The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Roberta X notes that the Better Business Bureau doesn’t take a very favorable view toward the Brady Campaign as a charitable cause. How go pro-gun groups compare?
NRA is rated more like a business, with an A-. I can’t find a record for the foundation. GOA gets an A-. Second Amendment Foundation gets an A.
First, the back story:
During the latest episode of the battle over a sex tape showing ex-presidential candidate John Edwards being less than presidential, Judge Carl Fox stopped with a quizzical look.
Rielle Hunter, a campaign videographer with whom Edwards had an extramarital affair and a child, claims the tape is hers and wants it back from Andrew Young, the former Edwards aide who wrote a tell-all book about the politician’s quest for the White House.
At a hearing in Orange County Superior Court on Wednesday, lawyers for Young argued that Hunter had no claim to it. They contended the video belonged to the Edwards campaign or his political action committee.
“What possible purpose would a campaign want – or desire for – a sex tape of a candidate involved in a sex act?” Fox asked rhetorically.
First of all, I love that there will forever be court records with that question in there. That should go down in the history of great political quotes. But, now for the understatement of the year:
“The campaign did not want some tapes that would upset Elizabeth Edwards,” said Wade Barber, the lawyer from Pittsboro on Hunter’s legal team.
Just because the campaign paid for them and didn’t want to use them in the Edwards for President commercials at the time doesn’t mean they don’t belong to the campaign. I mean, come on, you never know when having your lover film you in a sex act while cheating on your dying wife will be just the thing to rekindle a political career.
The team cooled down antiprotons to temperatures colder than the surface of Pluto, as low as -443 degrees F (9.26 kelvin) — just 17 degrees above absolute zero. Physicists studying cold antimatter hope to ultimately glean insights into why the universe is made of matter rather than antimatter.
I think we need to know the definition of absolute zero before we can have warp drive.
UPDATE: Someone in the comments notes the degrees is correct, since it’s degrees F above Absolute Zero. They did not re-note the scale. That would make sense. It’s not technically correct to refer to Kelvin as degrees, so that temperature isn’t 9.2 degrees Kelvin but 9.2 Kelvin. The use of degrees make restating the scale redundant.
SayUncle is pointing to a story out of Florida where police are asking gun shops for personal information on buyers in order to find a serial killer who is using the same type of weapon. It’s illegal under Florida law. I have a nasty case of Deja Vu over this story, but I can’t find anything in the archives. I feel like this has happened before, where police were going around collecting information on gun owners in order to catch a criminal.
UPDATE: Jennifer found it here. It doesn’t look like I blogged about it, so it must have been someone else.
That seems to be Josh Horwitz’s position. He quotes from Heller, as an example of “Justice Scalia’s dangerous insurrectionist rhetoric in Heller“:
“If…the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia … If, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment’s guarantee — it does not assure the existence of a ‘citizens’ militia’ as a safeguard against tyranny.”
Nice cherry picking there Josh. Here’s the full quote:
Justice Breyer’s assertion that individual self-defense is merely a “subsidiary interest†of the right to keep and bear arms, see post, at 36, is profoundly mistaken. He bases that assertion solely upon the prologue—but that can only show that self- defense had little to do with the right’s codification; it was the central component of the right itself.
Besides ignoring the historical reality that the Second Amendment was not intended to lay down a “novel principl[e]†but rather codified a right “inherited from our English ancestors,†Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U. S. 275, 281 (1897), petitioners’ interpretation does not even achieve the narrower purpose that prompted codification of the right. If, as they believe, the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia, see Brief for Petititioners 8—if, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment’s guarantee—it does not assure the existence of a “citizens’ militia†as a safeguard against tyranny. For Congress retains plenary authority to organize the militia, which must include the authority to say who will belong to the organized force.17 That is why the first Militia Act’s requirement that only whites enroll caused States to amend their militia laws to exclude free blacks.
