The Brady folks would love to have you believe they are winning the Second Amendment battle. To help spread this meme around, Mother Jones is clearly willing and able to lend a hand. My belief is this meme is aimed at potential donors. Brady doesn’t want donors to believe they are on the losing side of history, because who wants to fork over large sums of money to a group who’s cause is going nowhere?
But the Brady folks are making the mistake of believing that the number of battles you win or lose determines who wins the war. Anyone who knows anything about the history of this country knows that’s not the determining factor; it’s which battles you win or lose. Mother Jones notes:
The gun group’s vice president, Wayne LaPierre, said at the time that the Heller ruling would be “the opening salvo in a step-by-step process” to kill off most of the nation’s gun control laws.
Well, three years later, gun control is alive and well despite more than 400 legal challenges based on Heller, according to a new report (PDF) by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Only a fool would believe that Heller meant we’d have gun control on the ropes in three years. They also make the mistake of surmising our movement’s next step, believing we’ve already taken many of them. That next step was eliminating the gun ban in Chicago, and we were successful at achieving that. Now the next step would seem to be getting recognition of some form of right-to-carry outside of the home — the “bear” part of “keep and bear arms”.
The Brady’s here are, to put this in another context, noting that General Washington is losing more battles than he’s winning. That might be literally true, but that’s not how wars are fought and won. That’s now how a litigative strategy is fought and won either. There will be many many cases that are lost, especially in lower level courts, but as long as we win the important ones, we’ll achieve robust legal protections for the Second Amendment.
Ironically, the best hope the Brady folks can hope for is a second term for Barack Obama, where we’ll all be biting our fingernails praying for the health of Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy and Scalia. If Obama gets to pick any of their replacements, there is a good chance the Second Amendment will be judicially erased from the constitution.
Only a fool would believe a “new report by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.”
The Brady Center is like the weatherman that tells you there is a 100% chance of sun while you look out your window and see that it is raining.
Markie Marxist sez: “We already won the Second Amendment battle. We won it when the Supreme Court ruled that we can infringe the right to keep and bear arms almost out of existence, but that we just can’t abrogate it completely. So, essentially, my commie compadres on the court stood the Second Amendment on its head and said that the right to keep and bear arms shall be infringed. Nice of them to drop the word “not” out of the Second Amendment. It was a pesky word that caused us all kinds of trouble. Now we can infringe away, as much as we please! Ha! Ha! All your infringement is belong to us! Let’s see, you’ll have to pay a fee, and there’s a waiting period, and forms to fill out, and have other people fill out, and have them all notarized, and an interview, and a background investigation, and a background check, and ATF’s 4473 forms are up to two pages now except for Mexican criminals who don’t have to bother with forms, and this infringement thing is a lot of fun! We get to abuse the heck out of private gun owners! Ha! Ha! All your infringement abuse is belong to us! And the Supreme Court okayed it, so it’s perfectly constitutional! Ha! Ha!”
Turning over existing bad gun laws is never expected to be easy. Every time we do, it is a win for the side of individual rights. Saying that they are winning because most get upheld is like a pitcher bragging that they get a hitter out 60% of the time.
Sorry to be a Grammar Commie again, but Markie, it’s properly “all your infringement are belong to us”.
Let’s get it right!
Oh, and I’m sad to see that only court battles matter here. Because Wisconsin being the 49th State to adopt Concealed Carry is a huge milestone for the Brady Campaign, in moving towards their goals!