Day may come when we can't afford to wait for the SCOTUS to bail us out. The McDonald decision was just spat on by a Federal judge(Skretny) in NY, he effectively banned a whole class of weapons purely on looks. CT is waiting for a similar ruling by the end of next week on their ban, from another Federal judge.
The NY case will go to the Supremes, and when we win, then what? The same thing will happen over and over again, maybe in NY, maybe somewhere else.
It's hard to rely on SCOTUS decisions with a gov't and judiciary out of control.
I must give credit to a poster on another forum, who posted this:
"How does the Supreme Court enforce its rulings? They have no law enforcers of their own, no armies, they do not even have the soap box by which to directly appeal to popular opinion, since to do so would should bias and prejudice in their court decisions and proceedings.
Heller and McDonald were clear, concise cases that upheld the 2nd Amendment, regardless of any criticisms anyone may have about any particulars of those decisions. And yet, we have courts ignoring those clear decisions, and offering nonsense rulings like the one Skretny offered."
That's 100% true, but short of armed insurrection it's not like we have a lot of other options, esp. in states with such high concentrations of the common sense challenged.
SCOTUS has never had any actual enforcement power. John Marshall established review in Marbury v Madison but the power has always been one of convention, and we have a President right now who more than any other in history cares nothing for the conventions of our national government, and is going to pack the federal courts as much as possible.
The only real hope we have is that the Senate turns in November which stops the bleeding and then win the white house and hold the senate in 2016 and start reversing the damage. Other than the insurrection thing, which I wont' entirely rule out in this nation's future given the massive schism developing between what I'd call "Constitutional America" and "European Wannabe America".
But there have been some positive rulings as well. The 7th District ruled in line with MacDonald and Heller in overturning the Chicago ban, and other courts have made decisions in line with those rulings. The courts have never fully fallen in lock step, those judges all have their opinions and even SCOTUS has some seriously mental midgets when it comes to the 2nd Amendment, they're just in the minority right now.
I hope that gun owners everywhere unite, which goes to the thread elsewhere on why so many don't join the NRA and be active in their support and votiing on these issues. Most of that IMO is that it's hard to get the message out to the casual gun owner as to what these laws mean and why it's important to take up the fight on legislation that has been carefully crafted to sound innocuous but is actually very serious.
Microstamping is a GREAT example of it. It's technical, a lot of voters immediately close off when they find out they may have to STUDY something to form an opinion, and it SOUNDS like it's to help law enforcement and won't impair gun ownership. It's classic politics, passing a law that gets to the goal through a backdoor b/c they can't win support by declaring what they really want to do. It's hard to explain to people and even harder to get them to take time to email or call or join the NRA or vote out the people who supported it.
In Cali I don't know what else is left but the courts, other than my proposal to split the San Francisco Bay area off into a separate country, which I believe would solve a lot of problems nationwide by turning Cali into a red state and isolating the insanity away from us.
I won't be surprised if an initial victory is won somewhere in this, to be overturned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, to then have to go to SCOTUS, if they decide to touch it. I would argue it on the basis of both 2nd Amendment and unjustifiably interfering with interstate commerce.
