Standard Mischief

Best Heller post so far is Laurel’s. She found an interesting excerpt:

In any event, the meaning of “bear arms” that petitioners and JUSTICE STEVENS propose is not even the (sometimes) idiomatic meaning. Rather, they manufacture a hybrid definition, whereby “bear arms” connotes the actual carrying of arms (and therefore is not really an idiom) but only in the service of an organized militia. No dictionary has ever adopted that definition, and we have been apprised of no source that indicates that it carried that meaning at the time of the founding. But it is easy to see why petitioners and the dissent are driven to the hybrid definition. Giving “bear Arms” its idiomatic meaning would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war—an absurdity that nocommentator has ever endorsed. See L. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights 135 (1999). Worse still, the phrase “keep and bear Arms” would be incoherent. The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once: “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.

Of course, I’m sure that it will take another lawsuit or four score before Fenty et al. allow any type of “shall issue” carry in D.C.

The anticipation was killing me, so at 9:42 I left the phone, watch, and PDA at home, saddled up, and went for a bike ride. I wasn’t going to just sit there and refresh the screen until it was released. The highest court in the land said yesterday that all of the remaining opinions would be released today, starting at 10:00 AM.

After exploring neighborhoods nearby via petal power, around 11:15 I returned home and all I had to do was glance at the RSS aggravator. I’m real happy I won’t have to blog about Plan B.

So 5 out of 9 Supreme Beings agreed with the just mildly obscure language in the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States that the right to keep fully functional (assembled in working order and without a trigger lock) exists, and people who have them may move them from room to room without a permit err, I mean a permit that D.C. must now issue. It’s not much, but it’s a start. One useless liberty infringing law struck down ~10,000 or so more to go.

I’m not going to read the decision today. There’s plenty of time later for that. And while I may read some of the bloggers, I’ll be most interested in what the anti-freedom people - bloggers and people like Adrian Fenty, Mayor of D.C. - have to say.

I also most certainly want to write about the others in the suit - Parker and others - who’s pleadings to the court just didn’t have standing. There’s a post or two there too.

I don’t have anything to add to this funny story except perhaps Debra might be guilty of “probing” TSA security. That might be a crime, but it’s hard to tell as many of the TSA regs are secret.

If it’s not there yet, I’m sure this will be a winner over on FlyerTalk.

And I’ll try to put this succinctly.

There are some people who think that Federal law encircles the globe, while basic Constitutional rights only exist if they are explicitly enumerated, and in any event those rights stop dead in their tracks at the US border.

Christopher Soghoian puts it succinctly:

I’ve had two conversations in the past few days - where I have sought advice from super intelligent and seriously kickass legal experts - and both of them have ended with me receiving a sharply worded (yet friendly) warning:

The law is not a machine. You cannot find a loophole in it in the same way that you would with a computer algorithm. The law is pliable, and if a judge wants to rule against you - he’ll find a way.

As plain and simple as this may be, I’m still struggling to get my head around it.

(emphasis mine)

I suppose it’s true, and I also have had other people try to explain this to me, but I’ve also had a hard time getting my head around it.

I’ve mentioned before how Ed Rosenthal and the city of Sacramento turned a federal law on it’s head. The law was an attempt to allow local police deputize someone so that they could buy and use drugs undercover to facilitate those big newsworthy drug busts. Instead, Ed was duly deputized and then proceeded to grow and distribute medical marijuana to medical patents. Everything was done legally under state laws, and arguably under federal laws too. However, during the trial, the defendants counsel were forbidden to mention their specific legal theory, and the judge impaneled a jury of meat-bots [1] and he was convicted. Yet the outcry afterwards was so loud that when sentencing came around, the judge broke the law that required a minimum mandatory sentence of five years, and gave Ed his freedom back with only time served.

That’s just one example. So it pretty much means that our legal system, designed to be “of, by, and for the people”, is horribly broken. Even if you’ve got the Constitution on your side and can afford the expert that can deduce the precise legalese language, cross all the eyes and dot all the tees on your writ of habeas corpus, it all usually doesn’t mean a damn thing if the judge or the state wants to take you down.

Since this layperson’s efforts to grok our justice system is a reoccurring theme in my blog, I’ve decided to make a new category, “A government of laws and not of men”, and more than likely move some of my previous post over there too.

[1] Click for more of what I mean by “meat-bots”.