The decision under review, from the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, concerns firearms ordinances of two Illinois municipalities, Chicago and Oak Park, that effectively ban the private possession of handguns and unreasonably burden the possession of all firearms. There is no question that, under this Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008), the categorical ban on handguns, at a minimum, would run afoul of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution were it enacted by the Federal government or the District of Columbia. The question presented by this case is whether the Constitution also prevents State and local governments from infringing the right to keep and bear arms. For the reasons given herein and in the brief submitted by Petitioners, the answer must be yes. The Court should find either that the Second Amendment is incorporated into the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, or that the right to keep and bear arms is a privilege or immunity of citizens of the United States.

Stephan P. Halbrook, et. al.
November 16, 2009
Brief for respondents the National Rifle Association of America, Inc. et al. in support of petitioners, page 1.
[The Apex of the Triangle of Death is on the victory train leaving from Chicago.

See also the SAF brief here.–Joe]

Pennington blames the Ft. Hood deaths on the lack of a whole laundry list of gun laws–despite the fact that implementing every one of them would not have served to stop the killing.  The only thing that would have stopped it would have been less restrictive gun regulation.

Kurt Hofmann
November 16, 2009
The Brady Campaign for defenseless soldiers

As pro-gun advocates, we have an obligation to lay out our arguments in a calculating and logical manner. To do so isn’t easy. I fail to tolerate the simple minded nature of our anti-gun adversaries on a daily basis. Like most pro-gun advocates it is beyond my ability to comprehend that people still believe in the validity of gun-control after the mounds of evidence that has disproved it over the last thirty years. Even worse is trying to educate the establishment media on how much they don’t understand about guns. Anger is never the answer, however, since it only reinforces the idea that people who own guns can’t be trusted–an ironic twist since it is backward anti-gun ravings that should incur the scorn of every day Americans.

Gerard Valentino
November 7, 2009
The Good Fight Against the Anti Gun MindSet
[I  spent a good part of my day yesterday being anger over a stupid anti-gun comment by someone. I decided to reload a bunch of ammo rather than make a blog post although the rant I had formulated probably would have released the anger more rapidly.–Joe]

What you’re going to see (Friday) in this report produced by the national firearms centre … is that the statistics I just gave you were not included. Whoever put it together didn’t put in there the information that only 2.4 per cent of those 3.5 million queries (to the registry) were actually related to information about a long-gun registration number or about a serial number of a gun.

That information was not put there by the people at the national firearms registry so you should ask them why that information wasn’t there.

Peter Van Loan
Public Safety Minister, Canada
Battle heats up over gun registry: Minister suggests staff of national database are hiding information to ensure its survival
[If the staff did this it certainly wouldn’t be the first time the anti-gun people told half-truths to justify infringing upon a natural right.–Joe]

I am not arguing here that higher rates of gun ownership cause higher rates of crime, violent crime, or homicide. Such causation is difficult to show because so many other factors bear on the incidence of crime. For instance, simple cross-national comparisons of gun availability and crime do not control for the degree to which various countries impose legal restrictions on firearms. It also is difficult to sort out whether high levels of gun ownership lead to high crime rates or whether high crime rates lead to high levels of gun ownership.

Dennis A. Henigan
Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy page 107.
[I find this an extremely interesting admission. With this admission how can he in good faith advocate for restricting private citizen access to firearms? In essence he is admitting that he cannot answer Just One Question yet he wants to push the envelope as far as he can in infringing upon a specific enumerated right.

As I said in a Tweet yesterday after getting off the plane, I’m nearly certain I could find a fatal flaw on every page of his book. It’s filled with half-truths, cherry picked data, and straw man arguments. I stand behind my nickname of Half-Truth Henigan for him.

I do have to give him credit for pointing out a few valid instances of NRA (almost all his attention is directed at the NRA) overstating things as well. John Lott gets some valid criticism too. He is not stupid but he’s not going to be winning any awards for piercing insight either.

I’ll be posting much more on this book over the next few days. In the meantime take a look at Dave Kopel’s review of it.–Joe]