79 thoughts on “Bipartisan Gun Legislation: Read It For Yourself”

    1. initial reads are the bill will potentially run afoul of the SCOTUS language. But I’m not the lawyer Burt or EM or CJ is, so . . . .

      I do find it interesting that SCOTUS doesn’t want 2A regulation by states, but is fine sending Roe back and creating a messy hodge podge.Report

          1. So, what, no laws are possible? I mean, you’re implying that the lack of enumeration of the right to park next to fire hydrants means that states can’t pass laws against it, right?Report

            1. There joke here is that not only do the people enjoy rights that aren’t enumerated but are contained in the emanations and penumbras, even the rights which ARE enumerated are still only discoverable through the same emanations and penumbra.

              That is, there is no obvious and unassailable meaning to ANY part of the Constitution. That’s why SCOTUS exists.

              So Phillips point stands, that it’s bizarre that one right is to be decided by the states but another is not.
              The assertion that one is enumerated in the 2nd Amendment and the other isn’t is meaningless.Report

              1. That is, there is no obvious and unassailable meaning to ANY part of the Constitution. That’s why SCOTUS exists.

                Well, the Grand Marshall of the Supreme Court has his opinion.

                If we’re now saying “but that’s obviously wrong!”, well… I think that there are a lot of cases that need to be revisited myself.

                You have my sympathies.Report

              3. That part was actually a pun based on a misquotation of Andrew Jackson.

                But, yes. The court gets a lot of crap wrong. Obviously so.

                So you think that this is one of the rulings?

                Personally, I think it’s high time for a constitutional amendment that allows for something like Judicial Review but for legislation. “This is unconstitutional”, the Supreme Court can say.

                Then we can pass a law that says “We Want It Anyway”.

                Maybe it’ll need 75% or something to pass. Sure.Report

              4. Or, people could just decide that voting for Democrats gets better SCOTUS rulings than does voting for Republicans.

                Which is why you’ll keep hearing me say that “elections have consequences.”.Report

    2. If you’re applying for a permit, “may issue” has moved to “shall issue”.

      If you’re trying to buy the gun for the permit, well, you have a *LOT* of hoops to jump through first.

      That’s my guess from what I’m picking up on the twitters.Report

    3. The key would seem to be in this section:

      “Only if a firearm regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command,” Thomas said. “We too agree, and now hold, consistent with Heller and McDonald, that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a hand- gun for self-defense outside the home.”

      https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/23/politics/supreme-court-guns-second-amendment-new-york-bruen/index.htmlReport

        2. “Tommyguns” are not illegal. The Thompson submachine gun, aka, the “Tommygun” is a restricted weapon that requires a whole lot more paperwork, but they are legal to have.Report

    4. Kavanaugh’s concurrence:

      “In contrast, 43 States employ objective shall-issue licensing regimes. Those shall-issue regimes may require a license applicant to undergo fingerprinting, a background check, a mental health records check, and training in firearms handling and in laws regarding the use of force, among other possible requirements.”

      I don’t think there is likely any problem, but I note that a number of provisions are conditioned on things like due process or convictions which are doing a lot of the lifting here.Report

      1. I’m hesitant to speculate too much seeing as how a pro-2nd Amendment SCOTUS is a novel development, however my read is that the fatal flaw is the discretion granted to a state official, not the existence of conditions.Report

        2. Yeah, I agree. And given that Kavanaugh’s concurrence is joined by the Chief Justice, it reads to me as the controlling opinion, written specifically to emphasize the unique context. Future litigants will focus on the swing justices even if they joined Thomas’ opinion.Report

    5. On a tangential note in relation to this case, I saw someone in the Twitter feed repeat the myth that John Marshall invented judicial review. In reality, judicial review is nothing more than an exercise of the Court’s authority to rule on all cases arising under the Constitution.

      There’s a common misconception that judicial review entails erasing a law from the US or state code, but it’s really just a declaration that the Court will rule against the state in all future attempts to enforce the law. The state is free to try to enforce the law again, but doesn’t do so because it would be a waste of time. If the makeup of the Court changes, the state might try again for a different decision.

      If the Court claimed the power to issue a writ of erasure—to take the law off the books so that no future attempts could be made to enforce it without the legislature passing it again—that would be overreaching the powers granted in the Constitution. But it doesn’t actually work that way.

