Bruen Drops and It’s a Win

This doesn’t portend a return to blogging. Social media and Google have killed blogging as a thing, so I’m not inclined to return to the same level of activity I once had. But I wanted to note Bruen because it’s probably the most important thing to happen to gun rights since McDonald dropped 12 years ago. You can read the ruling here. At this point I have done only a quick skim, but my impression is that it is about as good a ruling as we could have hoped for. Is it ironclad? No. No ruling would be. My impression is that Kavanaugh and Roberts are the weaker of the Bruen majority, but they still joined the majority of the opinion and filed their own concurrence basically saying shall-issue was fine.

Overall it puts the kibosh on the lower courts Second Amendment Two-Step dance. They will have to come up with a more novel means of resisting the Second Amendment, and I suspect they will. But it will get harder for them. The Court pretty clearly wanted to emphasize Heller and signal to the lower court that it is not dead letter. The Court made quite clear that outlying laws were meaningless for 2nd Amendment analysis. So the fact that the Sullivan Law is over 100 years old by now doesn’t mean it’s constitutional because it has a long history: it is an outlier that new other jurisdictions have passed.

Long term it’s probably best not to rely on the Courts for protection. Just ask Planned Parenthood how well that’s working out for them. But we can use these reprieves to help repair the gun culture in these jurisdictions if the restrictions lighten things up a little. This is not over. There will never be a death blow to the desire of the nobility to control the serfs. Nonetheless we should use the circumstances presented to us for maximal advantage.

Breaking Silence Over Gun Control

For the past week since the deal was announced, gun owners have been wondering “What do we get out of this? How is it a compromise if all we’re doing is ceding ground.”

After reading the proposed language, I’m surprised by how much of this looks to me like it’s aimed at Mexican drug cartels. So what you have here is a bunch of Republicans who are probably retiring or will soon announce they are retiring, who love themselves some “law and order,” who are using Uvaldi as an excuse to get a wish list to target the cartels.

There’s also a few cases where they are requiring action from states, which the feds cannot do. The state can literally refuse to pick up the phone and there’s nothing the feds can do about it. This is well-established precedent. So know we know what the GOP worms got out of this: some drug warriorin’. And what flag waving Republican doesn’t love that?

Just go read them trying to define “dating relationship.” Are you kidding me? At least they didn’t apply it retroactively, and limited the prohibition to 5 years, but you know what would have been nice? To do the same thing with all of the Lautenberg Amendment. There would have been a compromise. But no. This just takes. The concessions are only things law and order GOP swamp creatures care about.

This bill is garbage and should be opposed, and any Republican who votes for this needs to be tossed out on their asses in a primary if they aren’t retiring.