Quote of the Day
All law-abiding Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense. This right is not a luxury reserved for a privileged few, but a fundamental element of our republic. You don’t need a law degree to recognize that charging a fee several times higher than the cost of the firearm itself is illogical, and an unconstitutional attempt to impede Americans’ Second Amendment rights.
Harmeet K. Dhillon
Assistant Attorney General
September 16, 2026
Justice Department sues San Jose, police over gun permit fee
I will never get tired of winning*. Prove me wrong.
I still want prosecutions, convictions, and prison time. But I’m willing to settle for this sort of activity until Vance takes office in 2029.
* While this isn’t an actual win, it is more like more like Mike Tyson joining your side in a barroom brawl, it is something to celebrate and likely means the good guys will win.
Would it be constitutional for there to be an organization, similar in concept to the ACLU, to begin a fund to defray the many-times-larger-that-the-cost of-the-firearm cost of the applications for concealed carry permits? After all, ever since 1963, when “Gideon v Wainwright” established the right to effective counsel there has been some level of publicly provided counsel to defendants in criminal courts in this country.
This was the same year that Ernesto Arturo Miranda was convicted on the strength of his confession to the arresting officers. Three years later the “Miranda Warning” became a sort of capstone for arrests in television detective shows.
The whole thing is unconstitutional per Bailey v Drexel from 1922. This involved a tax so high it was actually a penalty.
Is that the case in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, ” The power to tax is the power to destroy”?
For all the Court’s focus on precedent, there is a tremendous inconsistency in their application of precedent, the addressing of analytic processes to some Amendments and provisions in the constitution compared to others, and even whether to apply the strict scrutiny standard to some passages in the Constitution and the rational basis test (which I call the non-risible test — If the Government’s attorneys can describe it without breaking out in giggles, it stands) in others. I have forgotten the name of the Ninth Circuit Judge who said that when the court favors a passage in the Constitution, it is capable of the broadest interpretations in the law; where it is a disfavored passage, it is interpreted as narrowly as possible.