[Pistolshot]

I've seen, read, and heard so many comments from the all-or-nothing crowd that makes me wonder whose side you are really on. The zealousness of some sound like the most vehement anti-gunner, except on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Take a deep breath, folks. It will be a long struggle, maybe one we leave to our children to carry on, but our first steps have been taken.

[rellimpank]

-—good post—

[Pistolshot]

Ping please?

[deuteronlmy232]

Thanks, good summarization for us non legal types.

[semantic]

As a Federal armed guard, Heller was the perfect poster boy to challenge the DC personal hand gun restrictions.

Assuming citizens successfully re-secure an individual right to armed self-defense subject to strict scrutiny, then a hunt will be on to find a similar stellar candidate to challenge/establish/incorporate the militia clause.

My guess is it will be someone in the reserves (officer rank, Iraq veteran?) who resides in a state where he/she is banned from possessing the very weapon(s) he/she commands in a Nat'l Guard.

Machine guns are too limited - we need to re-establish the concept that the People form the militia and have pre-existing rights to possess sufficient firepower to both help in common defense and/or challenge a potentially tyrannical government.

[Lazamataz]

If there aren’t handguns in vending machines by Thursday, we’ve lost it all.

[umgud]

I’d be happy if Heller just confirms the individual right.
From there, we can start defining what is “infringement.”

[Leisler]

You don't know your law. At this level, it is a matter of Constitutional rights and power, and not of a particular law. That was settled at the lower Federal courts, which threw out the D.C. ordnances.

Anyways, the 2nd Amendment is not about crooks, or burglars, or hunting bears. It is about the citizens having military weapons to attack and commit violence and killing upon tyrannical government forces.

[beltfed308]

Good post. I agree that the ruling will only be ruled very narrowly to address the DC ban. The greatest win IMO is that it sets the brady crowd and others back to the stone age as the collective argument they have propagated for decades will be totally destroyed.

It will clearly take one step at a time to get back to our roots. That is exactly what the other side has patiently done for years and that has brought us to where we are now.

I am encouraged that Heller will win.

[ctdonath2]

It is not about NFA ‘34 It is not about GCA ’68. It is not about Hughes.

It _IS_, however, about re-establishing core principles which, if applied honestly and correctly in Heller, will make it clear those are void as well. Further cases may be needed to take those down, but it will be a matter of enforcing the final Heller verdict instead of battling them independently. There's a reason 922(o) was a frequent theme in oral arguments and the SG's brief: much as they want to issue a narrow verdict, they can't overturn the DC ban without either establishing solid grounds to toss other bans/restrictions, or gutting the 2nd entirely.

[marktwain]

Good post, well thought out.

I saw many of the same arguments that derided the incremental approach with Concealed Carry permits. The approach has proven itself. It has worked very, very, well. We would not be at this point today, if the Concealed Carry Permit system had not shown the nation how false the anti-gun premises were.

[mad_as_he$$]

I agree with you on one thing the "It's all or notghing crowd" suffers from ADD or just does not care. In any court case you MUST look at the question the court was asked. In Heller it (unfortunately) is a very narrow question. I was disappointed by several of Gura's answers to the Justices but he did OK being his first case in front of the court. Dellinger had a bad day now matter how you spin it. When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court mocks you from the bench it is a bad day. He may never go back to this court.

"It is not about the right to shoot, it is about the right to shoot back."

Richard Quigley 1941-2007

[gitmo]

Thanks for the reality check, Pistolshot.

[jim_trent]

I agree totally. The guy who bankrolled this deserves a thanks. He did EXACTLY what a former in-law of mine (an ACLU lawyer) told me they do with their cases. They find the perfect person and the perfect case. Then they take it all the way. That is what was done on this case and it will work.

Unfortunately, the “all-or-nothing” crowd have been in charge before and brought loser cases to the courts (I remember the millions of dollars that the NRA spent on taking the machine gun ban to the Supreme court — and lost). And we have lost every time.

I hope that the NRA (and the “all-or-nothing” crowd) have learned how to win with this case. Take it one step at a time. Make gains incrementally. Get the perfect case with the perfect people (even if you have to manufacture it), then push it all the way.

That is how the liberal/left has been doing it for 40 years and look how successful they have been.

[Hunble]

This is so simple to understand that even a child could figure it out. The government has abused the rights of the people.

The arguments presented before the SCOTUS were afraid to state the rather obvious:

The people of the United States of America can keep and bear arms, and the government is not allowed to infringe upon that basic right. No government regulations concerning arms is allowed.

This is a subject that the government is not allowed to be involved with in any way. The government is specifically forbidden to address this subject!

Now "Miller" defined arms as those which are used by the military. It may be rather twisted, but I can accept that legal argument.

I personally own many arms which were actually used in combat.

From my swords to rifles, there is no way that they could not be classified as militia related arms, since each and every one of them were used by the militia in actual combat.

Why is such simple language so darn difficult to understand?

[Ancesthntr]

We get the perception from the courts that they would like to correct Miller. Justice Kennedy – “Miller may be deficient.” The translation here is : “Bring us a case we can rule on.”

Heller opens this door.

What else do we get?

We get the chance to find the correct case to bring to the justices to roll back Hughes, which will roll back the restrictions on new machine guns.

We get the chance to bring the correct case to roll back GCA ’68 and the importation of surplus weapons

All of these are dependent on how the Supremes rule in Heller, but it will not signify that a total revolution in gun control and gun laws has taken place

Very good post and follow-up comments.

