{"id":1403,"date":"2007-10-05T06:26:47","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T11:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1403"},"modified":"2007-10-05T06:26:47","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T11:26:47","slug":"you-can-taste-the-anticipation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1403","title":{"rendered":"You Can Taste the Anticipation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fascism in America took a shot to the gut last year, when the DC Circuit struck down Washington DC’s gun ban <\/a>on Second Amendment grounds.<\/p>\n

Now, the SCOTUS may take up the appeal.<\/p>\n

See if you can tell what side the AP’s on?<\/p>\n

Both sides uneasy: <\/strong>Deep inside Washington’s police headquarters is a library with floor-to-ceiling racks displaying 1,700 guns, from a World War II-era rifle to rows of automatic pistols.<\/p>\n

Most of the weapons, used now for forensic research, were seized under a 31-year-old law in the nation’s capital that bars handgun ownership for nearly everyone except law enforcement.<\/p>\n

But that ban was struck down by a federal appeals court this year, and now the District of Columbia is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The writer doesn’t favor us with an explanation of what the stacks of guns seized from criminals have to do with the constitutional rights of the law-abiding, of course.<\/p>\n

The writer is also historically illiterate:<\/p>\n

A far-reaching case:<\/strong> The case represents the first time a federal appeals court struck down a gun-control law on the ground that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to own guns. Up to now, courts have generally interpreted the amendment to protect only the collective right of states to maintain militias.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is either misleading or ignorant.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment very rarely<\/em> at all – certainly not enough to say the court has “generally” done anything<\/em>.\u00a0 The most recent significant case was US v Miller <\/em>in 1939, which set a precedent that was tortured into a “collective rights” interpretation over the past forty years.\u00a0 Before that, other than US v. Cruikshank <\/em>and Presser v. Illinois<\/em>, in 1876 and the 1880’s (neither of which were collective rights interpretations!), the whole “individual vs. collective” thing was not even apparently a point of discussion; people apparently knew that rights “of the people” – like the First, Tenth as well as the Second – referred to the people<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If it takes the case, the Supreme Court could issue its first direct ruling on the Second Amendment in 70 years, solidifying some of the nation’s toughest gun-control laws or exposing them to a torrent of new challenges.<\/p>\n

“It will be the biggest ruling on the Second Amendment ever,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “You get nervous when you see something with far-reaching implications.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And one might hope they have reason to be nervous.\u00a0 As even liberal\u00a0 legal scholars abandon <\/a>the collective rights fiction, and even the liberal media starts to let facts seep<\/a> into what they’d heretofore covered with press releases from the “Brady Campaign”, gun control has been losing even more traction.<\/p>\n

The National Rifle Association (NRA), which believes it might have an advantage with a conservative-leaning high court, also is uneasy.<\/p>\n

“I’d rather be on our side than on their side, given the chances, but there is always a ‘but,’ ” said Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president.<\/p>\n

D.C. officials say they expect to learn by early November whether the Supreme Court will take the case.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet another reason why Bush, for all his many faults, will leave a good legacy; he may have started to restore sanity to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fascism in America took a shot to the gut last year, when the DC Circuit struck down Washington DC’s gun ban on Second Amendment grounds. Now, the SCOTUS may take up the appeal. See if you can tell what side the AP’s on? Both sides uneasy: Deep inside Washington’s police headquarters is a library with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}