We Won! Sort of (Part 2)

Yesterday I posted comments re: Heller v DC which were a dismal reflection of my own pessimistic attitude about the on-going contretemps between gun-rights v gun-control activists.

I stand behind every word I said.

Still, I'm aware that such dour commentary is disheartening, so I spent some time looking for a more positive response from reputable commentators.

Thanks to the Michael Bane Blog, I found this article in the REASON magazine website. The folks who write for this publication are not only excellent writers, they are much smarter than I am.

Here's the short article from Dave Kopel:

Dave Kopel: Heller is a tremendous victory for human rights and for libertarian ideals. Today’s majority opinion provides everything which the lawyers closely involved in the case, myself included, had hoped for. Of course I would have preferred a decision which went much further in declaring various types of gun control to be unconstitutional. But Rome was not built in a day, and neither is constitutional doctrine.

For most of our nation’s history, the U.S. Supreme Court did nothing to protect the First Amendment; it was not until the 1930s when a majority of the Court took the first steps towards protecting freedom of the press. It would have been preposterous to be disappointed that a Court in, say, 1936, would not declare a ban on flag-burning to be unconstitutional. It took decades for the Supreme Court to build a robust First Amendment doctrine strong enough to protect even the free speech rights of people as loathsome as flag-burners or American Nazis.

Likewise, the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was, for all practical purposes, judicially nullified from its enactment until the 1930s. When the Court in that decade started taking Equal Protection seriously, the Court began with the easiest cases - such as Missouri’s banning blacks from attending the University of Missouri Law School, while not even having a "separate but equal" law school for them. It was three decades later when, having constructed a solid foundation of Equal Protection cases, the Court took on the most incendiary racial issue of all, and struck down the many state laws which banned inter-racial marriage.

So too with the Second Amendment. From the Early Republic until the present, the Court has issued many opinions which recognize the Second Amendment as an individual right. Yet most of these opinions were in dicta. After the 1939 case of United States v. Miller, the Court stood idle while lower federal courts did the dirty work of nullifying the Second Amendment, by over-reading Miller to claim that only National Guardsmen are protected by the Amendment.

Today, that ugly chapter in the Court’s history is finished. Heller is the first step on what will be long journey. Today, the Court struck down the most freakish and extreme gun control law in the nation; only in D.C. was home self-defense with rifles and shotguns outlawed. Heller can be the beginning of a virtuous circle in which the political branches will strengthen Second Amendment rights (as in the 40 states which now allow all law-abiding, competent adults to obtain concealed handgun carry permits), and the courts will be increasingly willing to declare unconstitutional the ever-rarer laws which seriously infringe the right to keep and bear arms.

As the political center of gravity moves step by step in a pro-rights direction, gun control laws which today might seem (to most judges) to be constitutional will be viewed with increasing skepticism. The progress that the pro-Second Amendment movement has made in the last 15 years has been outstanding. As long as gun owners and other pro-Second Amendment citizens stay politically active, the next 15, 30, and 45 years can produce much more progress, and the role of the judiciary in protecting Second Amendment rights will continue to grow.

Dave Kopel is Research Director at the Independence Institute, in Golden, Colorado. He was one of three lawyers at the counsel table who assisted Alan Gura at the oral argument on March 18. His brief for the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association was cited four times in the Court's opinions.

Wait a minute! This was suppose to be a positive, uplifting and thoroughly reassuring note from one of the Key Speakers for the Second Amendment. He's telling us "As long as gun owners and other pro-Second Amendment citizens stay politically active, the next 15, 30, and 45 years can produce much more progress ...", and this is A Good Thing?

I don't want to wait and work for another 15, 30 or 45 months for the Federal Government to acknowledge that the Second Amendment means what it says. I don't have 45 years left in me; I want what I want, which is for the Socialists to quit screwing around with my life, and I want it now.

I'm tired of writing letters to the editor, to my congress-critters, and to total strangers. I don't want to write about the need to defend the Second Amendment here, I want to write about the high cost of reloading equipment and the funny things that happened at the last shooting match.

But Kopel tells me I have even another lifetime to fight for my rights? I'm tired of fighting for what was given to me by God, and what was guaranteed in 1791 with the ratification of the Bill of Rights.

This isn't as 'positive' as I had promised, is it?

I've got Good News for you, and I've got Bad News .

The Bad News is ... what Kopel said? That's the Good News .

Oh, wait a minute. Here's some good news.

Why is it good news?

It's good news, because the existing situation which the legal challenge addresses describes an Administrative Hell which is obviously designed to discourage firearms owners from meeting 'Reasonable Restrictions':

Under the gun law currently in place, firearms must be re-registered annually.

“Each time,” Gura said, “a tax is imposed, forms must be filled out, photographs submitted. A person who owns more than one gun will find herself or himself constantly in the process of registering each gun as it comes due for expiration. If registration is to be required, once is enough.”

He further noted that Chicago’s bizarre requirement that guns be registered before they are acquired often times makes registration impossible. The penalty for failure to comply with the registration scheme is that a gun not re-registered on time can never be registered again. Gura likened it to a requirement to dispose of a car if it is not re-registered on time with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

And you wondered why I called it "Administrative Hell".