      Really, it’s not clear how the Court could exercise its power to decide cases arising under the Constitution without performing something functionally equivalent to judicial review. What else are they going to do, say “We rule against the state because the law is unconstitutional, but next time anything could happen?”

      Aside from being illogical, this claim appears to be grossly ahistorical. I haven’t checked all the references, but this Wikipedia article provides extensive evidence that judicial review was an intended feature of the Constitution that was discussed at length prior to ratification. It also lists numerous pre-Marbury cases involving judicial review.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_review_in_the_United_StatesReport

      1. Honestly, we might be better off if the courts _did_ have the power of erasure, considering that obvious dead-letter laws have been used to harass people who the government knows cannot fight back.

        However, yes, if the courts can say ‘This law is not allowed to be enforced’, then they can clearly say ‘And we will keep saying that in the future’. That’s not an independent power.

        But I think there is an aspect of judicial review that does sorta exist independent of that, in that the government enforcing the bad law no longer has a presumption of ‘accident’. The first time, possibly the government didn’t know the law was unconstitutional.

        Whereas it’s clearly deliberate malice of the government if tries to do something with a law it has already been explicitly told cannot get past a court, and thus a) it’s easier for someone wrongly charged under such a law to get free, and b) it feels like it would be easier to win a civil rights lawsuit? I don’t know if it actually is, but it feels like a jury should have an easier time there.

        Ie, I think it’s a good thing the system can sorta do that formally.Report

  2. Once again, straw purchases won’t be prosecuted as long as drug convictions are more valuable to LE & DAs, because the vast bulk of straw purchases are connected to the drug trade and it’s easier to plead a gun conviction in order to get a drug conviction.Report

    1. Seems like the best recourse would be to pass laws like Colorado’s “Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity” law.

      I think that you could get more than half of the states to pass such a law.

      I mean, if I wanted evidence that “Defund” was out of gas, I’d point to stuff like Stacy Abrams:

      Report

      1. Jaybird on Abrams: Why does she want to give the police this much money?

        Jaybird on Boudin: Don’t Democrats realize how toxic defund the police is and that they should fear a backlash?Report

        1. Actually, Saul, I wrote an entire essay about Boudin. My main criticism of him was that he tried to usher in sweeping change but, instead, made things worse.

          One of the things outside of his control that I pointed out in my essay was that the police had an unofficial work slowdown that resulted in an increase in petty crimes. Like, my pointing that out wasn’t me siding with the police.

          I mostly pointed out that if you want to be the face of a Big Change, you’d better make the trains run on time.

          Because if you take power and then everything starts falling apart, even the stuff outside of your power, then you will not only find yourself out of power in short order but you will also discredit your bold vision.

          Hey, Saul: Defund has been pretty discredited.

          (I understand that there are people out there who don’t think that Chesa was, though.)Report

    2. I see that John Cole at Balloon Juice is now on the page of DO NOT TALK TO THE POLICE EVER, in upper case. He’s even worse than the talk my children got when they headed off to college. (Said talk delivered because I had/have one foot still stuck in the 60s.)Report

  4. There’s another option:

    Report

        1. $20.

          If I described the summer of 2020 as a bunch of “skirmishes”, we’d probably have to hammer out what “war” would actually look like. A minor kinetic event with one fairly powerful person gravely kineticized? A medium kinetic event that happens to kineticize a half dozen?

          If property damage counts, would we want to set a dollar amount?

          How’s about $2 Billion in property damage?Report

            1. Nah, not really. Good clean livin’, you know how it is.

              But if we do an over/under, we can say “fewer than 12.5 people dead in organized protests in a two week period” and “less than $2 billion in property damage by (date)” or something like that.

              Heck, you can name the numbers that would sound sweetest to you, if you want instead if you look at those and say “that’s something that is obviously going to happen anyway! It’s not a *WAR* until …”

              And you can give your numbers.Report

              1. It’s your proposition, not mine. Put it out there and see if it draws any action. It’s not as pretentious as “divorce or war,” but it’s at least a bettable proposition.Report

              2. Oh, I did. It’s right there.

                $20.

                Let’s say by… Labor Day next year.
                And organized protests (of the sort we saw over the summer of 2020).

