Someone please hand Wayne LaPierre a bigger shovel

By Carl 

Because he clearly doesn't believe he has hit the bottom of his self-dug grave yet:

WASHINGTON — Wayne LaPierre, the executive director of the National Rifle Association, angrily accused President Obama on Tuesday of demonizing law-abiding gun owners and of wanting to put "every private personal firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government."

In a fiery speech at a hunting conference in Nevada, Mr. LaPierre criticized Mr. Obama's Inaugural Address on Monday when the president said Americans should not "mistake absolutism for principle."

That reference, Mr. LaPierre said, was intended as an attack on the N.R.A. and gun owners who believe that the Second Amendment to the Constitution provides an absolute right to bear arms. 

What gun nuts won't tell you is that the Second Amendment is the only one, the only one, that places a condition on a Constitutional right. They'll ignore the language of the first part about a "well-regulated militia" -- and if the Founders were alive to address this, I think they'd acknowledge local police forces as constituting said militiae -- but woe betide anyone who interprets the rest of the Amendment to read as anything but "all the guns we want, all the time."

But then La Pierre doubled down on the stoopit:

"I urge our president to use caution when attacking clearly defined absolutes in favor of his principles," Mr. LaPierre said. "When absolutes are abandoned for principles, the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone's graffiti."

In effect, La Pierre is demanding absolutism on his relative terms. For instance, the gun that Founders referred to is a muzzle loader, a musket. At best, you might have a flintlock pistol. Why doesn't he mention that in his "principle"? After all, colonists had to defend their farms against varmints both human and animal, and they seemed to do a pretty good job of surviving. If the purpose of owning a gun is to defend yourself and your family, then it seems to me that mission accomplished there.

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What a shock

By Mustang Bobby

A right-wing Republican congressman from Texas (redundant, I know) is threatening impeachment if President Obama does anything about guns by executive order:

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) is threatening to file articles of impeachment against President Barack Obama if he moves to change gun regulations through executive order.

"I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment," Stockman said.

In a statement, Stockman didn't hold back, saying Obama is launching an "attack on the very founding principles of this republic."

"The President's actions are an existential threat to this nation," Stockman said in a statement. "The right of the people to keep and bear arms is what has kept this nation free and secure for over 200 years. The very purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop the government from disallowing people the means to defend themselves against tyranny. Any proposal to abuse executive power and infringe upon gun rights must be repelled with the stiffest legislative force possible."

Oh, yawn. It wouldn't be worth doing if some gun nut didn't get his dander up every time Barack Obama scratched his ass because that constitutes a high crime and misdemeanor.

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Assault weapons ban?

By Frank Moraes 

Ed. note: Frank thinks I might disagree with him here, if only because he's shifting the argument away from assault weapons. I don't. While I do think assault weapons, which to me are weapons of mass destruction, ought to be banned, there ought to be broader gun control that includes restrictions on handguns as well as substantial waiting periods, among other things. Actually, I'm all for going much further than that, but I realize you have to be realistic if you want to get anything done. There's just no way the U.S. is about to enact the comprehensive gun legislation I'd prefer.

My only quibble with Frank's post is with his second footnote. To me, the Second Amendment does apply only to militias, not to private individuals, except insofar as it was assumed at the time that in the absence of a standing army militias would be made up of private individuals. ("If a well regulated militia be the most natural defence of a free country,..." wrote Hamilton in Federalist 29.) Just because the Supreme Court has interpreted it a certain way over time doesn't mean that interpretation is the right one, or that Madison et al. meant it that way.

As Justice Stevens wrote in his dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008): 

The Amendment's text does justify a different limitation: the "right to keep and bear arms" protects only a right to possess and use firearms in connection with service in a state-organized militia. Had the Framers wished to expand the meaning of the phrase "bear arms" to encompass civilian possession and use, they could have done so by the addition of phrases such as "for the defense of themselves." 

The Framers knew what they were doing. And if they'd meant to enshrine an individual's right to bear arms in the Constitution, they would have said so.

The distortion of the Framers' intent in this regard is one of the most blatant ways conservatives have imposed their right-wing ideology on America.

