If you ever had a Right to Keep and Bear Arms – you have it now – and Government can Never take it from you Lawfully. It is unalienable, and it is necessary to protect your own life and property, and the lives and property of your family and neighbors – even the Union – against all enemies foreign and domestic.The high court really has only one function in Heller--and that's to confirm that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Questions along the lines of which infringements are "reasonable" are indeed sophistry.
The notion that certain weapons are not suited to personal protection is also sophistry that preys upon gross ignorance.
I note that GOA is taking no small amount of heat from the no line in the sand crowd for its recent criticism of Alan Gura's concession, and that he has reacted heatedly.
This may surprise some of you, but I do agree with Gura that had he presented an absolutist argument he would have lost the judges--which tells us more about the sorry state we have allowed our government to degrade into than anything else. Gura "didn't make the last 219 years of constitutional law and [he's] not responsible for the way that people out there -- and on the court-- feel about machine guns."
He didn't and he's not. We can't expect him to undo all that for us.
But I don't agree that anticipating the question--and he must have--with a rejoinder that machine guns were outside the intentionally narrow and limited scope of the case being argued would have been perceived as "fudging," and objections for his totally misinterpreting Miller as excluding arms "not appropriate for civilian applications" are legitimate and appropriate.
I don't know where some get off acting like there's no room for criticism, and the expected reactionary hostility I've seen is way out of proportion to what was really a rather mild statement on the part of Larry Pratt & Co. If the "pragmatists" flipped over that, wait 'til they see what Vin Suprynowicz has to say.
[Via Ron W]