Sangamon
County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois
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Sangamon
County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights Springfield, Illinois |
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 Heller - The Decision of a Lifetime by Tom Shafer 7/7/08 SCRA Meeting August 2008 GunNews It's the decision of a lifetime, there's no question about it! You can can tell by the media. They were literally stunned. I read the Times, the Trib, the LA Times, the Post Dispatch, the SunTimes and the Boston Globe. I read all their headlines. They all cried in their beer that they had to say what the Supreme Court decided 5-4, that the Second Amendment is an individual right, a handgun ban anywhere by any county, state, municipality, village, city would be unconstitutional. There were about four points in Heller that if you understood the DC law, that said you couldn't own handguns at all, totally banned. That was thirty-one years ago. Then they said you couldn't have a long gun assembled in your home. You couldn't have a rifle or a shotgun ready to fire in your house. That was banned. It had to be disassembled and have a trigger lock on everything after it was disassembled, so actually you owned no firearms. That stood for thirty-one years. I didn't think in my lifetime of political activism on Second Amendment issues that we'd ever hear of a case that would be brought before the Supremes, God Bless their little hearts, five of them, that would make a definitive ruling in our lifetime. So I say again and I congratulate everybody that had any kind of work in this area, it is the decision of a lifetime, absolutely outstanding, I still can't believe it! I read a letter that Ted Nugent wrote that said he couldn't believe that four of the justices decided the way they did, that there was no Second Amendment, there was no right to self defense, and there was no individual right to keep and bear. Their reading of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is just unbelievable! When the founding fathers wanted to say "the People", they said "the People". When they wanted to say "the States", they said "the States". So the clause in the Second Amendment is very, very simple and yet four justices of the Supreme Court saw a different way then the five majority did. Ted Nugent did say, "What if we had some changes on the Supreme Court?" People do pass away, people do get to old to serve, new Presidents get elected, the Senate decides to throw people off or not confirm people who are appointed by the President, so the Supreme Court does change. But they have things called "precedent and certiorari". First thing is precedent, this has defined the Second Amendment for our children. I will not live to see the end of this ruling. It will never change in my lifetime. These kids will live under this Supreme Court's ruling, under the Second Amendment, the no handgun ban, and the individual right to keep bearing including self defense which was mentioned by several of the justices. So it has legs and it has tentacles. The certiorari portion of it is enough justices, you know you lose at the trial level, that's the US Circuit Court and then you lose at the Appellate Court and then you can go to the Supremes. But they don't have to take your case. The law says you've got a right to one appeal on your case, not to the Supremes. They get what they call a "certiorari". They get to a vote which cases they want to look at. They vote yes or no, "We'll look at your case, but we're not going to look at yours". They have to change enough votes to get certiorari for another Second Amendment case which will not happen in my lifetime, guaranteed. This is settled law now. Now they'll leave it to the Appeals Courts. When we filed against Chicago, Wilmette, Winnetka, Oak Park, Morton Grove, all these handgun bans suburbs around Chicago, the Illinois State Rifle Association has already filed suit to overturn their handgun bans because of the Supreme Court's ruling that handgun bans by any unit of government is unconstitutional, one of the villages just said, "Yeh, we quit, we give." They gave up when they heard the Supreme Court ruling because they knew what shaky legal ground they were on. So the certiorari, the court will never take another Second Amendment case. There won't be enough of a change because you'll notice that some of these guys are young. Scalia is a young guy and Roberts is a young guy. Stephens and Ginsburg are old people. They're going to be replaced and they're so anti-gun and anti-Second Amendment in a lot of their rulings on other issues as well that I don't care who they get replaced with, anybody would be better than them. The Supremes in my lifetime will probably never take another Second Amendment case because they don't need to. Why on earth do you need to redefine the Constitution when they just defined it and they said, "It's an individual right." I'm thinking about filing a suit in federal court against the FOID card. Now federal lawsuits are difficult and everything is not a federal case. Lawsuits are