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Unfortunately, this type of looseness of thought is being asserted by the woman's liberation movement and is apt to be asserted in court, with success as more people in juries and elsewhere adopt it. Life in this country has become a college freshman English class where a person receives an "a" for creativity by discerning as many vague and bizarre alegories and metaphors as possible, while avoiding the concrete. We are being trained to think nuts as a form of intellectuality. This is one reason I enjoy conversation with uneducated people. "This is a tree. This is a shovel. That is a bird." You get straigt observations and answers.
I think you missed Martian's point. That was his complaint. Mine, too. William O. Douglas-think is becoming codified in law.
The defendant was a convicted felon, but look how they loaded the argument. They're making an admiralty-law argument against the shotgun, convicting it of lawlessness in se, and then hanging it around the neck of the defendant, whom they've carefully picked as their stiff just the way USG did when they prosecuted the indigent and absent Miller and his dead codefendant in 1939. Miller stinks of New Deal crookedness.
I agree that Miller and its precedent, Presser vs. Illinois (1895), need to be redecided. They might also have a look at Cruikshank, on which Presser rested. I don't think Cruikshank's construction of rights and the Court's refusal to incorporate them to the States, even after the XIVth Amendment was ratified, would pass muster in con law today. But hey, I'm not an attorney, so what do I know? I'm only paying for this party, like you are.