-- MJWS

**********

Greg Sargent's The Plum Line blog is quickly becoming my favorite Washington Post reading, which is to say I turn to it more often than Ezra Klein's excellent Wonk Blog. Sargent just seems to write more about the stuff I'm interested in. Klein writes a lot more about economics, but I'm afraid I read a good deal too much economics elsewhere. Anyway. This morning Sargent was focused on gun control.

He noted a couple of articles about where the White House is regarding an assault weapons ban. The New York Times claims that they are planning to dump it and focus on background checks and high capacity magazines. But Sam Stein claims they are still pushing the ban on these guns.

I think the focus on assault weapons is misplaced. I understand that they look scary. On a recent trip to Mexico, seeing all the military with these kinds of guns was intimidating. But like syringes with drug addiction, they are just provocative and indicative, not the problem itself. To me, the thing that I most associate with assault rifles are the 30-round banana clips.

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Connecticut school massacre: More blood on the NRA's hands

By Marc McDonald

In the aftermath of the deadly shooting that killed 27, including 20 children, at a Connecticut elementary school, there's one theme the mainstream media have been repeating over and over again. 

That is: How could this tragedy possibly happen? 

Actually, there's no mystery at all. 

The problem is that America has practically zero meaningful regulations on guns, thanks to the assholes at the National Rifle Association, an organization that has had great success in pushing its extremist agenda on America over the past 30 years. 

The NRA's vast power is the main reason that America today has far weaker gun restrictions than it did a century ago. For example, in my state of Texas, in the 1890s, it was illegal to carry a concealed gun, unlike today. Which raises a question: how, exactly, did Texans manage to get by back in the 1890s with gun laws that were more restrictive than what we have now? 

One issue that I never hear discussed when there is a tragedy like this is (ironically enough) the Second Amendment's actual text. Oh, sure, the gun nuts regularly talk about the Second Amendment in a general sense. But nobody ever actually cites the actual wording of the amendment. 

There's a good reason for this. Despite what the gun nuts would have us believe, the wording of the Second Amendment is very convoluted and vague.

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Now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.

By Carl 

The assault weapons ban must be put back in place, immediately. If President Obama has to risk looking like "He's comin' fer our gunz," then so be it. We shouldn't have to explain to the parents of the next school shooting, "It wasn't the right time to talk about banning assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols."

Because if this incident doesn't immediately make it clear that a) there is no wrong time to talk about the ban and b) assault weapons have no place in society, period, I can't imagine what the hell a gun nut could possibly want to convince him.

There is absolutely no need for any civilian, not even an off-duty cop, to own an assault weapon. Period. Here we have a case of legally owned guns being used to slaughter dozens of innocent people. These guns were employed by someone who had authorization to use them, having fired them any number of times at gun ranges under the auspices of his mother.

As Michael Moore so deftly tweeted this weekend: "If only Nancy Lanza had more guns, none of this would have happened." The Lanzas clearly had too many guns.

The answer, clearly, is not more guns. Indeed, no civilian in the past 30 years has stopped a mass shooting. Ever. Not once. Indeed, another gun tends to incite more gun violence, as anyone who lives in a deep urban area can attest. Or you merely have to look at this past summer's incident at the Empire State Building, where nine bystanders were injured by police firing upon the assailant. And they're trained in the use of firearms to the point they are warned not to draw unless its absolutely necessary.

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Single shot weapon

By Mustang Bobby

Shorter Mitt Romney on gun control:

Guns don't kill people; single moms kill people.

What he actually said:

Because if there's a two parent family, the prospect of living in poverty goes down dramatically. The opportunities that the child will — will be able to achieve increase dramatically. So we can make changes in the way our culture works to help bring people away from violence and give them opportunity, and bring them in the American system.

That's because white folks in the 'burbs don't kill other people, or shoot up high schools or movie theaters.

The dog whistles make my ears bleed.

P.S.: As Rick notes, Mr. Romney hasn't always been such a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. But that doesn't keep the NRA from backing him without question.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

The fathers of our dysfunction

By tmcbpatriot

Are we bored yet? These stories of massacres by white kids with heavy weapons always leaves us numb and totally desensitized. It happens so often that we don't even have time to process the previous one. Add to that a non-stop news cycle at break-neck speed and by the weekend we are already looking for the next big story.

