July, 2008

If this Is Defeat, We’ll Take It

Cloaking himself and the Brady Center in the mantle of “reasonableness,” Dennis Henigan disclaims the statement of Brady co-founder Pete Shields and asserts that it “has never been” and is not now the policy of his organization to “make possession of all handguns . . . totally illegal.” Perhaps so. Perhaps, as Henigan [...]

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The NRA and the Supreme Court

Dennis Henigan is a smart lawyer who knows a great deal about gun laws and the Second Amendment. But one subject on which he is not an expert is the internal deliberations of the National Rifle Association. Reading Henigan to learn the secret motives of the NRA is akin to reading Richard Dawkins to learn [...]

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Take It up with the NRA

I fear that Dennis Henigan has somehow mixed up his blogs.  This blog — Cato Unbound — is an exchange between Henigan, Kopel, Chemerinsky, and Levy.  The blog on which Henigan has most recently posted is an exchange between Henigan and the NRA — somewhat complicated by the fact that the NRA is not a [...]

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What Did They Mean in Massachusetts?

In a previous post, Dennis criticized me for not “responding to the evidence, presented in my essay, of Justice Scalia’s manipulative and inconsistent textualism.” OK.
Much of the post does not merit a response because it does not advance the discussion, as it amounts to a précis of the arguments made by Justice Stevens in his [...]

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One Man’s “Sensible” Is Another Man’s “Extreme”

Dennis Henigan’s criticism of Bob Levy leaves a little to be desired in terms of accuracy. Levy had quoted Nelson “Pete” Shields’s explanation of his plan for gradual handgun prohibition. Here’s the full quote:
“The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is [...]

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Does Heller Point the Way to Victory for Reasonable Gun Laws?

Bob Levy is uninterested in the “old debate” about the meaning of the Second Amendment because Heller decided the issue, while David Kopel thinks Heller hangs on a fragile 5-4 thread that could be severed by the Obama Administration conspiring with the United Nations to use unratified treaties to undermine Second Amendment rights. I [...]

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More on the “The” and Pre-existing Rights

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals said that the word “the” in “the right to keep and bear arms” shows that the Second Amendment protected a pre-existing right. All nine Justices agreed. The majority opinion makes exactly this point. (”The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and [...]

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Slope Still Slippery

Dennis Henigan’s theory that Heller paves the way for new gun controls, by eliminating fears of the slippery slope, might be possible in the long run, but is probably not correct in the short run.
First of all, Heller was a 5-4 decision. Even if a Supreme Court a few years from now did not formally [...]

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