Over 700 comments. I don’t know that any I read (I only skimmed as last I checked there were only 100) took the ACLU’s side.

Because it’s fun to stir shit up and get under people’s skin, and because the blogging will be quiet for the holiday weekend, I just had to link this comment by Bruce Baugh at Obsidian Wings:

I’ve said this before and will again: the very heart of the “widespread gun ownership checks tyranny” argument has been tested and failed completely.

For twenty years or more, political discourse in a whole lot of online forums was swamped by people telling the rest of us how the US was getting ever more tyrannical, and that the day would come when on some flimsy pretext the government would abandon habeaus corpus, engage in unlimited surveillance of everyone it felt like spying on, arrest people on arbitrary grounds and then abuse them any way the captors felt like, and so on.

It turns out they were right about that part.

They also told the rest of us that when this happened, they would rise up en masse. They would free unjustly held prisoners, put terror into the hearts of agents of tyranny, maybe even overthrow the tyrant him/herself. (As the ’90s went on, the hypothetical tyrant was increasingly likely to be portrayed as a woman.) And did they? Did they hell.

There are no martyrs from the RKBA crowd. Their organizations sometimes join in efforts mostly initiated and staffed by others, but apart from objections to a handful of specific proposed restrictions on gun sales and such, one hears of no RKBA leadership on any of the rest. To the contrary, one hears a great deal of cheerleading for warmaking abroad and tyranny at home as long as all the right people get it, and one hears silence. Where are those freed prisoners? Nowhere. Where are those terrified agents? Nowhere. It was all the purest bloviation.

It’s really very rare for such ambitious claims about what one will do oneself and what one’s allies will do in a moment of profound crisis. But Bush/Cheney gave us all the chance. And all of you going on about how guns keep the republic safe and free are completely full of it. All the things you warned us about came to pass, and where are you? Right here with the bulk of us, and well behind some – there are individual posters here who as single people have done more actual good for American liberty than half the membership of the NRA and such groups.

It’s liberal lawyers, academics, journalists, and the like who are actually pressing the government, pretty much, and liberals at large funding them, while conservatives and libertarians (with way, way too few exceptions) either cheer and keep voting for the tyranny or sigh and shake a finger and then keep voting for it. The RKBA claims about guns’ role in society are demonstrably false for America at the beginning of the 21st century, and no amount of dithering over 18th century will change that. The Second Amendment as constituted is useless not because of then, but because of now, because of you its champions.

PS: It will of course be a glad thing if the bloviators ever do get serious about fighting tyranny, because tyranny is really bad and needs all the opposition it can get. But I’m not holding my breath waiting – it seems like we are instead well into the phase where all the loyal cheering section for the tyrant busily tries to pretend they didn’t say things. I fully expect lawsuits against Google, the Internet Way-Back Machine, and the like from right-wing legally minded folks who wish their embarrassing words better hidden.

But hey, always glad to see clues, if and when they break out.

You see, tomorrow is not only the day we celebrate that time when Santa and the baby Jesus joined forces to defeat the Seleucid Empire using candles and divided up a fish to drive the uwole-clad British to the sea, where they saw their shadow which meant six more weeks of telethons.

Wait, that’s not right. I get my holidays confused. But regardless, it’s also when my wife’s family reunion is happening. So, no blog for you.

Have a happy independence from the British day.

And come back with all your fingers.

Remington Nylon Body 66.

My dad’s got one of those. He used to shoot nickels out of the air with it. And he will attest that one should never take them apart.

Uncle links to some Gun Law News analysis of Heller’s footnote 27, which concludes “Any law, to pass a constitutional challenge on Second Amendment grounds, must pass a strict scrutiny test.”

There’s no way in hell 2nd Amendment regulations will have to survive strict scrutiny. Sure, gunners will argue for strict scrutiny, but they’ll never find 5 votes for it.

The Gun Law News blogger makes a good effort, but there are a few things he might have missed:

Strict scrutiny is the highest level of review and it is almost impossible to pass. It is only applied when courts want to use a test that will be failed. And it is almost never applied outside of 14th Amendment cases involving racial classification.

Ever since strict scrutiny was invented, the S.Ct. has been backing away from it, which is why sex/gender discrimination under the 14th Amendment is covered by intermediate scrutiny. Intermediate scrutiny is the test used for discrimination cases that aren’t about race. It’s a high standard, and anything that smells bad fails this test. It was invented so that judges could either (a) reach for a test the case will fail or (b) make it look like the regulation passed a high bar of analysis.

Below intermediate and strict scrutiny is the lowly rational basis review. This is the test judges apply when they want a law to be upheld. Virtually no law fails this test.

