Posted on 10/07/2009 2:04:58 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Whatever significance is attached to Chicago’s failed bid to host the 2016 Olympics, it is of small importance to the rest of the country. More far-reaching and frightening is the Supreme Court’s decision to take up a case challenging the city’s ban on handgun ownership in the court’s new term, which begins this week.
The case is best considered a preview of coming attractions. The gun lobby, if it wins in the Supreme Court, is prepared to challenge every gun control law enacted at any level of government. It will usher in a scary season of assault on the common sense of citizens, law enforcement officials and others who believe that carrying today’s high-powered weapons in an urbanized, mobile—and angry—society is chillingly dangerous, and deadly.
Since the high court last year struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handgun ownership, gun rights advocates have eagerly awaited a case that would extend the decision to states and localities. Because the District of Columbia is a federal entity, a different case was needed to establish that states and municipalities don’t have the right to impose broad gun restrictions. Chicago has become the test case.
Almost no one expects the conservative-leaning court to uphold Chicago’s prohibition, which applies only to handguns. Owners of rifles used in hunting, for example, are unaffected by the local law.
This distinction says much about the current state of gun politics. Only about a decade ago, gun rights activists often claimed that they wanted their weapons in order to hunt. They would evoke childhood memories of kinship that grew in the woods as one generation of hunters passed an ancient art on to another.
Those arguments seem as quaint now as the assumption that reasonable people do not bring firearms to political events featuring the president..(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at truthdig.com ...
Are guns getting more powerful like cpu's or something? Maybe I'm missing something, should I upgrade my AR-15 to a new hybrid?
I'm just so sick of that phrase. The Brady's, proven liars and idiots, are a "non-profit non-partisan group trying to address gun violence" or something like that, while the 80% of the public who can actually read the Constitution, are a "gun lobby".
Idiots. Liars. Charlatans.
Justices often negotiate with one another and alter draft opinions in order to gain a swing vote or two. There are those who believe what he wrote was the strongest he could word it and still get Kennedy on board. Losing Heller and its finding that the Second does indeed protect a right of individual citizens (Duh!) would have been far worse than the weaselly opinion that emerged.
Arm everybody and watch the civility rate climb.
I do agree in the sense that I think the four generally viewed as conservative can tend toward the authoritarian if the issue is right. And I certainly didn't mean my other post as a full-throated defense of Scalia's conservative creds (see Raich). The rationale of some of his pro-government opinions and dissents strikes me as "but what if the police don't like it?" as if that were a legal argument. And he's viewed as the leading originalist on the court! [ hangs head in shame ] AFAIC, Justice Thomas is far more logically consistent and finds what he finds regardless of whose ox it is about to get gored.
The gun lobby, if it wins in the Supreme Court, is prepared to challenge every gun control law enacted at any level of government.
One can only hope.
"Free at last! " --MLK
Stand and Deliver
I don’t think you’ll see everyone just handing their guns in!
I think that’s what worries the politicians ... the minute they somehow circumvent the Constitution (gun czar?) and declare guns illegal they’ll go underground and the second Revolution will start(?)
Long overdue cuckoo.
I mean Cocco.
5.56mm
I don’t think they can dig deep enough!
Agree with you about Thomas. As far as I can tell he is the best...most consistently originalist...of all of the conservatives on the court.
Ha ha. The author forgot about the holocaust in New Hampshire. Afterall that is the stylish crutch.
Actually I was talking with my dad on how to hide our guns in case ... we have almost ten acres of forest. Best thing he said was to hide them up in the trees - firs, hemlock, cedar ...
I can't really see the government voluntarily changing it's mind and reinstating any rights once they've been taken away.
I am well aware that George Bush was willing to sign a new AWB, we can depend on no one but ourselves.
The GOP hierarchy has decided to play the democracy game and abandon the republic, we can't allow this to go on, and still honor the oath that many of us are sworn to.
The GOP can never betray me again, I do not count on them for anything!
BUAIDH NO BAS!
....But will that past the smell test or in other words, the Surpremes Court test?
Victory or Death ...
Save Ma Gaia. Switch to a battery or fuel cell operated EBR. I guess that would be a L(ess)EBR.
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