|
|
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
|
4:18p - My thoughts on DC v. Heller.
I've listened to the entirety of CSPAN's audio stream coverage of the oral arguments. I've read a handful of the amici on both sides, read both side's briefs, the District Court's ruling, and a smattering of other documents involved in this case.
My general sense, is that this is likely to be a 5-4 decision in favor of an individual right to arms ownership.
However, the big question is... what will that mean?
It seems that several of the justices favor some sort of "reasonableness" restrictions. I think the DC lawyers really fucked themselves when it came to addressing the reasonableness issue. They tried to use fully automatic firearms (i.e. "machineguns") as a juxtaposition against handguns. However, it seemed to backfire on them when the justices hounded them for why it would make sense for allowing full-auto ownership, but to prohibit handgun ownership. I suspect the DC boys were hoping that the NFA would not be challenged if such a decision were to be handed down, thus allowing the DC handgun ban to continue to exist. Considering that the NFA (and the resulting US v. Miller case) is the fundamental underpinning of all modern prohibitive firearms legislation, I suspect that they weren't able to clearly distinguish the forest from the trees.
It looks like there's the slim possibility that we'll be allowed strict scrutiny for the 2nd amendment. Strict scrutiny is the same style of tests that are applied to the 1st amendment and is the most rigorous standard that can be applied to this issue. It would mean that the legislature would need to go to great lengths to prove that any laws they pass don't infringe on the right, and that we'd then have excellent standing to challenge nearly ever anti-firearms law on the books. I would LOVE to see this happen, but I think it's a long shot.
More probably, the majority opinion will find some bizarre "middle ground" in expanding the test from its traditional military application to include a more broad perspective, but still allow a wide swatch of restrictions such as age limits, background checks, etc.
I think the one thing that, in all likelihood, will come out of this case is that at least some provisions of the DC handgun ban will be torn down. I expect to see something that overrules the class-of-weapons style prohibitions that the gun-grabbers have been pushing in an attempt to slide down the slope until all classes of firearms have been banned.
Overall, I expect this to be a decent wedge case that allows a lot more challenges to the other anti-firearms laws on the books.
current mood:  satisfied
current music: Paralyzed - Ted Nugent (comment on this)
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
wakko's journal