[NVDave]

The NRA refused to get a clean case, too.

Back in 1993, I was part of a small group of RKBA activists that used to meet in San Francisco with some lawyers about RKBA issues. One of these lawyers was Don Kates, a name people should know if they’ve been involved in the RKBA “movement” or know the history of taking Second Amendment cases to court(s).

Mr. Kates was saying even back then that the NRA needed to create a case as Gura did: find people who had clean, pristine records. Find the right venue - and DC or Chicago were mentioned even back then as being the places to start.

Now, with respect to Stevens/O’Connor, Mr. Kates mentioned that there were ways to get an effective ruling by a majority of the Circuit Courts before taking it to the SCOTUS. For example, get a decision in several Circuit Courts with an individual RKBA interpretation and don’t bring cases in the anti-RKBA Circuit Courts (eg, the Ninth). Get other cases within the pro-RKBA Circuit Courts that use the precedent of the prior Circuit Court decisions. Now, when a case finally goes to the SCOTUS, they’d have to overturn case law and settled cases. The SCOTUS is loathe to do this.

In other words, it would have been a long, carefully thought out road to get the results we wanted. The NRA always wanted some big splash of a case, they never wanted to put in the sustained, case-after-case strategy how to build the case law and get the outcome we wanted. Mr. Kates used to be frustrated at the lack of clear thinking about how to get the result we wanted on the part of the NRA lawyers. At one point, Mr. Kates was muttering that the person who was going to finally take the case would be a young attorney who would come out of left field and make a huge reputation for himself by taking on the hard lifting of doing this - and history showed me (at least) that Don Kates was right: it was a lawyer outside of the RKBA movement who decided that he was going to take these cases and make a name for himself.

Mr. Gura effectively used Mr. Kates’ strategy from all those years ago - find plaintiffs in the selected jurisdictions who met the criteria to take away all the “exit ramps” from the wobbler justices. What was needed were people in a jurisdiction who had clean, pristine records, had a verifiable need to self defense, were domiciled in an area where all possible legal use of firearms (owing included) were outlawed. Then make a case that these people have a right to self defense. This is effectively what Gura did. It is NO accident that Gura went after DC first, then Chicago second.

Don Kates had this in mind years and years ago.

[Hugin]

Wouldn’t any lower court victories have probably ended up in the Supreme Court anyway? We were lucky that when one did get there, we had 4 solid pro 2A justices. No telling how squishes like Rehnquist and O’Connor would have gone. For that matter Kennedy might have gone along with the libs if it were only Scalia and Thomas making solid arguments.

[marktwain]

You are exactly right. Don Kates doesn't get near at much credit as he deserves. His work in the mid 1970’s was groundbreaking. I loaned a copy of his first book to a Nobel Prize winner who had written an anti-freedom editorial in a Madison Wisconsin paper. He read the book, and when I got it back, he said he would stop offering his opinion on subjects he knew nothing about.

[1010RD]

Kates is brilliant. His strategy needs to be applied across the Bill of Rights.

Think Kelo, think ESA, etc.

[mvpel]

It is NO accident that Gura went after DC first, then Chicago second.

I spoke with Dick Heller a couple of years ago, and in fact, Gura and Heller's plan had unfolded over the course of the past 20 years, when Gura and Heller decided that Heller ought to get a job working security in DC and work his way up to armed security, to lay a foundation for the Second Amendment case based on the handgun which Heller had refused on principle to register in 1976.