Justice Scalia thinks we’ll be hearing more Supreme Court cases on guns soon. I think Scalia would vote to give us a strong and robust Second Amendment, but he needs four more votes to win cases. I’m glad to hear he’s softening up Kagan. Who would have thought in the 70s and early 80s we’d be primarily fighting long gun bans because handgun bans were off the table? I actually think it would benefit even a very urban and very gun weary Democratic Party to have the courts largely settle the issue in favor of gun rights. That opens the door to the Democrats using gun control the same way Republicans use abortion. Republicans love to talk a good talk on abortion, but the fact is the court protections preclude most of the policy options they advocate, and they are then left nibbling around the edges, and mostly failing at that, when it comes to policy. But it’s a good issue to drag out at election time and dangle in front of important constituencies. I’d be tickled pink of the gun issue ended up like abortion, and with similar levels of protection from the courts.
Amicus briefs have been filed in Kachalsky. I don’t think all this late gun control nonsense is going to change the fact that carry will be the next issue before the Court, and we can hope the Court will clear things up a bit when it comes to standards of review.
I think you’re tallying up the support on the wrong side of the abortion issue. However, I’ll also put my cards on the table as a pro-life gun owner.
There is way more support for tighter restrictions on abortion laws than gun/magazine bans. If you look at public support alone for “abortion restrictions” (which the media also glosses over like they do support for gun rights) it’s around 50-60%. The march for life garners consistently 100-200k people in DC, even more when a pro-abortion president is in office.
Of course if anything we can learn from public opinion polls from this whole bout of craziness, the devil is in the details on just what “popular support” really is and how broad that is. I don’t think you can ever really know from a poll alone how many people support an AWB since most don’t know what the item is they’re being referred to.
Now I’ll make a comparison. I think there is about as much chance of the supreme court overturning a full auto machine gun ban as overturning Roe v. Wade. That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight in the legislature, but we also shouldn’t count on the courts to back us up. The line has to be pushed, and we ought to push it. I think the line will be pushed somewhere between full and semi-auto rifles the way the courts see, and we’ll have to hold the line in as many states as possible.
Even Scalia says he doesn’t know what limits on gun ownership could be upheld by the supreme court.
I think you may have a closer comparison than you probably thought in terms of judicial interpretation and intervention on the issue.
I’m a single issue voter these days. But if I had my way, I’d get the “R” party out of the abortion conversation.
I view abortion in a similar vein to guns. It’s individual choice and NONE of my tax dollars should fund it. I don’t believe abortion is a morally acceptable thin to do. But I refuse to make that choice for someone else unless my money is funding it. In the same way I would never agree to forcing someone to bare arms (or not).
Just one of the few reasons my registration reads Independent, rather than Republican.
More to the point: do you think duck hunting or deer hunting will translate for Kagan? Or will it make her believe in the “rights of hunters and sportsmen”?
Well, at least you’re consistent. And you have my ear with respect to how the GOP should look toward being party of the “bill of rights.” Right now I think this should be job one so in one respect I can agree with your sentiment.
However, I still support laws against murder even if they can’t/won’t stop it. I do draw the line there.
I don’t honestly know. I think only Scalia could answer that.
For a variety of reasons, it is much more likely that the Supreme Court will grant cert to Moore v. Madigan rather than Kachalsky v. Cacace.
Chief among these is that Moore focuses exclusively on the threshold issues of scope and public carry; Kachalsky introduces an as-yet not fully adjudicated issue regarding discretionary carry license issue.
While Kachalsky is the current darling case of certain groups, its core legal theory — denial of a carry license is prior restraint — has yet to be adopted by any court in the nation. For this reason alone, it is very unlikely that the Supreme Court will hear Kachalsky in the near future.
Gonna have to disagree.
With the glaring split between the 7th and 2nd circuit courts in Kachalsky (7th said you need “good cause” and 2nd said you dont need any cause) it is all but guaranteed to be picked up by the Supreme Court. The job of the Supreme Court is to settle this splits.