Quote of the day—Dennis Henigan

For the NRA, it was not supposed to be this way. After the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment granted a limited right to have a gun in the home, the NRA bragged that it was just the “opening salvo” in a legal war to use the courts to dismantle the nation’s gun laws.

Yet three years, 400 legal challenges, and “millions of dollars in [NRA] legal bills” later, all the gun lobby has had to show for its efforts is a growing body of case law affirming the right of the people to have strong gun laws short of a total handgun ban. Just last week, the same Texas judge who was previously overruled for ruling that domestic abusers have a right to own guns threw out the NRA’s lawsuit claiming that teens have a right to buy semi-automatic handguns. Never before have so many courts so cogently affirmed the constitutionality of so many strong gun laws in such a short span of time.

Dennis Henigan
October 6, 2011
How Many Second Amendment Cases Will the NRA Lose?
[The NRA is mostly a strawman in this context. SAF is who the Brady Campaign should be (and probably is) worried about.

The total number of victories is a poor metric of how the battle is going. More important is how many Supreme Court victories each side has to their credit. In the last three years, how’s that been going for you Dennis?

Gloat while you can Dennis. I’ll be saving these words for your eating pleasure a few years from now.—Joe]

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9 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Dennis Henigan

  1. … the NRA has claimed that handgun registration amounts to an unconstitutional atrocity on par with the Nazi Kristallnacht rampage or the genocides in Darfur and Rwanda …

    What a despicable liar. The NRA doesn’t claim registration is an atrocity, they (and many others, including you) rightly point out it enables such atrocities.

    I can’t say more and remain polite.

  2. Well, enabling atrocities is too close for comfort. It’s a little like this, “I filled the pit with a hungry bear and suspended the child above it, but I did not cut the rope. I let the bear rear up to get its snack.”

    Given the track record of oppression, abuses, and genocides that happen with firearms registration (e.g. Turkey, Nazi Germany), how can anyone with a functional moral compass in their heart ever think they are prudent?

    My other main retort is for the proponents to show me the benefits of registration. They know that it is a failure in stopping the criminals from illegally buying, stealing, or even creating firearms for their use. Registration only harms the lawful firearms owners. Why do they fear lawful gun owners so much? The criminals seem to always get around registration schemes and many governments are the least trustworthy and the most blood-thirsty entities on the planet.

  3. Well in the 80s and 90s laws were being passed and rights were being restricted and the best pro-gun forces could to was fight them back.

    That was bad.

    Right now we are rolling back bad laws and enacting good new laws….and really the only thing the antis can do are…well NOTHING, right now our only setbacks are in the courts.

    This is a VERY bad place for them to be.

  4. I no lawer, but isnt case law what helps determine the outcome of future cases? If all *we*have is a “growing base of case law” then I would have to say very shortly those laws will tumble and at the federal level.

    Looks to me like the Bradies are once again trying to make lemonade out of sour lemons and failing miserably.

  5. “My other main retort is for the proponents to show me the benefits of registration.”

    Too bad they can’t show any benefits, isn’t it?

    “A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

  6. Hey, I like being the “bourgeoisie” so I say no to registration.

  7. I think we’re all becoming Charlie Sheens. That means we are living in a world where losing means “Winning!” You see it all the time on the gun blogs. No matter what happens in court cases, someone will post “And that’s why we’re winning!” If the gunnies can do it, it only seems fair that the anti-gunners should be able to do it too.

    So who is winning? Are we only supposed to look back three years? Or should we go back to the 1600’s when the country was first settled?

  8. @ubu52
    Well since the beginning of time, the use of weapons for self defense has been an axiomatic need. It was only recently, say the late 1960s through the 1990s that in the U.S. that substantial, broad (i.e. not just against blacks) gun control schemes were implemented. After that, the trends have been to reverse many of this silly restrictions, all with positive and liberty-affirming results. Are there set backs and minor defeats, yes, but the trends are irrefutable and yes we are winning!

    Ubu52: Go pick a cause that is not inherently immoral (making the innocent defenseless) and un-Constitutional (see Second Amendment). Basically, mind your own business!

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