In fact, we are already so bored by what happened in Colorado that last week CNN posted a video online of the massacre in 3D, just to remind us. I wish I was kidding. If you click on the link, you are a braver person than I, because, quite frankly, I do not want to see it. Not as a cartoon and not in fu**ing 3D!

But by this week, after all (most?) of the dead are buried and their families and friends are left to deal with their unimaginable loss, we will go back to our lives, the presidential election, the new judge on Idol, and whatever else has not even happened yet. It is what we do. Sure, there will still be stories about gun owners fighting with anti-gun folks over their "rights," Ted Nugent will continue to say stupid sh*t as usual, and anti-gun activists will still be protesting somewhere. But by this week the shock and awe of Aurora will all be over and nothing will have changed, because nothing ever does.

Why? Because our Constitution makes it so. It is as close to the Bible as we have to a religious document while not actually being one. And no matter how convoluted and totally misinterpreted our "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is, as long as the NRA continues to shape national policy, as long as the gun-and-ammo industry continues making billions off of our collective fear and paranoia and their interest in allowing insane people to use their weapons as viral marketing campaigns to show off their effectiveness, nothing is going to change, ever.

That is to say, nothing except for our fear of yet another place that used to be fun. Where will it be next? Disney World? A Lollapalooza festival? The Taste of Chicago? A baseball game? It is only a matter of time before everything we ever knew as being fun, as a night out, as an afternoon with the kids, turns into bedlam and more bloodshed because of long-dead, power-hungry, war-thirsty, extremists in tight stockings who thought it would be a good idea to write into our Constitution a right to own weapons to protect against an enemy they apparently believed would be around forever.

Well, turns out their foresight and omniscience was spot on because we still do have an enemy. Only, the enemy, it turns out, is ourselves and our ever growing desire to own insane weapons that would have blown the minds of the Founders. Perhaps, if they truly were forward-thinking, as many claim they were, they would have at least have put in some footnote, some caveat to the Second Amendment that said something like: "In the event that weapons one day become so powerful and so deadly on a mass scale as to be used against our own citizens and not in a time of war, than that other thing we said about the right to bear arms, you can just cancel that part."

Seems they forgot to put that in because I looked and it's not in there. It just says over and over again about our right to own weapons. Good thing it said nothing about the right to bear medicine or we would now all be on heroine, bath salts, and LSD during work hours.

Makes me wonder though, how would the "Founding Fathers" feel today knowing how it all turned out? Would they feel remorse, regret, a need to apologize to the future generations who have been put in harm's way and killed just because they went to the movies? Nah. I think they would be, and were, no different than the politicians we know today, except perhaps with less hygiene and a more visible need for a dentist.

Thing is, some things never change -- like the need for votes from ignorant, frightened men and politicians who see the Second Amendment as a sure way to get their support. It is a trick as old as the paper our Constitution is written on and as a result our excuse to be irresponsible and deadly while hiding behind daddy, who said it was okay. But daddy is long gone and he left us to mind the store with no real instruction about how to do it or how to deal with the mounting psychological debt that is piling up faster than we, or they, could have imagined.

What happened in Aurora and elsewhere and what will continue to happen all over the country from now till forever, is truly the lasting legacy of the Founders who, from the grave, are still able to wreak havoc and pain upon a weak and fragile constituency that looked to them for guidance but instead got what politicians of any age have been delivering for time immemorial: irresponsible, empty promises in return for power. The future be damned!

(Cross-posted at Take My Country Back.)

Scalia says hand-held rocket launchers are probably constitutional

By Michael J.W. Stickings

First of all, what's a Supreme Court justice doing on a Sunday political talk show, particularly one on a partisan pro-Republican network like Fox News? Well, that's Antonin Scalia for you. He may claim to be an originalist, ruling based (in his view) on what the Founders (supposedly) intended, but really he's just a partisan conservative, an activist who seeks to enact a right-wing agenda.

