Gun Nuts Media

Copied in its entirety from subguns.com is a post by Alan Gura on why he said the things he said about machine guns during oral arguments.  If you don’t recall, people had been complaining that he threw NFA stuff under the bus, etc.  As a side note, I would like to have seen any of the people complaining do better, but that’s neither here nor there.

Below, you’ll find Alan’s entire post, no edits or changes have been made.

Thanks for your support.

The solution to 922(o) will have to be political in the end. The fact is,
outside the gun community, the concept of privately owned machine guns is
intolerable to American society and 100% of all federal judges. If I had
suggested in any way — including, by being evasive and indirect and fudging
the answer — that machine guns are the next case and this is the path to
dumping 922(o) — I’d have instantly lost all 9 justices. Even Scalia.
There wasn’t any question of that, at all, going in, and it was confirmed in
unmistakable fashion when I stood there a few feet from the justices and
heard and saw how they related to machine guns. It was not just my opinion,
but one uniformly held by ALL the attorneys with whom we bounced ideas off,
some of them exceedingly bright people. Ditto for the people who wanted me
to declare an absolute right, like I’m there to waive some sort of GOA
bumper sticker. That’s a good way to lose, too, and look like a moron in
the process.

I didn’t make the last 219 years of constitutional law and I am not
responsible for the way that people out there — and on the court– feel
about machine guns. Some people in our gun rights community have very….
interesting…. ways of looking at the constitution and the federal courts.
I don’t need to pass judgment on it other than to say, it’s not the reality
in which we practice law. When we started this over five years ago, the
collective rights theory was the controlling law in 47 out of 50 states.
Hopefully, on next year’s MBE, aspiring lawyers will have to bubble in the
individual rights answer to pass the test. I know you and many others out
there can appreciate that difference and I thank you for it, even if we
can’t get EVERYTHING that EVERYONE wants. Honestly some people just want to
stay angry. I’m glad you’re not among them.

You want to change 922(o)? Take a new person shooting. Work for “climate
change.”

Thanks,
Alan

He is absolutely, unequivocally correct in this matter.  If you want to lose a gun rights case, tell the judges that your next goal is unban machine guns.  Even conservative justices would not be on board with that.

What it comes down to is that Alan Gura is dealing with the political reality of the situation, of how law is actually practiced in this country.  If we win, and we get an individual right decision from the Supreme Court, then we’ve established a solid foothold in winning this fight, but like so many other people have said this is just the first step.  We’re not going to get Machine Guns for the People, and we’re not going to get some absolute right declaration from the Supreme Court; if Alan had gone in and asked for that he would have been laughed out of DC.

Bitter has a post up about the disconnect between the editorial board of a Florida paper and the rest of the country. I was going to give the entire editorial a good hard fisking, but I couldn’t get past the first two lines.

Will the country be like the Wild West if the Supreme Court loosens legal restrictions on guns in the Second Amendment case that justices will hear today?

Not that America is as far removed from the Wild West as the nation would like.

I haven’t seen a case of Wild West Syndrome in a while, honestly. I was kind of hoping that anti-gun people had gotten over the whole “cowboy shootouts” phase, since concealed carry laws have not led to blood in the streets or western-movie style showdowns.

The problem with the whole analogy is that the “Wild” West wasn’t all that wild. The link goes to an excellent chapter of the book Violence in America by Roger McGrath which examines the violent crime rate of two “Wild West” towns in comparison to modern cities and contemporary 1800’s towns as well. I encourage you to read the entire link, it is a bit of a read but it’s well worth it. For the sake of brevity, I’ve also lifted his concluding paragraph.

Popular wisdom says that generations of living on and conquering frontiers have made Americans a violent and lawless people. Popular wisdom is wrong. So is much scholarly literature that has drawn conclusions about violence and lawlessness from anecdotal evidence and specious assumptions. The kind of crime that pervades American society today has little or no relation to the kind of lawlessness that occurred on the frontier if Aurora and Bodie are at all representative of western communities. Robbery of individuals, burglary, and theft occurred only infrequently and rape seems not to have occurred at all. Racial violence and serious juvenile crime were absent also. The homicides that occurred almost invariably resulted from gunfights between willing combatants. The old, the weak, the innocent, the young, and the female were not the targets of violent men. In fact, all people in those categories would have been far safer in Aurora or Bodie than they are today in any major U.S. city. Even most smaller cities and towns are far more crime ridden and dangerous than were Aurora and Bodie.

There simply is no justification for blaming contemporary American violence and lawlessness on a frontier heritage. The time is long past for Americans to stop excusing the violence in society by trotting out that old whipping boy, the frontier. On the contrary, it would seem that the frontier, instead of representing America at its worst may have, in many respects, represented the nation at its best.

Assuming for the moment that he’s correct (which I believe he is, as my own research into the issue correlates nicely), then where did we get this “Wild West” impression of random gunfights in the streets and rampant lawlessness? Try Hollywood and the western genre.