The 5/4 split decision in the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia vs Heller case demonstrated a continuing dichotomy in Second Amendment history between relevant period sources, which were largely relied on in the Courts’ decision, and the views of modern historians that backed up the dissent in that case. Justice Breyer’s statement that most of the historians supported the Heller dissent was correct, but that is exactly the problem. The historians’ brief contained numerous errors of fact and failed to present the essential bill of rights related developmental history of the Second Amendment’s clauses.

David E. Young
The American Revolutionary Era Origin of the Second Amendment’s Clauses
From Volume 23 (2011) of the JOURNAL ON FIREARMS & PUBLIC POLICY.
[It’s a great resource on the origin of the Second Amendment. I wish there were a way to get these points across to current historians and judges. But as near as I can tell facts are frequently superfluous to the decision making process of most people.

Update: Young’s blog post about the paper.—Joe]

It infuriates me when I hear “reporting” and editorializing about “the powerful Gun Lobby” and “the intransigent Gun Lobby” and sometimes even “the evil Gun Lobby,” as if we were a handful of rich fat cats in safari shirts sitting in a mahogany-lined room full of leather, stuffed animals, and cigar smoke plotting how to increase our profits by increasing crime. We are the people! We are the 80 to 90 million people in this country who own guns and the tens of millions more who do not own guns, but fully support our right to do so.

Jeff Knox
December 17, 2011
I Am The Gun Lobby
[This excellent rant should become a classic. Please read the whole thing and remind those who refer to the NRA as “the gun lobby” that we are the gun lobby.

H/T Say Uncle.—Joe]

Filthy cretins. They should be treated with all the respect of a Klansman. Well, I don’t want to insult Klansmen like that. At least with the KKK, they don’t go around trying to tell people they’re actually concerned about the rights of blacks.

Robb Allen
December 20, 2011
Not only do they lie about practically everything
[He’s referring to the Brady Campaign.

I think the problem is that they have lost control of their world. It used to be they could say anything and the press would repeat it far and wide. When it was published in a magazine or even a newspaper the ability of gun owners to respond was delayed by days or even months and the editors could easily suppress those responses or select the weakest response while pretending to be fair. In that world Handgun Control, Inc./The Brady Campaign was in the “drivers seat”. They controlled the message and whatever fantasy they wanted to believe became, in essence, reality.

With the presence of the Internet those days are gone. Reality isn’t optional for them anymore. They are being forced to deal with the facts and with the facts being incompatible with their view of the world they have a crisis on their hands. They could adapt to reality but that isn’t really an option for them. They have far too much invested in their fantasy world.

Imagine you have invested 20 years of your life in the belief in a flat earth or the moon is made of green cheese. You spread your word far and wide and you have been the darling of the media and many politicians all this time. Then astronauts land on the moon take pictures of a round earth and bring back rock samples of the surface. You have two options: 1) Change your beliefs and admit to the world you have been spreading falsehoods for decades; 2) Insist the trip to the moon was a hoax.

The “psychological cost” to admit an error of such magnitude is far greater than believing in a massive hoax. To protect the belief there was a hoax and to prevent followers from deserting the data must be suppressed. With the presence of the Internet that is nearly impossible except within a very small domain. Within the domain of control expect even the slightest deviation from their “true belief” to be dealt with as harshly as possible. It gives them back a small taste of the control of their world which they enjoyed for so long and have now lost. They know what it is like to have control and they yearn for it again.

This is why anti-gun people are so violent. If they had guns or even political power they would be extremely dangerous people. —Joe]

On appeal the City raised but did not dwell on its concern about lead contamination. For good reason: It cannot be taken seriously as a justification for banishing all firing ranges from the city. To raise it at all suggests pretext.

Perhaps the City can muster sufficient evidence to justify banning firing ranges everywhere in the city, though that seems quite unlikely. As the record comes to us at this stage of the proceedings, the firing-range ban is wholly out of proportion to the public interests the City claims it serves. Accordingly, the plaintiffs’ Second Amendment claim has a strong likelihood of success on the merits.

…

For the foregoing reasons, we REVERSE the district court’s order denying the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and REMAND with instructions to enter a preliminary injunction consistent with this opinion.

Diane S. Sykes
July 6, 2011
Circuit Judge
United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
RHONDA EZELL, et al., v. CITY OF CHICAGO
[See also other QOTDs I have posted from this same judgment here, here, here, and here.

The response of the Chicago and Washington D.C. reminds me of the response of politicians in the deep south confronted with civil rights laws telling them they had to treat people with dark colored skin the same as those with white skin. They became very creative in their methods of discrimination and the Federal courts were kept busy for years putting them in their place.

But the courts can only do so much. What has to happen is for these people be shamed and shunned for their persistence in discriminating against people exercising a specific enumerated right. Treat them like the scumbags they are and tell them that to their faces.—Joe]