Second of all, Scalia's nuts. When asked by Chris Wallace, in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado massacre, about the Second Amendment constitutionality of "a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute," he responded with the extremism that is essentially the reductio ad absurdum of conservative thought on guns:

Obviously the Amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried — it's to keep and "bear," so it doesn't apply to cannons — but I suppose here are hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes, that will have to be decided.

So basically, as long as you can carry it, it's fine. No matter that what you can carry these days isn't just a musket, or some other 18th-century weapon, but something far more lethal. Indeed, along with rocket launchers and the like, you can pretty much carry a weapon of mass destruction, a weapon far beyond the imaginings of the Founders, far beyond what "[a] well regulated Militia... necessary to the security of a free State" requires (not that such militias are needed in an age of modern armed forces).

But Scalia isn't an originalist so much as an ideological extremist, an absolutist. And like conservatives pretty much across the board these days, and certainly like the Republican Party, he takes a position on guns that defies common sense, common decency, law and order, and, yes, the far more reasonable -- and, given the time, understandable -- intent of the Founders.

Sign of the Apocalypse #74: Guns in bars

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There's no way this will end well:

Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.

Experts say these laws represent the latest wave in the country's gun debate, as the gun lobby seeks, state by state, to expand the realm of guns in everyday life.

The rulings, which overturned handgun bans in Washington and Chicago, have strengthened the stance of gun rights advocates nationwide. More than 250 lawsuits now challenge various gun laws, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican, called for guns to be made legal on campuses after a shooting last week at the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that armed bystanders might have stopped the gunman. 

And, no, it's not in the Constitution, thank you very much, not if you actually think about what the Founders meant -- and if you actually read the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Please note: The "people" have a right to "bear Arms," but only because there is a need for a "well regulated" citizen militia to defend the state. 

That was 1791, shortly after a revolution, when America was young and fragile. It's now 2010. Whatever the anti-government extremists on the right might say, there's no need for citizen militias -- and there's certainly no need for people to be free to carry guns, concealed or otherwise, into bars, onto college campuses, or for the most part anywhere else.

Based on what the Second Amendment says -- read it again, if you must -- the Founders did not intend for citizens to be free to carry weapons so as to be able to shoot each other.

The pro-gun misinterpretation, if I may put it nicely, is a recipe for disaster -- for violent, bloody chaos, and that's hardly an exaggeration.

And it's only going to get worse, what with alcohol in the mix.

The set up for the low down

By Carl

You know that queasy feeling you got yesterday when you read this story? 

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that cities and states must abide by the 2nd Amendment, strengthening the rights of gun owners and opening courthouse doors nationwide for gun rights advocates to argue that restrictions on firearms are unconstitutional.

In a 5-4 decision, the justices said the right to have a handgun for self-defense is "fundamental from an American perspective [and] applies equally to the federal government and the states."

Embrace your nausea. There's more here than meets the eye.

Essentially, what the Court ruled is that Constitutional rights trump states' rights or een individual rights. "Libertarians" may mark this as a good thing, but I do not. See, the Second Amendment prescribes that, in order to ensure your God-given inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you have to buy a gun.

I'm betting that's not what the Founders intended. This might be the only enumerated right that requires a citizen to do something in order to enforce it. A truly libertarian position would be that an individual's right to privacy is far more important than the constitutionality of a manufactured good.

This is a glaring distinction that so-called "glibertarians" (e.g. people who read and masturbated to Ayn Rand books) fail to grasp and it's really a simple concept: no man is free if for that freedom he is requred to carry a weapon.

But hold that thought for another time. Here's the really scary part.

This decision opens the door for the Court to decide that individual state laws are unconstitutional. Should Roe V. Wade for example be overturned, there is no check on the Court to decide that New York's abortion law violates the Constitution. Or New Jersey's. Or California. Should a consitutional challenge to the gay marriage ban fail in SCOTUS, that would open the door to overturning Hawaiian law, Iowan law, and would also prevent any number of states from recognizing homosexual marriages.

It wouldn't stop there. Your state doesn't have a death penalty? Too bad. You might be forced to get in line with the totalitarians. Our laws would revert to the lowest common denominator of a moron state like Alabama or Mississippi.

