Author: Sebastian

Lots of good stuff over at Volokh lately, this one a story of Four Black Men and a Gun.

As an American, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to many, many people who have risked and given their lives to defend our liberty. But as I reflect on the recent Supreme Court decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago, I thought I should take a moment to mention four Americans who have made a relatively uncelebrated contribution to the freedom I cherish and enjoy. I owe a special debt to four black men, and one gun.

The most important of these men, to me, was my father. When I was a boy, he and my mother moved our family of six from the Terrace Village public housing projects in Pittsburgh’s Hill District to a predominantly white neighborhood. While many of our neighbors welcomed us, we were not welcomed by all. I recall a brick through the front window, and other incidents. But burned into my memory is the Sunday evening when my father was beaten with a tire iron on the street in front of our home, and in front of us, his four little children. Those three young white men were never caught.

When my father, with his surgically reconstructed eye socket and jaw, was released from the hospital, he did something he never once considered when we lived in the projects. He bought a gun.

Every evening after that, before going to bed, I and my siblings would go out onto the front porch to say goodnight to my father as he sat in his chair, shotgun across his lap, with its black barrel glistening under the porch light. I never once felt unsafe. I never once had trouble sleeping. My sense of security did not come from the Pittsburgh Police, or from the law. My sense of security came from my father, and his gun.

There were no more incidents, at least not any that I can recall, after my father exercised his Second Amendment right. It was his contribution to “non-violence” in our neighborhood.

Read the whole thing. I can’t help but think the Brady folks think we’re full of crap when we try to tell the role that the Second Amendment played in the Civil Rights Movement. On the left they point to the public non-violence face to the movement, which was also very important. But it seems to me, given multiple anecdotes, that it’s hard to deny that the Second Amendment right played an important role.

Two police officers, one of them from Chicago, take exception to USA today’s assertion, that I would note has been promoted by the Bradys, that police support the Chicago gun ban. The Brady folks have never had a lock on the rank and file, but they do get the political appointees. It’s good to see cops speaking out against their leadership on these issues.

Graham gave her the one vote she needed to get out of committee. The rest of the GOP Senators voted no, and she needs at least one vote from the minority to get past the committee. Now the vote goes to the Senate floor, but it’s going to be impossible to stop her there with Graham’s defection. Other GOP votes are sure to defect as well, following Graham’s lead.

Voting against her were Sessions (R-AL), Hatch (R-UT), Grassley (R-IA), Kyl (R-AZ), Cornyn (R-TX), and Coburn (R-OK). They all deserves our thanks for their vote. Graham is showing himself to be an increasingly unreliable conservative vote, and given the state he’s from, I think we ought to expect better.

Judiciary Dems are mostly anti-gun and poorly rated. The only votes up for possible influence by NRA were Leahy and Feingold, and to a lesser degree Specter. But even with those votes, she still would have gotten out. The GOP needed to hold it together, and they failed us because of Graham.

They seem to be pulling out all the stops on Kagan (PDF). If I were a guy like, say, Lindsey Graham, who had an endorsement in 2008 and an A-rating, I’d be nervous about the level of opposition coming out of NRA. Especially when the Democrat running that last ran against him also had an A-rating.

The panel the case has been remanded to has asked for supplemental briefs speaking to the standard of review that ought to be used. Eugene Volokh also speaks of standards of reviews, addressing the SNBI crowd:

The trouble is that “shall not be infringed” doesn’t resolve much until we figure out what it means to “infringe” a right. […]

And I think as a general matter this is probably the right interpretation of the constitutional provisions. But in any event, it seems unlikely that courts will take an absolutist view towards the right to bear arms, to the point that any regulation of any possession of any arms in any place will be seen as an “infringement.”

Now this having been said, I’m happy to argue against restrictions that really are infringements; I discuss some in this article. But it’s not enough just to say “shall not be infringed,” especially when we’re in an area — such as government control over government property — where some degree of government restrictions have long been accepted in many areas.

The trick is to get the Courts to carve out a broad right. While I have some minor and specific disagreements with Professor Volokh in his paper Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, it provides the best context I’ve seen to date for thinking about the issue. It’ll be very interesting to see what the 9th Circuit has to say about this.