                You down? If we don’t want to trade addresses, we can use North as our main dude. He’s cool.

                Or we can donate to a charity of the other guy’s choice. INCLUDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD.Report

      2. Its up to the Republicans.

        So far one group of Republicans have threatened to inflict violence on anyone who stands in their way.

        The other group of Republicans are standing around dithering and pretending not to notice.

        You’re a good example- are YOU ready to vote Democrat yet?

        If not, what sort of things would need to happen change that?Report

        1. As I’ve said, my vote is easy to get:

          1. Legalize Pot at the Federal Level
          2. Eliminate DST

          Please tell the Democrats to do something that will actually win votes instead of the bullshit with the Juul pods and whatnot.Report

          1. So your policy preferences, in order of most to least desirable:

            1. The end of democracy and the rule of law;
            2. Voting for a Democrat.

            And you wonder why I say you’re an authoritarian?Report

            1. I’ve told you my price and you’ve told me that you will not pay it.

              Good luck with those principles.

              Hey, maybe other people will be persuaded by the whole “agree with me or I will call you bad” thing.

              It worked in 2020!Report

              1. A person whos support for or against democracy can be bought for a nickle bag will always and forever be in the service of authoritarians.Report

          2. A woman’s right to choose is very much an individual right. So, for that matter, is a kid’s right to not die in a school shooting. Both have collective benefits, but they start and end with a person, not a group.Report

            1. There have long been efforts to try to split the individual from the group, like the theory of positive and negative rights, or in this case, individual and collective rights.

              But they all fail because all rights only exist after a collective body is formed and chooses to recognize and enforce them.Report

              1. It can be hard to separate the two in all situations.

                That doesn’t change that collect rights create nasty outcomes like dismantling equality before the law. We prevent Asian Americans from going to colleges that they’d trivially qualify for if they were a different race in the name of racial justice.

                Collective outcomes require individuals to take it on the chin, normally at the hands of the government.Report

            2. You have a solid point about a woman’s right to choose, although largely this comes down to calling a fetus an “individual” and claiming it has rights.

              “It’s for the children” is a way to put fig leaves on bad ideas. And what you mean is “all children in general” not any specific child in the future.Report

              2. The fault in that logic is the concept that a little bit of gun control would deal with the problem.

                We’re going to go back to outlawing green guns that have bayonet fixtures and then be shocked when that doesn’t work.

                The most “relevant” solution suggested for our current nut is making him wait longer before legally buying a gun. Clearly, even though he waited for 8+ months, there’s no way he would have waited more.Report

      1. The ol’ “Kim Davis” option? Yeah, I can see how that might appeal to people.

        What is the court going to do if people pretend that the ruling hadn’t been made? “How many divisions has the court?”Report

        2. I don’t believe there’s a lot here for USDOJ to enforce/not enforce.

          Edit to add, the same type of scheme was held unconstitutional in DC 5 years ago without much fanfare or any apparent reverberations, so far (Wrenn v. District of Columbia).Report

  7. Almost none of this bill seems useful.

    It closes the boyfriend loophole, which honestly is somethat that should have been closed decades ago. Like, seriously, it is still completely absurd that domestic violence sometimes doesn’t ‘count’ based on a marriage license.

    I think maybe the changed requirements for someone to qualify as a dealer might also help.

    But…none of this seems to do anything about the most recent shooting.Report

    2. But…none of this seems to do anything about the most recent shooting.

      That’s normally the observation of the pro-gun group of various proposals after a shooting.

      There’s a disconnect between “SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!” and “what law would people actually obey that would help?”Report

      1. I mean, I don’t _object_ to any of this, and looking into it, depending on how the changed requirements for the ‘who must have a FDL’ might be very good are interpreted, it could be very good. ‘Is the reason you are selling this gun mostly to make a profit?’ seems like a pretty wide question and basically puts the nail in the coffin of all off-books resellers, aka, the gun show loophole.

        You want to sell a gun anymore without an FDL/background check, you better have some explanation of where you got that gun that isn’t ‘I just bought at a store for 10% less’ and is more like ‘I bought it ten years ago and just upgraded so selling the old one’ or ‘I am moving to somewhere where I cannot own it’ or ‘I inherited it and don’t want a gun’.

        It’s just…that has nothing to do with mass shootings at all.Report

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