So in context, we can see Scalia is arguing against Justice Breyer’s assertion that the militia prologue essentially negates the self-defense interest in the Second Amendment. He does this by arguing that showing how Justice Breyer’s interpretation would permit Congress to essentially destroy the right using its militia powers, which Scalia correctly points out is an absurd result for an enumerated Constitutional right.
Perhaps the reason the Court did not address the issue, as Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s brief urged, is because CSGV assertion that this was an issue was absurd and ignorant. These guys seemed to prosper when they were media darlings, but the party is over. Post Heller, the Brady’s immediately went into tactical retreat mode. CGSV just seems to have gotten angry and ridiculous. Perhaps they always were, and success covers a lot of faults, except their movement has not had any since the mid 90s.
By David Post over at the Volokh Conspiracy. The comments are all very interesting as well.
UPDATE: One commenter notes:
You guys are really misusing the Marks “narrower†rule. The Marks rule applies in the following situation:
Plurality announces a broad rule. Concurrence says “no, it shouldn’t be that broad– I agree with the result in this case, but would not extend it any furtherâ€. In that situation, concurrence is controlling opinion.
It has no application to concurrence that says “I would also announce a broad rule, but I would do it using a completely different rationale that would create a brand new, expansive doctrine that this Court has previously declined to recognize.â€
It would not make any sense to recognize as the “controlling opinion†an opinion that takes a position that is going to be rejected 8–1 in the next case.
I suspect that will be correct in the end. I don’t think any lower courts are going to interpret Thomas’ opinion as controlling.
I really have to wonder if Washington Whispers, a feature of US News & World Report, got their information for this article from an NRA fundraising letter. The “NRA hit list” they cite are the kinds of things I’d expect NRA to scare me with if they wanted me to send them money.
Remember that article from the New England Journal of Medicine I linked to a few days ago? I should have looked her up when I noticed the JD next to her name. An intrepid reader did, and she’s with a Califnornia law firm, and filed a brief supporting Chicago in McDonald. The brief was not cited, despite the fact that it was essentially a justification for total firearms prohibition.
I anxiously await the New England Journal of Medicine taking editorial articles from actual practicing pro-gun doctors, of which I seem to have a number of among my readers.
Eugene Volokh has a post explaining standards of scrutiny, and points out it’s not as straightforward as we’d like to believe:
Consider, for instance, what would be the standard of scrutiny for free speech. Sometimes it’s strict scrutiny, as to content-based restrictions on speech that’s outside the exceptions. Sometimes it’s a weak form of intermediate scrutiny, as to content-neutral restrictions that leave open ample alternative channels. Sometimes it’s a strong form of intermediate scrutiny, as to restrictions on commercial speech. As to speech that falls within the exceptions — as it happens, exceptions that were not themselves generated using strict scrutiny — it’s hard even to talk about standard of scrutiny. Is it that for speech that’s within the exceptions (e.g., obscenity, threats, fighting words) the standard of scrutiny is rational basis? Or should we see the standard of scrutiny for sexually themed speech, for instance, as the Miller test, for insults theCohen/Gooding/Johnson test, etc.? Certainly the cases dealing with those exceptions generally don’t even talk about “standards of scrutiny†for the exception.
Professor Volokh also looks at what this means for the Second Amendment, noting that comparisons between other rights and the right to bear arms are a useful exercise, but that it has to be tempered with an understanding that no one right is treated the same way, and they are treated differently for the different purposes they are intended for. This ties in an earlier post by Professor Volokh in regards to a previous post on gun license fees.
While I recognize that other rights have been licensed (marriage and demonstrating), or subject to registration requirements (lobbying), I can’t help but wonder about how constitutional it would seem if it was the state governments under Jim Crow that were doing the licensing and registration. Bringing up Condie Rice’s thoughts on the subject:
During the bombings of the summer of 1963, her father and other neighborhood men guarded the streets at night to keep white vigilantes at bay. Rice said her staunch defense of gun rights comes from those days. She has argued that if the guns her father and neighbors carried had been registered, they could have been confiscated by the authorities, leaving the black community defenseless.