Medical marijuana? Nope. Speed limit of 55? Gone, mostly because the federal government mandates it in exchange for highway funds, so all it will take is some yahoo from Montana to overturn that necessary and safer speed limit, and your state won't be able to do a thing about it. Property rights? Eminent domain will encroach and absorb as many properties as it deems necessary, because the SCOTUS has already ruled it's perfectly constitutional to appropriate your land and turn it over to a developer.

Are we sure we want to walk this path when it's taken so long and we've worked so hard to bring even a shred of progressivism to the nation?

(Cross-posted from Simply Left Behind.) 

Yesterday in SCOTUS

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It was a mixed day, not surprising given the 4-4-1 divide (with Kennedy as the swing vote). The good news:

The Raw Story

The US Supreme Court declined Monday to hear an appeal by the Vatican in a landmark case that opens the way for priests in the United States to stand trial for pedophilia.

Allowing a federal appeals court ruling to stand, the decision means Vatican officials including theoretically Pope Benedict XVI could face questioning under oath related to a litany of child sex abuse cases.

The Supreme Court effectively confirmed the decision of an appellate court to lift the Vatican's immunity in the case of an alleged pedophile priest in the northwestern state of Oregon.

The New York Times

A public law school did not violate the First Amendment by withdrawing recognition from a Christian student group that excluded gay students, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The case, involving a clash between religious freedom and antidiscrimination principles, divided along familiar ideological lines, with the court's four more liberal members and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in the majority.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said it was constitutionally permissible for public institutions of higher education to require recognized student groups to accept all students who wished to participate in them.

The bad news:

The Washington Post

The Second Amendment provides Americans a fundamental right to bear arms that cannot be violated by state and local governments, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in a long-sought victory for gun rights advocates.

The 5 to 4 decision does not strike down any gun-control laws, nor does it elaborate on what kind of laws would offend the Constitution. One justice predicted that an "avalanche" of lawsuits would be filed across the country asking federal judges to define the boundaries of gun ownership and government regulation.

But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who wrote the opinion for the court's dominant conservatives, said: "It is clear that the Framers... counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty."

For a deeper look at the gun-rights case, see Jack Balkin and Scott Lemieux. Unfortunately, it seems to have been the right decision, legally speaking, even if it won't mean much. As Balkin notes, "[t]he vast majority of states already have guarantees of a right to bear arms."

I would just add that the ongoing Second Amendment debate in the U.S. is ridiculous. Yes, Alito is right, the Framers added "the right to keep and bear arms" to the Constitution," and may have considered that right to be "fundamental," but basing public policy in 2010 on what the Framers thought was important in 1787, right after a bloody war of independence and when the country was young and insecure, is simply the wrong way to go about addressing contemporary issues and problems. As Melissa McEwan puts it:

And that's still relevant 200 years later, despite the fact that the Framers, as ingenuous as they were, did not envision a country of 300 million+ people where almost everyone is literate and almost every adult can vote. Nor did they imagine handguns, which didn't fucking exist.

For more, see Echidne (linked by Melissa), whose anger and frustration I share (even if they the issue isn't as immediate for me, as I live in Canada, which has, compared to the U.S., strong gun laws in place):

My first thought on reading this is that desperate unemployed people can't get jobs or help from the local government but their right to be armed is honored! That makes for a really happy society in which to live.

My second thought was the one I always have when reading about the Second Amendment, which is to try to stretch my poor brain to make the leap from "well-regulated militia" to Bob-can-have-a-rifle-in-his-pants.

And so on...

What a mad, mad, mad world it is.

But at least there was a firm ruling against anti-gay bigotry, and at least Catholic sex abusers can be held accountable in courts of law for what they've done.

A mixed day indeed, even as Americans continue to arm themselves towards Armageddon.

Why gun laws must be made harsher

By Carl

GAO Cites Gun Sales to Those on Watch List:

People named on the government's terrorism watch list have successfully purchased firearms hundreds of times since 2004, government investigators reported yesterday. In one case, a known or suspected terrorist was able to obtain an explosives license, the Government Accountability Office reported.

