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Jun 23, 2022·edited Jun 23, 2022Author

To everyone complaining about the pronoun thing:

1) I can tell you read it on email instead of online, because I fixed that about ten minutes after posting it,

2) I considered leaving it up and simply saying "I'm not a biologist," but that seemed to much like culture war bait,

3) I honestly mapped Breyer over to a woman reading the dissent because the first six pages were basically a copy/paste from innumerable Vox articles, Everytown articles, and such, which are all spaces so incredibly female dominated that they all bleed together in my head. The thing may have in fact been ghost written by a woman.

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Jun 23, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

You keep using "she" when referencing Justice Breyer. Has he had a transition that I'm not aware of?

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Jun 23, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Aren’t Stephen Breyer’s pronouns he/him?

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It's really a pretty simple matter. The Second Amendment states, in part: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

If the "right of the people" is infringed by a plain reading of the statute in question, there's nothing more to discuss. There's no need to develop an evidentiary record, as Breyer and two other dissenters advocate. It's simply not how statutory construction works.

Let's say the evidentiary record demonstrated all that Breyer claims. It doesn't matter. The rules of statutory construction are still the same. If the statute in question infringes the "right of the people to keep and bear arms," the statute is unconstitutional. Period.

Breyer is not stupid. This is plain propaganda. But, depending on who has the votes, propaganda can be the law of the land, which is unfortunate but a fact of life. Fortunately, not so here.

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I think that Justice Alito might be a HWFO reader: https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/23/politics/samuel-alito-stephen-breyer-guns/index.html

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Hey, I want to point out that the VCDL calls it a lobby day, because they were lobbying not protesting (though yes, I expect most there did not directly talk to a government official), and that it took place in 2020.

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So we affirm via the dissent what we already know: ideology eliminates honesty. For all these many years the public has suffered from court decisions that have used ideology to reduce liberty. A very fortunate set of circumstances has reduced the ability of our highest court to impose that ideology.

Breyer's dissent shows how shallow the reasoning was. Alito affirms your analysis: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/courts/scotus-gun-ruling-depicts-spat-between-retiring-breyer-alito. And apparently Breyer has used a similar approach to the 1st Amendment: https://reason.com/volokh/2022/05/02/justice-alito-identifies-the-problems-with-justice-breyers-factorized-jurisprudence.

We can hope that after the anger subsides over this and the Roe decision, we will settle down and accept the decisions. Probably not, the left ideologues really do hate to accept rule by [unfair] law.

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Interesting post,

It hadn't occurred to me to read the dissent, but I'm glad you did: who knew that Supreme Court justices are just as likely to use statistics for self-serving lies as journalists. Then again, Breyer's 83; did he even write this? Maybe he's a justice like Biden is President, and it was actually written by clerks.

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This particular 1-2 combo this week is the best demonstration of everyone's utter disregard for the concept of "State's Rights" I've seen in a while. Possibly the best ever.

"States should absolutely have the right to regulate guns/abortions but they should absolutely not have the right to regulate abortions/guns."

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All I have to add at this point is that while Thomas' opinion is very well done, Alito's concurrence is the real gem here.

I mean... I've never had a SCOTUS ruling actually make me *cheer* before. ;)

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