Tuesday, March 02, 2010

World's Coolest Shotgun Headed for NRA Museum


That would be the suppressed Remington 11-87 used by Javier Bardem as hitman Anton Chigurh in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. It';; be part of the National Firearms Museum "Hollywood Guns" exhibit, which will open later in the spring.

The movie tripped off a lot of threads about whether shotguns could be suppressed. Apparently, the answer is yes, especially in Europe. Consider HushPower, who makes this natty O/U (and, no, it's not available here):


Anyway, movie guns are always fun, and I look forward to my ext trip to the Museum.

There's a really cool op-ed column on Fox on our brave President Barack Hussein Obama and his Justice Department's response to today's Supreme Court oral arguments, titled Why Is Obama Hiding Under His Desk:
In major cases, it’s typical for the Justice Department to file a brief informing the Supreme Court of the position of the United States. The Office of the Solicitor General -- the elite legal team that represents the federal government whenever the United States is a party in a Supreme Court case -- routinely files briefs in high-profile cases.
McDonald is as high-profile is it gets. It presents the question of whether the Second Amendment, like the First Amendment, is a right that law-abiding citizens have against state and local laws, or if, instead, it’s only a right they have against the federal government alone. The entire Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, originally only applied to the federal government. When the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868 after the Civil War, it extended most—but not all—of the Bill of Rights to also apply to cities and states.
Given that there are over 90 million gun owners in this country and thousands of gun control laws on the books—most of them state or local laws—McDonald is a monumental case.
So what is the position of the Obama administration? How can he oppose the rights of 90 million Americans, many of whom are blue collar union workers in swing states that he needs to win in 2012? To do so would also help drive Democrats into the minority in the 2010 midterm elections. On the other hand, how can he reverse his position of more than a decade in supporting Chicago’s absolute ban on firearms?
In this difficult situation, President Obama’s position is … Nothing.
Golly, I guess he just voted "Present," as he has done so many times before. And it has served him well...after all he did get elected President. I'll bet I'm not the only American who nottices that the more you get to know BHO, the less impressive a person he is.

We're humping it over at DRTV getting commentary up on the oral arguments...it's frustrating that the Supremes decided NOT to release the tapes of the oral argument, but we did have David Hardy and Jim Shepherd in the room. Jim's excellent commentary should be up in a short while. Meanwhile, we've also go Sebastian from the SNOWFLAKES IN HELL blog with some of his observations from the Supreme Court chambers already up.

The SCOTUS blog has its analysis up...here's the nut:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed poised to require state and local governments to obey the Second Amendment guarantee of a personal right to a gun, but with perhaps considerable authority to regulate that right. The dominant sentiment on the Court was to extend the Amendment beyond the federal level, based on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “due process,” since doing so through another part of the 14th Amendment would raise too many questions about what other rights might emerge.
When the Justices cast their first vote after starting later this week to discuss where to go from here, it appeared that the focus of debate will be how extensive a “right to keep and bear arms” should be spelled out: would it be only some “core right” to have a gun for personal safety, or would it include every variation of that right that could emerge in the future as courts decide specific cases? The liberal wing of the Court appeared to be making a determined effort to hold the expanded Amendment in check, but even the conservatives open to applying the Second Amendment to states, counties and cities seemed ready to concede some — but perhaps fewer — limitations. The eagerly awaited oral argument in McDonald, et al., v. Chicago, et al. (08-1521) found all members of the Court actively involved except the usually silent Justice Clarence Thomas. And, while no one said that the issue of “incorporating” the Second Amendment into the 14th Amendment had already been decided before the argument had even begun, the clear impression was that the Court majority was at least sentimentally in favor of that, with only the dimensions of the expansion to be worked out in this case and in a strong of likely precedents coming as time went on.
Keep checking at DRTV for updates and analysis...

9 comments:

Scott said...

So, given his clear gun control history, doing nothing is a bad thing?
The oft times deserved bashing does seem almost knee jerk at times.

Geoff aka Pathfinder said...

They're doing nothing for a couple fo reasons.

1. They know they will lose. That was evident int he weakness of the arguments by the lawyer for Chicago and Oak Park.

2. The fix is in - bho and his minions have an end-run somewhere that we aren't seeing, or that is unstoppable. A UN rule that we follow - ala Hitlery's comments the last week or so - will do the trick. It will be contested, but that will take years and the damage will be done, especially by the leftist, statist a$$holes that populate the benches in our courts these days.

It's a good day today, will be a better one when the 2A is officially incorporated, but watch out for the so-called "October surprise" - they will come at us, probably under a "crisis" of some manufacture.

furtium said...

After reading the oral arguments from today, I would recommend these well placed right hooks coming from Justice Scalia to counsel for City of Chicago, Mr. Feldman:

Page 41 beginning line 43. Scalia's logic is inescapable and he ends his rebuttal of counsel's strained argument (defeated very recently in the Heller decision) by remarking, "You are switching horses now."

Page 49 beginning line 19: "What's the purpose of a State constitutional guarantee which has at the end of it "subject of such regulation as the legislature may proscribe, if that regulation includes banning it (handguns) entirely? That would make a nullity of the constitutional requirement." Hmmm. I don't think you need to go to law school to see the problem with that.

And lastly, my personal favorite exchange on Page 57 beginning line 12 by Mr. Feldman: "And I don't see any reason to think that there will be a jurisdiction that would try to sufficiently ban firearms that people wouldn't have a reasonable means of self-defense." Justice Scalia responds: "The District of Columbia did."

nj_larry said...

Having just read the pdf transcript, Jim Shepard was right about Feldman. If I were the guy from Chicago that is gonna be writing the check to Mr. Feldman, I would hold back a few bucks. I think the guy started to prepare for the case last nite.

Anonymous said...

Chicago went out of its way to have a poor lawyer do a bad job.

Why?

Even a good lawyer doing a good job would lose this case. So better to have an idiot make your argument, so you have someone to blame when you lose.

This way, Chicago can hem and haw over the final decision, and turn right around and make some tiny little changes to the law, and then repeat the process - not arguing against incorporation, but arguing aginst the standard of review. That's when the good lawyers with the good arguments come out.

KMitch200 said...

The sock puppet BhusseinO can't have an opinion until one of his handlers gives him one.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of Fox News, Bill O'Reilly was very supportive of our "2A" Rights and took on a phony "Constitutional lawywer" who kept regurgitating the tired old "militia" argument that was nullified by the SCOTUS and the 9th District Courts. Bill "showed him the door".
Bravo Bill!
Life Member

Anonymous said...

Scott,
I repsect your viewpoint, but sometimes "doing nothing" is in fact a strategy. Look at this administration's alternatives.
First, their clear "anti" history is in conflict with writing any supportive documents.
Second, writing an opinion that denounces 2A Rights would have an effect even more severe than what they're experiencing after trying to ram health-care "reform" down our throats.
Third, if they do nothing now, they can still implement their plans in the future without any contradictions from themselves.
I think that we'll see the "UN Treaty Strategy" deployed in our future.
Life Member.

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