The District of Columbia’s final reply brief in the Heller case is online now. I don’t know if they’re just getting desperate now or what, but the brief is a comedy goldmine! Basically, they’ve boiled their argument down to three main points:
First, they pretty much admit that the militia referred to in the Second Amendment was composed of the people themselves. All of them. They go on to argue (against who? themselves?) that the keeping arms bit really means that said people would have arms in their possession before they were called into service (isn’t that what we’ve been saying?!). From this they conclude that since everybody is in the militia, everybody has a right to own arms unless they’re not in the militia which they said everybody is already in. Umm, okay?
Their second argument is basically that the Second Amendment only restricts the Federal government, and not the several States or the District itself. If you replaced “controlling weapons” and such here with “controlling slaves” or “controlling blacks,” it would read just like the racist arguments in Dred Scott or Brown v. Board of Education. Do the fascists in DC really want to go there? And, umm, isn’t this type of State/local usurpation of rights precisely what the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent?
Their third argument is that a total gun ban is somehow “reasonable” either way. They arrive at this conclusion from two main concepts. For one, they claim that handguns are too dangerous to use in self-defense in an urban environment, and that people are “permitted” to use rifles and shotguns instead.
Aside from the fact that they’re lying about people being “permitted” to use a rifle to defend themselves, the idea that handguns are more dangerous is ridiculous. Rifles, by their very nature, are far more likely to penetrate multiple walls and hit an unintended target some distance away. Tactically speaking, the whole point of handguns is to serve as a short-range defensive weapon while fighting your way back to the rifle you should have never left behind.
The other main (and most hilarious) part of their third argument is that their ban has a “grounding in Framing-era practice.†And which Framing-era practice do they cite as evidence that the Framers would somehow approve of their gun ban?
Long before the Founding, England banned the use of particular weapons. Near the Founding, Boston enacted storage requirements that effectively banned the possession of loaded firearms within city limits.
Umm, guys, I hate to break this to you, but that ban in Boston is, well, pretty much what started the damn Revolutionary War. If the Framers really liked the idea of gun bans so much, we would still be part of the UK..