Quote of the day—Sean Davis

Baseless gun control laws don’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Instead, those laws keep lawful, innocent Americans from being able to protect themselves from the very same criminals who regularly violate the nation’s gun laws. Thankfully, that’s a fact that more and more Americans understand.

Sean Davis
November 11, 2014
Time for Knife Control?
[Setbacks like I-594 blunt the enthusiasm but we are making progress. It’s extremely easy to see the progress when I look back 20 years to 1994. The Heller and McDonald decisions were such huge wins that I don’t think the anti-gun side will ever recover.

The war may never be won to my satisfaction but we are making steady progress on the culture war. Of the three fronts we do battle on, legislative (including initiatives), judicial, and culture we are clearly winning more than losing on two of them. It’s only the legislative that we have lost some important battles recently. Even if they have another few wins of I-594 magnitude in the next few years we will bury them with the cultural and judicial wins.—Joe]

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8 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Sean Davis

  1. Joe, do you anticipate a Constitutional challenge to 594? It seems unbelievably broad to me, and I think a smart man could argue the chilling effect on the Right…..

    • I expect we will attack it in the courts on every point we can think of.

      I doubt “chilling effect” will be one of the stronger points though. “Chilling effect”, to the best of my knowledge, has only been successfully used in regards to the 1st Amendment.

        • Of course. But I don’t think we should count on it in this instance. Use it in the arguments but have lots of other arguments as well.

          • I think void-for-vagueness and therefore overbroad is the way to go. Every restriction on the other constitutional rights is subjected to strict scrutiny, so whatever restriction is imposed on the right should be narrowly tailored with no less burdensome restriction available.
            The same tools and techniques of analysis that are used for the First Amendment are used for the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth, so why not the Second? There is no principled argument to treat it differently.

          • I think the principle argument (notice how I changed the topic there?) used by our opponents will be, “Because GUNS!!!!!

    • Surely everything related to transfers could plausibly be overturned on “vagueness” concerns.

  2. I look it as how can a simple majority via a ballot initiative trump the Constitution of the United States?

    To take guns out of the equation, imagine an initiative that required people of a certain religious faith to undergo background checks every time they handed off their holy book? How about pre-clearance of blog posts by the government so that nothing subversive is posted? How about having to register your political views before you can get legal counsel in a trial?

    All of these hypotheticals are similar in that they do not outright deny a right, but they heavily burden it, just like I-594. I think very few of our fellow citizens would put up with such abuses. It’s time we sued the pants off the I-594 despots.

    Just because 51% or even 99.99% of the population votes for something does not convert our Constitutional Republic into a democracy.

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