‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!’ And More on Heller

[WSJ_law_blog]

Before and after the Heller handgun decision came out this morning, the Law Blog’s in-box was flooded with press releases and commentary about the case, as well as links to other Web sites’ reporting. Herewith are a few of the more compelling submissions and finds:



Dick Heller, the security guard who sued the District of Columbia after it rejected his application to keep a handgun at his Capitol Hill home, signs autographs outside the Supreme Court on Thursday after the Court ruled that Americans have a constitutional right to keep guns in their homes. (Credit: Associated Press/Jose Luis Magana)


Heller v. D.C. or Stevens v. Scalia? Over at the Legal Times BLT blog, Tony Mauro provides us with some atmospherics from the Court’s historic, 23-minute session. Justice Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, and Justice Stevens, who wrote one of the dissents, cast aspersions on each other’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, reports Mauro. “Do not accept the summary you have just heard,” Stevens said at one point, after Scalia summarized the Court’s majority opinion. For Scalia’s part, he reportedly said it was “particularly wrongheaded” for dissenters to rely on U.S. v. Miller, the Court’s last Second Amendment case from 1939.

But perhaps the ultimate barb came when Stevens said that “a genuine judicial conservative” would not have inserted the Court into the “political thicket” of the gun rights debate as Scalia had allegedly done. (Emphasis from Stevens.)

“Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!” The LB receives scores of press releases every day, but the title of this one really caught our attention. It came from Liberty Counsel — an organization devoted to “restoring the culture” by advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life and the traditional family. The release contained the following quote from Mathew Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law: “‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’ is the best way to describe today?s decision,” he said. “The right to self-defense is a liberty at the core of the American Revolution. It was ordinary people who defended life and liberty against organized tyranny. The King of Great Britain sought to disarm the colonists because he, like any criminal, knew that a disarmed people are a weak people who can easily be overcome. The Second Amendment stands as an impenetrable wall between tyranny and freedom.”

Out of touch with the real world: That seemed to be the reaction of Linda Singer — a Zuckerman Spaeder partner and the former D.C. AG — in an e-mail she sent to the Law Blog this morning. “While the majority spent much time on British and colonial history, they talked almost not at all of the real world, right now, life and death consequences to the Court?s ruling,” wrote Singer, who oversaw the preparation of the D.C.’s petition to the Supreme Court in Heller. “I will never forget a holiday spent at the arraignment of a young woman for killing a friend during a game of keep-way. Child?s play turned deadly — one life ended and another forever upended — because there was a loaded gun in her home. The DC Council recognized these very serious stakes when it decided in the 1970s, in one of the first acts of this Home Rule government, to ban handguns. It reviewed evidence from law enforcement that handguns are uniquely dangerous weapons. That they are more likely to be used in suicides, against law enforcement, and fired accidentally by children. Because they are easily concealed, they are the weapons of choice of criminals.”