Quote of the Day
Unsympathetic defendants make for bad precedents. This is what happened in the Rahimi case, where the Supreme Court opened the door a crack, allowing judges to believe they can create more exceptions to Second Amendment rights. Rahimi is cited as the reason for the upholding of the Gun Free School Zone Act in the Fifth Circuit.
Dean Weingarten
July 17, 2025
GUN WATCH: Fifth Circuit Holds Gun Free School Zone law to be Constitutional
This is why we have to be as aggressive as we can in the courts. We need to flood the courts with sympathetic plaintiffs in infringing areas that are relatively obvious wins. Please consider donating to the gun rights organization who are active in the courts.
Once again, politics is downstream of culture.
We have a culture of government that we have allowed to violate rights at will. It’s bred an even worse culture that believes it should be allowed to dominate everything it sees.
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Is as simple and black letter as law can get. And they all understand it perfectly well.
So it’s not about law. And law won’t win the argument in this culture.
Now, it’s truly good to try things the polite (legal) way first. And thank you Joe for all you do for us!
But as government has shown us time and time again. The only thing that changes culture is fear. As they use it every chance they get to do that very thing. (And write laws against you using very thing on them.)
Government must be made to fear violating human rights.
It’s the only way to change the culture of tyranny that is upon us.
And thus, the real reason for the 2A.
Maybe that’s something the courts should start hearing?
“2A is the people’s right to bring justice when government refuses to.”
It’s a legal fact that criminal and unsympathetic plaintiffs deserve the exact same Constitutional protections as peaceable, sympathetic ones.
But every Constitutional challenge necessarily goes through the Court of Public Opinion long before it’s decided in a Court of Law, and sympathetic plaintiffs are much more likely to get the unconstitutional infringements overturned.
I’ve seen it postulated that U.S. v. Rahimi, for example, could have been a win if Mr. Rahimi himself were a more sympathetic plaintiff. The case was a challenge to the statute saying that someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order becomes a “prohibited person”, even if they have not been found guilty of any crime. While Justice Thomas wrote a dissent, the Court found that disarming alleged domestic abusers is Constitutional without a conviction (even though all other “prohibited person” statuses require a conviction). The problem is that Mr. Rahimi very likely IS the domestic abuser he is accused of being and DOES pose a credible threat to his former partner. Constitutional or not, the optics of the case are ugly and make it harder to justify overturning a law for this guy.
On the other hand, someone with a DV restraining order against them almost always is a credible threat — they don’t usually issue these things for no reason — and even if they weren’t, they run into the logical problem of proving a negative; how does one prove they’re not a danger to others and never will be, when their past actions show they have been? For this specific issue, sympathetic plaintiffs are very hard to find. Attorneys take cases forward with the clients they have, not the clients they wish they had.