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It is a Great Day for Liberty.

It is less than 90 days from Election Day.  It is high time to get to work for your candidate.  Some day I hope to see an election in which our rights do not hang by a thread.  We do not have such an election this year.  Perhaps my sons will see such an election, but only if we get things done in my time.

It takes a great deal to knock the learned Larry Swickard off the front page of the Bullet.  It takes, in fact, a landmark Supreme Court decision.  The more I examine the decision, the better I think it is for us.  The decision’s comments about licensing and other restrictions are merely dicta (sometime dictum or obiter dictum.  The term means that they are comments of the court which are not essential to the court’s ruling and have no precidential value.   The ruling of the Court is that the Second Amendment is an individual right to own firearms based on the right of self-defense.  It specifically includes handguns as a protected class of firearms.  For the first time a class of firearms is protected instead of banned.  The fact that this is based on the right of self-defense is huge.  Since the right is based on self-defense, other actions and facilities also have the right of self-defense.  We have the right to practice self-defense, we have the right to a range for self-defense practice.  It would seem that we have a right to books, and videos and magazines on self-defense; that does not make them tax deductible, but it is a good thought.

The Heller case is unusual, and not just because the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Second Amendment means what it says.  The tone of the opinion is unusually confrontational.  Typically an Opinion will state that the dissenting judges “overlook”, “over rely”, or “fail to consider” some point or the other.  The harshest criticism is normally that the other opinion “misstates” some prior case.  In Heller the opinion of the Court states several times that the dissenting opinion is “wrong” and once that it is “bizarre”.  This is not because the dissenting opinions are either wrong or bizarre, they are wrong, and they are bizarre.   The dissents are not the first Supreme Court opinions, dissenting or otherwise, to be either wrong or bizarre.  Justice Scalia, the author of the opinion, may have been affronted by the intellectual dishonesty of the dissents.  The dissents are notable for contorting language, misstating precedents and focusing on minor, isolated laws of the colonial period in order to justify a total ban today.  One dissent, in an attempt to claim that the “right of the people” is a collective right, proclaims that the First Amendment right to petition the government is “primarily collective”.  Such intellectual and legal dishonesty pervades the dissenting opinions.  They focus on obscure Boston ordinances which regulate storage of loaded guns and gunpowder as a fire prevention measure and turn them into justification for the D.C. ban.  We survived such dishonesty.  We won.

When the Heller case began there was much debate as to if it was a good idea.  I confess that I had concerns.  Many knowledgeable persons did not see five votes on the Court in favor of the Second Amendment.  The fact that it was a 5-4 decision indicates that these concerns were well placed.  However a 5-4 decision is the decision of the Court, just as when congress passes a law by a 5-4 ratio it is the law of the land just as if it were unanimous.  We must remember that all the opposition has to do is scare one more justice, and we could lose the next case.  The new president will probably appoint one or two justices.  These will be younger and more vigorous than the retiring dissenting justices.  They may be more persuasive.  What view they will press on the other justices depends on who appoints them.

As of this writing Washington D.C. has not yet written its new handgun laws.  They promise to make them as restrictive as possible.  Currently, the only licensed firearms dealer in the District is the virulently anti-gun “Violence Police Center”.  While gun dealers across the country had their licenses revoked for not selling enough guns to qualify as “in the business” the ATF tolerated the VPC’s FFL when they did not even have a sales tax license a retail storefront or zoning clearance; something required of everyone else.  Residents of the District have no place to buy a handgun.  The District has licensed handgun trainers, to qualify the many security guards required by the rich and connected.  These trainers now have a new market, but the District promises to make exercise of the Constitutional right as difficult as possible.  This may be good in the long run.  The best way to get a 9-0 decision from the Supreme Court is to attempt to evade an earlier ruling.

The standard of review for Second Amendment cases is still vague.  This may have been a deliberate decision in order to get that fifth vote for the result.  It may be that the Court did not want to take things too far in this landmark decision.  We still don’t know if the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments.  The ruling only covers the actions of a federal enclave.  There have been several cases filed against notoriously anti-gun cities.  There cases will take years to work their way through the courts.  In the meantime there is work to do.

The fact that the Second Amendment right is based on the right of self-defense is huge.  Self-defense is a very basic human right found in all legal codes and religions.  This makes it more likely that the judicial standard of review will be high and it will be considered a fundamental right which the states must respect.

