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.
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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.
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