Next Step
By Mitch Berg
As Carnivore notes at TvM, the next round of post-Heller lawsuits are crawling toward the Supreme Court:
Similar to what we saw in the prelude to the Heller decision, 33 state Attorneys General have signed an amicus brief (PDF) to grant cert in McDonald v. City of Chicago and NRA v. City of Chicago, the cases which seek to have the US Supreme Court confirm that the Second Amendment applies to the States.
From NRA-ILA:
Fairfax, Va. – Two-thirds of the nation’s attorneys general have filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant certiorari in the case of NRA v. Chicago and hold that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This bi-partisan group of 33 attorneys general, along with the Attorney General of California in a separate filing, agrees with the NRA’s position that the Second Amendment protects a fundamental individual right to keep and bear arms in the home for self-defense, disagreeing with the decision recently issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Carnivore notes that Minnesota’s AG, Lori Swanson – who, whatever her other faults, is reliably anti-orc on Second Amendment issues – has signed the brief, while Wisconsin’s has not.
Carnivore also notes:
Unfortunately, former Governor and current Attorney General of California Jerry Brown filed a separate brief asking SCOTUS to take the case, but only to use such a case to validate California’s massive gun control schemes.
The petitions in these cases should be granted to provide needed guidance on the scope of the States’ ability to reasonably regulate firearms while extending to the states Heller’s core Second-Amendment holding that government cannot deny citizens the right to possess handguns in their homes.
Reasonably regulate? We all know what that means: Burdensome licensing, registration, and near prohibitions without being technical prohibitions.
And in the age of Obama – with his facile assurances to your face and behind-the-back skulduggery – it’s good to be watchful. The orcs know that they can’t win this battle politically; when even a Barack Obama shies away from a direct attack on the “gun lobby” and its’ four million “gun lobbyists” and 100 million-odd gun owners, and Democrats from not-completely-insane districts pay at the very least lip service to the Second Amendment, one can reasonably expect them to go through the only venue left to them on this issue.
We haven’t lost any votes on the SCOTUS yet – so the likelihood of the first interpretation of Heller being written by some lice-ridden scumbag Chicago lawyer who will tell us that “leg shackles are for your own safety” is relatively manageable.
But this is why we – human-rights activists of all parties – have to not only win elections, but push the agenda. Fix the laws, so that slime like Jerry Brown have no more grounds for filing their moronic papers. Change local and state laws so that closet Maoists like the orcs that run Chicago can’t impose their demented will on the real Americans in the rest of their states.