U.S. lawmakers requested the audit to show how people on the watch list can be stopped from boarding airplanes but not from buying guns. Under federal law, licensed firearms dealers must request an FBI background check for each buyer but cannot legally stop a purchase solely because someone is on the watch list. The study found that people on the list purchased firearms 865 times in 963 attempts over a five-year period ending in February.

Now, the general portrait of a gun dealer is someone who is a very narrow patriot: guns are necessary in order to keep the tyranny of government at bay, but they would never be used unnecessarily.

Right?

Apparently, not even that much. Suddenly patriotism and homeland and personal security fall by the wayside when profit becomes the overriding concern.

Interesting how greed can trump enlightened self-interest, the very basis of capitalism, isn't it? Here we have numerous instances of a gun dealer selling guns or explosives to a bunch of people whom the government, the BUSH administration in most instances, deemed a threat to the security of the nation.

So it's not like we have a bunch of "militiamen" (domestic terrorists with an acceptably cretinic agenda) purchasing guns to keep BATF agents at bay. These are folks the FBI won't let get on an airplane.

These dealers are selling weapons to presumed terrorists with no place to go...meaning the odds jump that the same gun dealers may be dealing with the aftermath of their greed right in their own home towns.

Worse, I can almost imagine that some greedy bastard went one step further, and told his other customers that "them terrists is loadin' up on guns, so kin Ah sells ya this here semi-auto unner th table?" I certainly hope I'm wrong, but my guess with respect to the inherent greed of humanity is I'm right. We'd sell our countrymen out for a bowl of soup, and now, I'm betting, we'd sell our neighbors out, too.

You can blame the loophole in the law, and the temptation to do so is pretty strong. After all, if you can't legally stop someone from buying a gun, then you're just following orders, right? But let's face facts: it's very easy to just say no.

And they cannot. It is apparent that not only should this loophole be shut tight, but that gun dealers should face increasingly stronger punishment for lapses in judgement. A gun is intended to harm. Period. In many instances, I have no problem with that, but we ought to limit the sale of weapons to only those instances as much as possible and since we've given loopholes of all sizes to gun dealers to slip through, then it's only fair that when they do screw up, it ought to cost them a lot more than just a few bucks.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Sloppy seconds

By Carl

A huge outcry (link not safe for sane people) was raised among the more extreme rightists in this country (i.e., any Republican) about Sonia Sotomayor's perceived dismissal of the "private ownership of guns.

Ahem:

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been called an "anti-gun radical" by some gun rights activists for joining an opinion this year that said the Second Amendment does not prevent state and local governments from restricting arms ownership.

But yesterday a panel of conservative luminaries on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit reached the same conclusion. The unanimous ruling rejecting a challenge to Chicago's tough handgun law could complicate efforts to portray Sotomayor as a judicial activist trying to undermine the Supreme Court's landmark decision last year holding that the amendment protects the right to own a gun for self-defense.

The sticking point came on a case involving nunchuks in New York City. You may remember nunchuks as the weapon of choice for Bruce Lee: two sticks chained end to end that are very versatile for self-defense...or clocking the ever-living crap out of someone.

In that case, the defendant claimed that the SCOTUS decision in Heller v. District of Columbia, which was a minor landmark decision in that it affirmed, or more to the point, created (so much for lack of judicial activism) the absolute right of an individual to own firearms, implied that states and localities were forbidden from overriding the Second Amendment.

The Appeals Court (Second Circuit) on which Sotomayor sat decided, um, no. States and localities can override it at their pleasure, as many other precedents of the court had dictated. The distinction in Heller is that the District of Columbia is quasi-federal to begin with.

As you can imagine, the NRAites went ballistic...sorry...over this revelation! It was decided in committee that this was absolute proof that Obama was trying to take away their guns.

After the tin foil hats were cleaned and blocked...

Much ado about nothing, as it turns out. The case they cite that Sotomayor sat on, Maloney v. Cuomo, was specifically cited by the conservative Seventh Circuit Appeals Court yesterday in its decision.

As usual, conservatives cried their eyes out and went through boxes of tissues decrying the oppression of the white man.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)