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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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The Supreme Court denied cert to multiple cases with more sympathetic defendants in favor of Rahami, whose case was brought by public defenders and not any organized gun rights organization. They chose a bad case because they wanted to have as much an excuse as possible for walking back Heller and Bruin, which the lower courts have rejected.

I suspect they didn’t want to take this either but the opinion below forced their hand.

If the CA had been sensible then the court wouldn’t have had the chance.

Is this maybe a good thing? I see no personal challenge to my gun rights living in a red state - I think large Federal gun restrictions died with the % of the electorate who owned a gun increasing during COVID/the summer of Floyd.

If blue states want to pass more restrictive laws: A. That's a plus for federalism, the only way I see to reduce the national partisan temperature B. That provides lots of fun little opportunities for research on differences in shooting and such that a unified national regulatory structure does not.

Nybbler has already gotten into the pragmatics of leaving half or more of the country a no-rights zone, but I'm going to murder this question closer to its root: I do see personal challenges to gun rights as a Red Stater.

The federal government passed -- post-summer-of-Floyd! -- a bill that banned hunter education and sports teams in public schools, and that was the unintentional bit they eventually reverted. The same law's restrictions on gunsmithing, in contrast, remain unquestioned. You have to sell a ton of guns to have the federal government break down your front door and shoot you in the head in a Red State, but the federal government also argues that it's illegal to sell one. Blue States will happily sue the companies selling firearms into the ground, fuck federal law or common sense saying otherwise.

I'd be a lot more persuaded by the 'laboratories of democracy' argument were it allowed to apply in any way that wasn't a ratchet down.

Until they pass laws or have policies that have the benefit of snuffing out the entire interstate firearms business.

It's not a plus for Federalism when their rights apply everywhere but yours only apply in your home state.

I think there have been inroads in some areas, ie school choice that are more red-state coded, while still taking your overall point

Their right to abortion now only applies in blue states.

And Blues are actively undermining the court because they find that situation intolerable.

How do you mean?

The current Supreme Court situation looks more functional than it did in Mitch Mcconnell’s day.

  • Open defiance to the Court's edicts from blue areas and blue courts, which now appear to have succeeded in forcing the Court to abandon those edicts. The Second Amendment doesn't exist in Blue Tribe areas, and it's now clear that the Supreme Court doesn't have the juice necessary to change that. This problem generalizes to the idea of Constitutional remedies generally.
  • Court Packing or removal of SC justices squarely back in the Overton Window, driven by high-profile attacks on the integrity of the Justices and the legitimacy of the Court. We're now discussing whether the Court's composition should be modified by methods other than the nomination and approval of replacement justices, which is a fairly novel development. The previous precedent was FDR's attempt at court packing, which is widely believed to have shifted the Court's findings, and until recently was universally agreed to be illegitimate.

To quote some high-effort perspective contrary to mine:

And back to jurisprudence, there wasn't necessarily a strong reason to overturn Roe, Hodges was broadly popular but certainly a major event, and as a Supreme Court you do have a certain amount of political capital and around that point they really should have gotten the memo that they were stretching it to breaking.

The conversation is now converging irreversibly on the Supreme Court's "political capital", and that's the end of the Court as an effective conflict-resolution mechanism.

Maine is a blue tribe area, it is all 2A all the way down, same for Vermont, even more blue, also 2A friendly. There is now a 72 hour waiting period in Maine due to the Lewiston shootings, not that one had anything to do with the other from a factual standpoint. But you can buy a gun and tuck it in your waistband in the bluest city in the state if you want.

Is your argument that Vermont and Maine are more central examples of Blue Tribe areas than New York, California, Washington State, Washington DC and Illinois?

More comments

But unlike other “rights” most will never use or use only once the abortion “right.” Given that it is trivially easy to travel to any blue (and even many red) state, there isn’t a big restriction on this so called “right.”

Reds don't treat "small restrictions" on their "so called rights" as lightly, I observe.

Consider: most will never use their right to defend their house with lethal force.

I’m making a different point. The right to arms is a daily right. You use it frequently even if generally one of the reasons for the right never materializes.

In contrast with abortion it is one off; not frequent. Provided there are a number of states they provide abortions and given the relative ease of going from A to B there is a very small drop in access to abortions

Any woman who's frequently having less-than-safe sex while not planning to be a mother is using her right to abortion at those moments, same as a gun carrier/owner even as they're not in the process of shooting.

Yes, that's their singular loss.

Laws around soft drugs are another example, even if widely disregarded.

That's federalism but not a case where something credibly* claimed to be a Federal constitutional right was reduced to only holding in some states. If Mississippi didn't have to recognize gay marriage or Florida could ban flag burning, that would be more like it.

* Yes, I realize conservatives don't believe there's credibly a constitutional right to abortion, but I figure having a long-lived Supreme Court precedent holding so is sufficient credibility.

Hasn’t every recent attempt at enforcing flag burning statutes been over pride flags anyways?

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