Jon Roland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Can anyone confirm or deny the accuracy of this report? If valid, does it represent a policy change on the part of the NRA? How might that affect the trajectory of debate on these issues?
Gun registration is completely constitutional with respect to the Second Amendment. There would be, I think, a strong privacy right argument under the Ninth Amendment against it, but the Second Amendment doesn't seem an appropriate argument against mandatory gun registration.
Mandatory registration is stupid, a waste of time and money, and carries the potential to lead to later confiscation (as has happened in a few places). But I think Halbrook correctly recognizes that striking down DC's law will be easier for the courts if they don't have to strike down registration as well.
Sure. The more a court has to strike down, the less likely it is to side with plaintiff in most contexts, and certainly here. I say especially here because most of the time when the Supreme Court strikes something down it's something (adult porn laws, abortion, police interrogation) that a majority of the Court thinks is stupid or unjust in the first place, whereas here one must in most cases convince a Court that a law it *likes* should be stricken. In fact, a standard defense tactic is the argument that "If you buy this guy's theory, you're going to have to strike down X,Y, and Z laws next, to be consistent." It's even got a nickname--the slippery slope argument. "You've started on the slippery slope and can't turn back." The pain in the neck is that federal courts only take cases and controversies, rather than abstract questions. We can't ask "is the Second Amendment an individual right," but only "should this specific law be stricken because of the Second Amendment?" What are the laws available to challenge? Outside of DC anyway, prohibitted person statutes (everyone's nightmare of a test case), GCA 68 commerce regulations (unlikely to be found objectionable), assault weapon bans (stupid, but likely to be thought very reasonable by judges), etc. --