The simple fact is, as others here and elsewhere have posted, that the Supreme Court is highly unlikely to issue a broad ruling. The fact that it granted cert with a very narrow set of questions on which it would rule is a huge hint at this. All of the questions regarding full autos were an attempt to trip up Gura, to get him off message and to give folks like Ginsburg an opportunity to vote with DC.

I personally think that we're going to win on the issue of individual vs. collective right. That is HUGE. That is really the crux of the 2nd Amendment debate, and we're only about 3 months away from winning it. I think that we'll even get 6 votes. Look, we've got Alito, Roberts, Scalia & Thomas for sure. Kennedy, based on the oral arguments, is also in our camp. IMHO, the big surprise will be Granny Ginsburg - she CAN'T vote against an ENUMERATED right being individual, and almost HAS to vote for strict scrutiny...or else a bunch of states are going to pass restrictive abortion laws and base their defense of them on this case AND the fact that the "right" to an abortion isn't an enumerated right. She's been sick and doesn't look well, and I have to believe that she wants to leave the law in such a state as to prevent (or make as difficult as possible) a repeal of Roe v. Wade. If that means that this uber-liberal anti-gunner has to accept guns, she'll do it - because abortion is more important to her than taking our guns.

Once we win on the individual right, that does open the door. First and foremost, this allows individuals to bring cases and not have the lower level courts in gun-hostile districts and circuits toss them for "failure to state a claim."

Regarding Hughes, which is the law I'd most like to see tossed out (short term, anyway), once we win this case we've essentially won that one. How? Because of 2 factors. First, the federal ban is virtually identical in effect to the DC law (i.e. if anyone hasn't registered a subject gun by X date, then they are forever prohibited from registering it-which, of course, prevents even mere ownership). The 2nd factor, the bridge between handguns and full autos, is the Miller case.

As most here know, Miller himself was a moonshiner. He and his partner were caught by "revenuers" with a sawed-off shotgun, which was and is illegal under the '34 NFA unless you have the tax stamp. He didn't, being both a criminal and also not so stupid as to pay a $200 tax to have a $20 shotgun with a short barrel. Long story short, he won his case on the District Court level, and the feds appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Miller was unrepresented (and also dead), and the Court ultimately decided that a short-barreled shotgun was not protected as a militia arm under the 2nd Amendment, since it (and I'm paraphrasing) tend to improve the effectiveness or the efficiency of the militia. Also, it wasn't in common use.

So where does that leave us? If we win in Heller on the individual rights issue and on the unconstitutionality of bans on whole classes of firearms (and I believe we will, given Kennedy's performance), then a plaintiff who has applied for a tax stamp to purchase a post-5/19/1986 full auto (preferably an M16, for reasons I'll state below) can bring a case in the DC District Court (because that's where the BATFE "lives"). Being a ban on a whole class of firearms, the law will immediately be suspect. Coupled with reams of evidence that the M16 was and is both the main infantry longarm of the armed forces, all of the state National Guard units and most state police forces, this will prove that the M16 meets the Miller test. BTW, the reason the "reams of evidence" is important is because in Miller the Court could say that a short barreled shotgun didn't have militia utility only by saying that "...it is not within Judicial Notice...." Reams of evidence ARE Judicial Notice. No weasling out on THIS one.

OK, why the M16? Because there was no such thing as the M4 in 1986. My ideal plaintiff is a squeaky-clean model citizen who happens to own a pre-ban M16, and who is turned down in his application for the tax stamp for an identically-featured post-'86 M16. If you really want a legal wet dream, let's deal with one gun made and registered with BATF on 5/18/86, and one made on 5/20/86 in the same factory, with the same exact features that couldn't be added to the NFA Registry because of its post-ban status. So, here you'll have Mr. Squeaky Clean, who the feds think is fine and dandy to own a pre-ban, but the same guy can't own a virtually identical gun made in the same factory only 2 days later. This defies ANY strict scrutiny argument and, in fact, defies ANY rational reasoning. The Court will, of course, also consider that full autos have NEVER been outlawed, and that some 160,000 are freely transferrable among probably 150 million adults in this country, that the guns aren't in common use ONLY because of the '34 NFA and, of course, the '86 ban, and that the crime rate among registered owners of full autos is miniscule. Further, repealing the '86 ban just puts us where we were 22 years ago - you still have the tax stamp, you still have the background check, LEO signoff (unless you form a trust or corporation), etc. Was the country like Somalia or Iraq before the ban, when anyone with about $700 could get a full auto? No way, and the Court won't buy the horror stories of the antis on this one. I think that we win a repeal of the Hughes act easily in a case like this.

Prediction: we'll be able to buy new full autos, or install new happy switches for existing semi-autos, within 5 years.

My goal: let's get 1 million or 5 million full autos into the hands of the citizenry. When you don't have "blood in the streets" the level of unease about them - and other guns - will subside substantially. Also, the more full autos out there, the less likely that some tyrant-wannabee is going to go for the brass ring (and, after all, isn't that the WHOLE POINT of the 2nd Amendment?). Once there are literally millions of full autos in public hands, I can see an a new law repealing import bans of all types - what would be the point?

[stevio]

Thanks for the thoughts.

[lisagolden]

No free man shall ever be disbarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms, is as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

[Shooter 2.5]

It is not about NFA ‘34

It is not about GCA ’68.

I don’t know what Hughes is but the Supreme Court Justices were the ones who discussed the Machinegun tax and the GCA ‘68.
Read the transcripts.

[Redcloak]

Heller is our camel's nose under their tent, for a change.

[archy]

I have spent a lot of time surfing some of the other discussion threads on the hearing before the US Supreme Court of DC v Heller.

It looks like Heller may not be the only gun rights question to go before the Supremes. SCOTUS takes new gun case ... is this a Heller tea leaf?