Outside of the discrimination context, laws don’t really bump up against this scale. Rational basis appears a lot in cases, but the higher levels of scrutiny aren’t applied. Instead, various balancing tests are used. In the first amendment context, for example, courts weigh the appropriateness of time, place and manner restrictions, look for narrow tailoring, etc.

The crux of Gun Law News’s argument is that Heller says the courts are going to apply the substantive due process tests from discrimination cases to 2nd Amendment laws. To get there, the blog reads the court’s reference to “any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights” as including strict scrutiny. But I’m not aware of any S.Ct. application of strict scrutiny to any enumerated rights.

And while it’s true that footnote 27 says 2nd Amendment laws must pass a test higher than rational review, that test will likely be some sort of balancing or line-drawing test, just like with all the other enumerated rights.

What all of this adds up to is that the S.Ct. hasn’t ruled that strict scrutiny applies. And because strict scrutiny has at times been unwieldy in the race cases, I can’t imagine 5 votes for it. Strict scrutiny for 2nd Amendment cases would mean that almost no regulation of guns is permissible, and I just don’t see the court going that far.

Disclaimers: I’m not a constitutional law scholar or practitioner. My clients deal with these issues sometimes, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert. I haven’t read Heller all the way through yet. It’s on my list for this weekend. All of the above is just, like, my opinion, man.

OpenCarry.org:

Senior Norfolk Judge Henry Coke Morgan held in a local federal case the day after Heller was decided that the individual right created by the Second Amendment does not impose any obligations whatsoever on state or local governments: only the federal government.

A water-cooled AR-15 upper.

Man, we gunnies will try anything.

Fals from DS Arms:

Discussion about technology making Heller obsolete here and here.

My thoughts are that arms doesn’t just mean guns. Of course, part of Heller stated that common weapons were protected. One way to limit more technologically advanced weapons would be to ban them so that they never become commonly used, like the .gov did with machine guns.

Armed and Safe looks at gun laws for AOWs: 10 years and a quarter million dollars–for a handle

Don’t even get me started on the shoulder thing that goes up.

I’ve heard lots of folks analyzing that one bit. Gun Law News has a looky.

Made from paper.

via guav.

Al Qaeda’s Plan C is smaller scale stuff. Some of us have been saying that for a long time.

The New York Times was a shill for the NRA before there was an NRA!

Long time reader, commenter and Texas State Rifle Champ Robert now has a blog.

Anti-gun crusader Bloomberg talks about how guns get into his city. And he basically blames everyone but his city. It’s a bit ironic that the NYPD can’t account for one out of three weapons.

We keep seeing articles that state Heller means it’s OK to vote Democrat now because they can’t ban guns. And a few bits that make it seem they’re pro-gun. The flipside now is that McCain’s association with anti-gun groups is also being highlighted. There is a bit of a difference, though. McCain has since changed his tune. And has had an A rating from NRA since 2007.

Shorter Sun Times: We know Heller said there’s a right and a ban is an infringement but here’s a list of infringements we think could work.

Typical tripe: gun show loophole, background checks on gun shop employees (note: felons already can’t work there), one gun a month (why not one a lifetime?), and banning regular capacity magazines.

In Philly, an anti-gunner thinks Heller is a good thing.

The paper of making up the record says of Heller:

But his [Barack Slippery When Wet Obama’s] muted response is also the culmination of a long-developing trend in the national Democratic Party: to tiptoe away from a policy discussion that they believe has caused them great political damage.

And in Canada:

We in Canada are so accustomed to thinking of handguns as some sort of specially infectious social menace that it has become shocking, even for a gun-rights proponent, to hear their merits — merits of a specifically moral sort –enumerated by the spokesman for a branch of a neighbouring government.

Barack LIBOR Obama, like other rich people, has good credit?

Shocking!

In other news, my rate is lower than his. But I did spring for origination fees. Of course, I’m also not rich. But I did know my banker. Hmmmm. Maybe they should investigate me!

Update: Oh, that’s because I’m white. Northern Trust is clearly racist!!!

Heard in the office:

He ain’t big as a fart.

Never heard that before. Ok, then.

More on the show here.

I need to catch that episode.

Via Tam and RideFast, I learn that long time commenter Billll has a blog.

So, he gonna take his agents’ weapons: weapons harm people, and more often than not they harm the people carrying them

The gun case in San Francisco is based on Title 42 U.S.C. Section 1983.

Joe notes their clarification. This could cost them some of their more libertarian leaning members.

Update: Well, cost them two folks already. See here and here.

she said tool.

Barack Giggidy Obama looking at Kathleen Sebelius? Not gonna help him much with the bitter and clingy pro-gun folks since she vetoed concealed carry. Twice. Fortunately, the legislature overrode her veto the second time.

Republicans were the party of smaller government?

DC Council unanimously got rid of the gun ban. It’s like they were forced to do it or something.