Tuesday - February 24, 2009

SCOTUS Blows It Again

Everybody misses the obvious: the Lautenberg amendment to GCA 68 is ex-post facto and therefore 100% unconstitutional. Nobody picks up on the almost obvious: Lautenberg Amendment is unequal protection under the law. Just like hate crimes, just like a more severe form of murder being reserved for only when the deceased was a police officer. Same idea, same mistake. Throw them all out because they are all wrong.

This guy from West Virginia Hayes beat his wife. He was convicted of that in 1994. West Virginia did not have a specific “domestic violence” law at the time; Hayes was convicted of “ordinary” battery. In 1996 Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ, which tells you almost everything you need to know) added an amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1968 that made it illegal for persons convicted of the misdemeanor offense of domestic violence (but not regular violence) to possess firearms. When the cops came to his house in 1996 for another instance of domestic violence, they found that he had a rifle. He was arrested for violating the so-called Lautenberg Amendment. He got 10 years in jail for that. Because he had a gun in 1995. Hayes took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. And lost.

You can lawyer it up and down and do your best to pretend that making an addition in 1996 to a law that was passed in 1968 means that the addition also existed in 1968 ... and that’s pure bullshit. You can say that Hayes should have lost his R2KBA from his 1996 conviction, and I’ll agree with you: the law is bad, but it is the law. But there ain’t no way in hell you can make me accept that he should be convicted because of a 1996 law that made his situation in 1995 illegal in 1995, when it was actually legal in 1995. That’s ex-post facto, and it’s one of the fundamental building blocks of our nation.

So SCOTUS spends the whole case arguing over whether this clause applies to that noun or that one. Idiots. All of them.

Read the decision here: Dumb Decision. SCROTUS just rewrote and clarified the laws of 39 states

Read the dissent here: Nearly As Dumb Dissent. At least Roberts knows his grammar inside and out. I bet he can spell “potatoe” too.

Don’t want to read a couple of pages of lawyerly gobbledy-gook? Read one short paragraph over at Arms and The Law. Or the Fox News story linked up above.



As for the efficacy of the Lautenberg Amendment, let’s ask Aasiya Hassan about it. Because that same bit of “law” also disarms takes the guns away from people who have protection orders served on them. 

Posted by Drew458     on 02/24/2009 at 03:55 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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