Category: 2nd Amendment

Via Dave Hardy, check out Concurring Opinions.  I’m happy to see that Pennsylvania signed on in favor of Heller.  What’s with Tennessee and Nevada?  Or North Carolina and Oregon for that matter?  You’d think those states would have signed on for Heller too.

It’s interesting that only Attorneys General from New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, and Hawaii were willing to sign on in favor of DC.

Academics for the Second Amendment has submitted their brief, and it is now online here. Dave Hardy, who is the Attorney of Record on the brief, says he’s pretty tired after all that, and I think we all owe him a debt of gratitude for helping put this brief together, and for all the academic work he and his colleagues have done over the years that has helped lay the groundwork for this. One way you can say thanks is by donating to ASA. I think it’s the least we can do.

UPDATE: Let’s not forget that Clayton Cramer also lent assistance to this brief as well.

UPDATE: I read the whole thing.  I think it’s devastating to many of DCs arguments.  It’ll take quite a tangle of intellectual knots the court will have to contort for itself to rule in favor of any kind of collective rights viewpoint.

NRA has a list of Congressman and Senators who have signed on. Compare it to the list of Congressman and Senators from the Congressional brief on DC’s side, and it’s almost laughable.

I would note that John McCain has signed onto this brief. I would also note that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama have signed on. Anyone still willing to say there’s no difference between McCain and those two?

Both Pennsylvania Senators have signed on. I notice that my Congressman, Pat Murphy, has not. He may have a concealed carry license, but if he wants my support, he has to do better than this. He’ll be getting a letter about this for sure. If your local Congress Critter is not on here, you should also send a letter asking why.

UPDATE: See “Rep. Tom Davis (VA-11)” Maybe his wife’s defeat running on a gun control platform has caused him to see the light.

UPDATE: I’m told that, in his capacity as President of the Senate, Vice President Cheney will be signing onto the brief as well.

You can read it here.

Over at Leibowitz’s Canticle, there’s probably the best and most detailed summary of the respondents’ brief filed in D.C. v. Heller.

Via Dave Hardy, who also has links to several other thoughtful posts on the subject.

Dave Hardy has some interesting links regarding the history of Jack Miller of the first second amendment case, US v. Miller, that are well worth reading.

Go read this excellent analysis of the Heller case over at Concurring Opinions.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Several other bloggers have pointed this out, and I feel I should as well.  Academics for the Second Amendment are a group of second amendment scholars that have been working hard to secure your gun rights for years to come.  They will be filing an Amicus brief with the US Supreme Court.  Needless to say, filing a brief with the Supreme Court costs a significant amount of money, so they really need your support.   I just sent a little bit of cash their way, and I hope you all will as well.

There is truly no fight in our life times that will matter to gun rights more than this one, and we must stand by the people who are standing by us.

Clayton Cramer has done some research into the use of the unorganized militia during World War II.  Well worth a read.

Clayton has discovered an 18th century antecedent of the machine gun:

Harold Leslie Peterson’s The Treasury of the Gun (1962), p. 205, indicates that 1722 London Journal accounts indicated that one fired 63 rounds in seven minutes in the rain. Okay, that’s not a machine gun, but nine rounds a minute is a major technological breakthrough compared to muskets that fired three rounds a minute, and not at all if it was raining.

It’s interesting, because we constantly hear “The founding fathers could never have imagined something like an Uzi.”  It’s becoming more and more likely that they indeed could have imagined it.  I seem to recall at some point, I think it might have been Dave Hardy, mentioning that if you had shown up at the constitutional convention with an M16, all the founding fathers would have recognized it as a firearm.  They would have thought you were pretty cool, but they still would have recognized it as something protected by the second amendment.