminals.

The rub, of course, is that “progressives” never, ever distinguish between the law-abiding and criminals when the topic is guns (or, for that matter, quite a few other topics as well) – which we see in the following clip:

Freedom of speech doesn’t include a right to publish and distribute hard-core pornography, for example. Freedom of religion doesn’t rubber stamp human sacrifice.

That “Maha” thinks my right as someone with a clean criminal record is on par with human sacrifice is almost as telling as the fact she thinks that there are any restrictions on hard-core porn.

The NRA is using bullying tactics to impose its will on lawmakers, even when a whopping majority of constituents (and probably the lawmakers’ consciences, if they have any) disagree with the NRA’s position. There are some cities and states in which a big majority would prefer some level of legal gun control, for safety’s sake.

If decades of statistic don’t show you that controlling the rights of the law-abiding in the interest of  “safety” isnt’ a canard, the example of Chicago is probably lost on you.

Anyway – the issue is at a bit of a head, with the nomination of Elena Kagan to the SCOTUS, and with the high court’s upcoming McDonald decision.

“Maha”:

Now the wingnuts are screaming that Elena Kagan is opposed to gun rights because –

Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.

Note the “unlicensed” part.

We do.  That’s the point; it is impossible, in DC, Chicago and other cities, for the law-abiding citizen to get the “license”.  In other cities – New York is a great example, as was Minnesota until 2003 – it was entirely a matter of the applicant’s political clout and connections.

More recently she has said,

“There is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides strong although not unlimited protection against governmental regulation,” she said.

Right.

And it’s the “…although not unlimited…” bit that we are watching closely.

A conservative’s idea of a “reasonable limit” is “keeping guns out of the hands of criminals”; a “progressive” thinks that putting a gun into anyone’s hands at all makes them suspect.

I don’t read Mahablog much.  But I noticed she’d linked to me:

But that’s not good enough for the gun nuts, who predictably compared Heller to Third Reich Nazis.

Which is a rather “un-nuanced” view of what I actually wrote.   Read it yourself; I criticize those who defend Kagan’s 1987 comments on the Second Amendment by saying “it reflects what the “elite bar” thought at the time”.

The “elite bar” once thought that a black man was worth 2/3 of a white man, and defended slavery with carefully-written, legally-scrupulous opinions – that were morally utterly vacant, since they abridged basic human liberties.

The “Nuremberg Laws” were perfectly acceptable law under German jurisprudence, too.  The German “legal elite” said so.

There’s no comparing the results of the two; Slavery and the Holocaust were evil, while gun control is merely stupid and racist.

But my point wasn’t comparison; it was simply that a stupid opinion isn’t made correct because “the elites believed it was correct”.

The crazy part of this is that the basic position of the gun lobby — that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to own firearms — is settled law at this point. And the issue of gun control isn’t even on the progressivist back burner any more, compared to, say, 15 years ago. It’s not even in the bleeping kitchen.

And how do you think it got that way?

Because millions of us schlumpfy, un-hip guys and gals in flyoverland – the ones that Bill Maher giggles at – made it that way, one vote and one state and, finally, one justice at a time.

And, by “Maha’s” leave, we’re going to make sure it stays that way.

About the only way gun rights are going to be seriously challenged in the foreseeable future is if there is a huge swing of public opinion in the direction of more gun control. A few shoot-outs in Tennessee roadhouses might do it.

Keep waiting.

And if you look at the statistics, you might wanna bring a water bottle.  You’ll be waiting a long, long time.

Side note:  Let’s see if Barbara “Maha” O’Brien is any better at allowing dissenting comments than she used to be.

UPDATE:  Nope, she’s not.  I’m told that several comments critical of her “position” have been removed.

Why are some liberal bloggers so utterly gutless?

I’ll give Obama this much; his administrtion is playing the “Is Kagan or is Kagan not gay?” card at just the right time; it’s occupying our peabrain media so much so that none of them, even were they so inclined, will ever even ask about her record on human and civil rights:

Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.Kagan, whom President Barack Obama nominated to the high court this week, made the comment to Justice Thurgood Marshall, urging him in a one-paragraph memo to vote against hearing the District of Columbia man’s appeal.

Apologists say that she was reflecting the view of the “elite” bar in the years before Heller.

Rubbish.  Adolf Eichmann reflected the “legal” view of Germany’s elite for 12 years; he was still wrong.

We – the good guys – don’t have the votes to scupper Kagan.  I’m afraid it’s a done deal.

WELCOME MAHABLOG READERS!:  I responded to Barbara “Maha” O’Brian’s misleading, context-challenged little swipe at me in this post here, which is a vastly better-thought-out response than her original grab-bag of ofay stereotypes and lack of legal understanding, deserved.

You should ask Barbara a question, though; why does she delete comments that challenge her?  Does she have that big a need for control?  That’s kinda strange.