That’s not the country we live in anymore, fortunately, but just as the Court said it was not it’s job to declare the Second Amendment dead letter, the Court also should keep in mind it wasn’t just criminals the founders had in mind when thinking about who We The People needed protection from.
After we slay the gun control dragon, food freedom may end up being my next pet issue. If the Government can control what you eat, any freedom you may think you have is an illusion. Much like having the means to protect one’s own life and liberty, having a freedom to eat foods of one’s own choice is fundamental. We might have to rename the blog “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snowflakes” with a tagline “Or Uncle Sam Will Shoot You.” It’s for your own good, you see.
Now it looks like the ATF is going to make sure everyone knows beer is bad for you, because if they don’t, FDA will, and we can’t have one out of control federal bureaucracy stepping on the turf of another out of control federal bureaucracy now, can we? At least one former inside the beltway blogger thinks that the GOP is utterly powerless to help us in this regard:
A big part of my thinking in coming to DC was to try and help to create a synergy between the Right on-line and the establishment GOP. I had hoped to forestall anything like an insurgency from the Right by finding common ground. What I didn’t realize is that today’s GOP is interested in no such thing. It can’t hear anyone outside the Beltway echo chamber and isn’t interested in listening to them even if they could.
Of course they aren’t interested. They are part of the problem too. As another blogger notes, the only way you can change anything is by getting folks back home fired up — you need a real grassroots movement:
What every Blogger should do, is get to know their local GOP clubs and Central Committees, and if time and distance permits, their County clubs too. Don’t just figure in publicity, but figure out other ways to expand your club (or committee’s) reach. Funds matter.  Knowing your County history and voting numbers also matter. […]
To make the RNC understand Bloggers and Tea Partiers, we have to crack County and State levels first. By the time of Election 2012 and 2014, we will become the establishment.
That’s likely what it’s going to take to change anything. But there is another model other than working through the political parties, and that’s working through single-issue interest groups that help channel grass roots efforts politically — basically the NRA model. That’s one thing the various “food lobby” groups have so far failed to understand. From the Belmont Club:
If sugary drinks become the new cigarettes the American Beverage Association bids fair to become the new Big Tobacco bogeyman. Wikipedia writes: “fighting the creation of soft drink taxes, the American Beverage Association, the largest US trade organization for soft drink bottlers, has spent considerable money to lobby Congress. The Association’s annual lobbying spending rose from about $391,000 to more than $690,000 from 2003 to 2008. And, in the 2010 election cycle, its lobbying grew more than 1000 percent to $8.67 million. These funds are helping to pay for 25 lobbyists at seven different lobbying firms.â€
They can spend all the money they want, but without votes to reward the supporters of food freedom, and punish the food nanny’s, lobbyist aren’t going to help all that much. What’s most likely to happen, realizing the futility, the industry will actively acquiesce to regulation, then realizing it can game the system to entrench the major players at the expense of upstarts, will engage in regulatory capture.
This is not inevitable; we’ve largely saved guns from this fate. We’ve not saved the industry from regulation, but firearms regulation has not, generally, resulted in a contraction of the industry into the hands of a few big players, and to a large degree, manufacturers are still allowed to design and market guns within a fairly broad regulatory framework. That might sound fantastic, but in comparison to the requirement for operating a pharmaceutical company, gun manufacturing is regulatory cake.
The big problem we have is honestly not from the left, but from conservatives and libertarians themselves. The problem is, to make an effect in politics requires collective action — something libertarians are very poor at. Collective is one of those dirty commie words, after all. People on the left are much more willing than libertarians and conservatives to put aside their personal agendas for the sake of the greater good, and for the sake of their cause. That’s why they are very effective at getting Government to do what they want. There’s a certain amount of selfishness that drives libertarian thought, but that becomes a barrier when it comes to convincing people that self-interest can be a good thing for a whole as well. That’s a paradox we’re going to have to figure out if we’re going to beat back leviathan.