Just Our Luck

With the U.S. Supreme Court set to decide whether the Second Amendment gives law-abiding citizens the right to keep a handgun at home, a convicted felon in New York decided to test his luck.

The inmate, Damon Lucky, isn't law-abiding. Nor did the gun he was convicted of possessing stay in his home. Still, Lucky decided to "see how far we can ride this pony," his lawyer, Harry Batchelder Jr., said, referring to the federal judiciary's apparent willingness to examine gun control laws critically.

My argument here will not be that the Second Amendment doesn't give anything, nor will it be my often-repeated assertion that anyone who can't be trusted with a gun can't be trusted without a custodian.

My argument is that luck really has nothing to do with it--it was inevitable. Those who avoided a Second Amendment challenge all these years because they were waiting for the "just right" Goldilocks case, or wanted to avoid it altogether because of the risk of losing, practically ensured that the wrong case, with a repulsive central character, would come to the fore. The question couldn't be more basic: would you rather engage with a case you engineered, at a time and place of your choosing--or wait to be blindsided by a train wreck of a case that you have no control or influence over?

I don't see this case going anywhere, but this will certainly make it problematic for future restoration of rights cases. For instance, Josh Sugarmann recently came out with a screed against the NICS expansion bill on the grounds that:

This provision is contrary to a unanimous 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ATF's failure to act on a relief application from a felon (because of a lack of appropriations) did not constitute a denial that would entitle the applicant to judicial review.

Here's what he conveniently didn't tell you about the "felon" in question: He was Thomas Lamar Bean, who was convicted in Mexico for leaving 200 rounds of ammunition in the back seat of his car. In one of the great travesties of US "justice," the Supreme Court unanimously confirmed the Catch 22 situation that an ATF denial was a requisite for judicial review, and that an ATF action was impossible to obtain because Congress had specifically defunded the agency from addressing appeals.

The unspoken danger, aside from the outrageousness of this intentional legal paradox, is the practical effect that foreign law trumps the Bill of Rights in the eyes of the court. Spreading the gospel in China is also equivalent to a felony, or violating Sharia "law" in Saudi Arabia...

"Lucky" won't make it any easier to rectify this. And future defunding of the new bill is merely a matter of political will, and rumor has it we have elections coming up soon where none of the front runners are people of principle or Constitutional fidelity.

[Via Alphecca]