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To: RandFan

So even Alito ignores the 2nd amendment.


7 posted on 06/14/2024 10:04:02 AM PDT by Revel
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To: Revel
"So even Alito ignores the 2nd amendment."

You don't understand how SCOTUS works. They don't/can't rule on matters not argued before them. If they could, they'd be able to go free-lance and shop for issues to decide.

They couldn't make a ruling impacting 2A (or the Constitution in general) because this wasn't presented as a 2A issue. Read the court's ruling and you'll find the word "amendment" does not appear in it. Not even once.

https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/06/Supreme-Court-Bump-Stock-Opinion.pdf

Nor does the word "right" or "rights" (as in human rights or Constitutionally-enumerated rights) appear in the ruling.

And there's a reason for that. If you can get the judgement you want without exposing 2A/RKBA to a reversal, that is the prudent course. Because SCOTUS is always a crap shoot. Juries are notoriously fickle and SCOTUS is perhaps the ficklest jury of all. Don't forget that Heller decision vote was 5-4. A single vote and that battle would have been lost for decades. The Bruen vote was 6-3, which leaves a bit of breathing room, but that three justices voted against Bruen shows that even SCOTUS is plagued with judicial activists who value political ideology over the letter of the law.

So if you can get the relief you're after without exposing 2A to a reversal in SCOTUS, that would be the smart thing to do. This was argued as administrative overreach and violations of the Administrative Procedure Act. And it was successful. Trump's idiotic ban on bump-fire stocks is history. And they did it without exposing the 2nd Amendment to any reversal whatsoever.

26 posted on 06/14/2024 11:27:42 AM PDT by Paal Gulli
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To: Revel

“So even Alito ignores the 2nd amendment.”


The Court only addresses issues that come directly before it in an actual case or controversy. In this particular case, the issue was *NOT* the 2nd Amendment, it was whether the BATF had exceeded its authority in promulgating the bump stock regulation. Clearly they had, because it changed the law - and that is the province of Congress (the Legislative Branch) to do, not a regulatory agency that is part of the Executive Branch. As it happens, the BATF also violated the Administrative Procedures Act, so there was no way that this was going to turn out to be a loss for us.

As an aside, I think that even IF Congress decided to pass a law banning bump stocks or making them subject to NFA registration (and there are a whole host of issues there), that would also end up being unconstitutional. Why? Because there are more than 200,000 bump stocks in public hands (and, I can guarantee, there will be a lot more sold before Congress even takes up the issue, IF it decides to do so). 200,000 is an important threshold, because an “arm” is protected under the 2nd Amendment unless it is BOTH dangerous AND unusual - and 200,000 was decided upon as being the threshold (so far) for when an “arm” is no longer “unusual.” This is the Caetano v. Massachusetts case from 2016 involving a stun gun - Caetano won, because there were more an estimated 200,000 in circulation at the time the case was brought. No one has since tested a lower number


35 posted on 06/14/2024 1:23:17 PM PDT by Ancesthntr (Paul Weiss )
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