The question is: what next?  There is a movement to encourage open carry in order to make gun owners more socially acceptable.  I believe that this only serves to make people afraid.  This is not the time to make people afraid.  We have the best shot by focusing on how unfair anti-gun laws are.  The American people often do not care what is done so long as it is done to everyone equally.  A strategy of lawsuits against the notoriously unfair Chicago and New York gun laws is the way to go.

Some people have suggested that we start a letter-writing campaign to inform judges, especially Supreme Court judges, of how important guns are.  This is a very bad idea.  The letters will not get past the judge’s clerk.  If they become aware of them they will be offended by what they perceive as lobbying.  This will be a very bad result for us.

I have checked.  Tom VanEyck refuses to clone his wife.  He does not want anyone else to be as happy as he is.  He is usually such a generous soul.

I saw a 1933 movie called Scarface.  It is a thinly disguised story of Al Capone and his Chicago mob.  It is not even thinly disguised as a demand for restrictions on tommyguns.  Characters repeatedly decry the availability of the Thompson and the mobsters repeatedly use them against the City and each other.  The next year the National Firearms Act placed crippling taxes on the guns.  The tax method was chosen because it was believed that banning them was unconstitutional.

A group of U.S. Marines has been cleared of war crimes accusations.  They were accused of murdering Iraqis near the town of Haditha.  When the accusations were first made there were even senators and congressmen proclaiming their guilt, based on nothing more than accusations.  Their right to a defense was given less importance than that of certain cop killers.  Now that they are found not guilty, they do not get so much as an apology.  There seems to be a double standard.  Some troops are given vague guidelines and little supervision; they get out of line and humiliate prisoners and this is considered a massive war crime.  No one objected when the Saddam regime murdered groups of dissidents, tortured their families to death, tortured their friends to death, tortured to death people who disapproved of torture and finally tortured to death people who expressed insufficient enthusiasm for torture.  We are held to a higher standard, but it might be said that we set the standard and so get more criticism when we do not measure up.

An episode of the series “30 Days” has an anti-gun woman moving in with a gun enthusiast and his son.  Before moving in she says that she expects it to be like something out of Deliverance with a Confederate flag on the wall and moonshine on the porch.  She is introduced to the shooting community and works in a gun store.  She repeatedly claimed that the gun owner was afraid; she could not imagine any other reason for him owning guns.  However she was the one who exhibited fear.  She was afraid of gunshot, afraid of guns and afraid of the gun owners.  She broke down in tears after she fired a shotgun for the first time.  The gun owner was clearly mystified at her prejudices.  He was calm and rational throughout the program.  I might have started her on a .22 rather than a shotgun.  The experience made the lady a little more tolerant.  Every little bit helps.

There is a reality show about recruits for a sheriff’s department.  One recruit is shot in firearms training.  He had never held a gun in his hand before.  On the big day he could not process commands or keep the gun’s terminology straight.  Told to touch the front sight he touched the hammer.  Told to put the gun on safe, he pulled the trigger.  He was the original safety problem.  Given extra training he did not improve.  Granted the military form of instruction did not reduce his stress.

I saw a documentary on the various possible ways the world could be destroyed.  The producer was much too enthusiastic about his subject.  It seems that one of the possibilities was an asteroid strike.  In 2128 on a Friday the 13th, an asteroid will come very close to the earth, closer than communications satellites.  Eight years later is will come back, again on Friday the 13th, and may come closer.  The fact that it keeps coming around on Friday the 13th is a bad sign.  However, we may all be dead of global warming by then so there is reason for optimism.

At a second hand store I saw a pool ball which had been affixed to what may be the leg of a barstool.  The store did not know what it was but was absolutely positive that it was worth $10.  It was a club, designed to keep order among the pool players.  It resembles a Zulu knobkerrie.  That does not mean that it is from a Zulu pool hall, but that would be a good story.  It would be even better if it was used by a Zulu regiment at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  That’s probably what happened.

This year we will have to make a choice between candidates when neither is good for us.  We sometimes have a choice between a candidate who will take us to hell by the fastest means and most direct route, or the one who will dawdle and take the long way around.  Choosing the perfect candidate from a third party will make it more likely the worst candidate will win.  This may make a statement, but we will be on the fast track to hell when we make it.  On the other hand, there is a very good chance that we will have races in which both candidates are good for us.  This does not happen nearly often enough, but is becoming more common.  This means that WMSA is making progress.

We shall overcome.

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