tough and you should be a lawyer when you get into federal court especially because the rules of evidence and everything are extremely strict and expensive even to file. But I lay awake at night and think about the FOID card. We're the only state with it and I never really did like it. It does infringe on me a lot. The one time when I had to renew it wasn't 30 days, it was 69 days. I thought, you know there might be a judge somewhere that looks at this Supreme Court ruling and says you can't ban stuff and you can't infringe on an individual right. Is that an infringement that I can live with or not? Now I keep rolling it around in my head and maybe I can't live with it. Maybe I need to sue somebody, like the Director of the State Police, whoever it is at the time. I don't care who he is because he doesn't take away my rights. He's not my daddy, he's not the big father, he's not one of the Supremes, he's not the judiciary, he's not a lawmaker, he's not anything to me. He runs the state agency and really not to well from what I can see, especially when he screws up that card that hits on a right that I've got by birth. By being born in this country I've got rights and one of them has just been redefined. So I'm going to think about it and we'll let you know what happens, if I need to get him on the stand, and have him squirming and squealing about this FOID card which we are the only state with. I've never liked it, it has never worked. Since 1967 we have labored under it. I thought about that when I heard that the DC gun ban was in effect for thirty-two years before somebody got up enough nerve. They've been sued before but the Supremes never took the case because you lose in one Appeals court and you win in one Appeals court, then you lose in another Appeals court. San Francisco's got that nutty 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most overturned Circuit in the country because they're so foolish, and I thought we'll just have to see what the Supremes would say about a case like that and how it filters down now to the trial court level. Illinois is the only state with a FOID card and it would be a wonderful case to litigate. Back to the Supremes, I don't care what happens, who gets elected, I don't care how the Supreme Court changes, there's a couple of justices, probably Ginsburg and probably Stephens, if you took a good look at them you couldn't believe how old they are. You think man these people are waiting to quit. Of course what they are waiting for is an Obama presidency. That's what they're waiting for and to be replaced by an Obama and confirmed by a Democratic Senate. So the Supreme Court will change but I'm willing to stand on this ruling here. I try to call as I do. I like to gloat. It's a character flaw that I have, fortunately. I called up the Post Dispatch and got their editor in Chief and did some good gloating there with her. I said, "You know you lost, all those editorials and stuff, you lost. The Supremes. Then we talked about how they'd lost at the concealed carry for Missouri. They'd done 125 editorials against concealed carry. They had a popular vote in Missouri which lost, and the legislature in Missouri still passed it. I'd asked her when I called her previously, "Will you please put an application on your front page so I don't have to drive down there?" I said, "you know you guys are wrong all the time, you're wrong on concealed carry, now you're wrong on Second Amendment. You guys are like 0 and 4 from what I can tell." The Chicago Trib, their paper is so big or so multi-national corporation owned that I couldn't get anybody that was anybody there. All I got was a phone answerer, "Heller what", "Supreme Court what"? They don't know what's going on and you can't reach anybody in power. You can't gloat if you don't get the big shots. It's just not fun to gloat with a phone answerer. I tried the Boston Globe and the New York times, both impossible to do from very far away. The Times was a little bit better. They will not write up the stunning magnitude of this decision. Notice that the Harvard Law professors and all the liberal academia and all the media types who had been telling you over and over, "No this is state right, you don't have no Constitutional right. No, No, No, you're misreading everything!" Where are they to say, "Oops, they were wrong." They're gone, they just vanished. So I guess all you've got are just guys like me. I've got a cable show coming. I don't know if I should just roll around on the floor the whole half-hour or if I should gloat. What did they do when the Brady Bill on assault weapons ban passed in 94, they had their feet up on the desks and were popping champaign and they had a big cigar lit up. You'll notice that's how they are. That's whistling past the graveyard because all those things have faded away. This decision here is worth looking at closely because it's going to survive all of us clearly. Shafer continued by answering questions from SCRA members in his wonderfully entertaining speaking style making it a once in a lifetime memorable meeting. From the Capitol Index Return to SCRA Home Page |