Post Heller there has been some people floating ideas about potential ways to get (or simply giving up on) machine guns back into general circulation. Yesterday I received an email which, in essence, is an idea for achieving this. Basically it shows the “in common use” argument leads to an absurdity:

From: Tom Locker
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 6:21 PM
Subject: A thought

Let’s see if I can make this point in a sensible, understandable manner – in many people’s minds the SC seems to give a tacit OK to the machine gun ban as they are not “in common use,” Scalia also used the term “unusual and dangerous.”

But, as many have noted, in the US, machine guns were pretty effectively banned (by using tax powers) fairly early in their developmental history. I think the Thompson was one of the first truly portable machine guns when it came out in 1921. The ban was instituted in 1934.

This gives the government a trump card over all future improvements in self-defense technology. As soon as a new, more effective method of self-defense is developed, it can be banned, as it is not “in common use.”

As a thought experiment, imagine that Heller was decided around 1500, just as firearms were coming into military use in Europe. In this scenario the decision would give citizens the right to use swords, knives and archery equipment for self defense, but not the “uncommon, unusual and dangerous” firearms.

Where would self-defense be then? And where are we now? Should the government have exclusive access to all future improvements in self-defense technology?

Sebastian has suggested that we might be able to demonstrate that anything the police uses is “in common use” and hence is protected by the 2^nd Amendment. One might hope to stretch this line of reasoning to anything the military uses (Hey! It’s common in the military!) but that is a big stretch goal.

My line of thought is that “uncommon, unusual and dangerous” shouldn’t be a difficult hurdle to get full autos over. After all there are tens of thousand of machine guns in circulation and they aren’t inherently more dangerous than any other gun of similar caliber in the hands of the same person. The “uncommon, unusual and dangerous” is more appropriately applied to biological, chemical, nuclear, and perhaps explosives based weapons. Perhaps the justices had machine guns in mind when they agreed to that criteria but that doesn’t really matter because that wasn’t the question before the court. If it had then briefs would have been submitted showing machine guns are not uncommon, unusual and dangerous. It could just be my optimistic nature but I would like to believe what I read in Scalia’s opinion is very careful wording that let the anti-gun people hear what they want to hear and gathered the required votes for a victory but are actually open gates for us to drive trucks through.

Other possibilities surely exist. What are your ideas?

Bitter and Sebastian have posts up about some anti-gun billboards that just went up. Oh, and the anti-gun group gets the space for free.

I offered my (failed) billboard project as a starting point for an alternative billboard but if anyone else has ideas send them to Bitter.

Tonight I’ll probably spend some time composing a letter to try and shame the bigots at the billboard company into reconsidering their support of this anti-rights group. Sebastian has the contact information if you want to do the same.

Reynolds and Denning sum something up that has been difficult for me to communicate to others:

Subsequent courts went further, stating that Miller held that the Second Amendment did not guarantee an individual right.  Reading those opinions closely, however, it is clear that many simply relied on what other courts had said about Miller, and some judicial characterizations of Miller’s facts are so inaccurate that it is difficult to believe that the judge writing the opinion could have actually read the Miller decision itself. Lower court discussions of Miller resembled a game of judicial Telephone, with the actual holding of Miller becoming less and less recognizable as the years progressed.

I always tried to say the courts have misread Miller which holds near zero weight because I’m not a lawyer. But also I probably was being too generous the courts. As pointed out by above paragraph they most likely didn’t even read Miller. And even that may be too generous. It could be they actually read it then deliberately twisted it to arrive at the conclusion they wanted.

That said, this is all history now. We should concentrate on the future. I think the plan for the future is best summed up by Lyle with history being looked at for guidance on how we should treat our “prisoners of war”.

The following chart is from Common Folk regarding Brady Campaign grading of state gun laws versus crime rates. The claim is, “It would seem that while the Brady Bunch consider a state safe if it has severe gun restrictions, crime is actually more rampant in those same states with severe gun restrictions making them, in reality, less safe.”

From this data one could conclude there is an inverse relationship between the Brady score and safety.

Be careful! This data is a subset of the entire population of states. I did a similar analysis for the 2004 Brady Report Card using all state data and the correlation was near zero. In the comments to the Common Folk link other people arrive at similar conclusions to mine.

Of course you won’t find the anti-gun people doing peer reviews such as this and pointing out the errors. Nope. They cherry pick their data and report just what they want people to hear.