It’s not surprising that a Trump judge would strike down a gun regulation. Republican judges do that all the time. Between Heller and Bruen, there’s now a collection of boilerplate, ahistorical gibberish that judges can cite so they can hem and haw about the “grave seriousness” of the threat but then strike down the law as overbroad anyway, no matter how narrowly tailored it might be. You might think it should be illegal to have that, but the original public meaning says the Founding Fathers EXPECTED your neighbor to own a rocket-propelled grenade launcher! It’s dumb, but it’s all part of the game.
Judge Stephen McGlynn does not understand that game:
Why are there small lifeboats on gigantic steel ocean liners? Why do we spend thousands equipping our vehicles with airbags? Why do we wear seatbelts and place our infants in safety seats? Why do we build storm shelters under our homes? Why do we install ground-fault interrupter outlets by sinks and bathtubs? Why do we get painful inoculations? Why do we voluntarily undergo sickening chemotherapy?
And why do we protect ourselves with firearms?
This is how he began a 168-page opinion. He sat down and thought, “I’m going to come up with some brilliant analogies!” and then decided to OPEN the opinion with this. Which, in some ways, you’ve got to appreciate because 168 pages is a lot and it’s nice that he broadcast that this wouldn’t amount to a work of serious legal thought right off the top.
Why are there small lifeboats in gigantic steel ocean liners? Because sometimes they sink. But — and I can’t stress this part enough — when the cruise ship isn’t sinking, no one uses lifeboats to assassinate kindergartners. Child safety seats and airbags have tragically cost children’s lives in the past and we’ve reworked how we use them because of it. But those were still instances of the safety device not working properly and not people using airbags as a weapon of destruction.
“And why do we protect ourselves with firearms?” First of all, the meaning of “protect ourselves” is stretched to the breaking point here. The law at issue, The Protect Illinois Communities Act, banned new sales of AR-15s and required existing owners to register their rifle with the state police. Cue the eerie music and imagine walking home from your office one night, hearing a strange noise behind you, and reaching into your computer bag to pull out your self-defense… military-grade longarm rifle? There’s a reasonable policy argument that the fixation on AR-15s is misplaced because handguns do far more death and destruction on a day-by-day scale, but at least with a handgun there’s a non-ludicrous self-defense hypothetical.
— Joe Patrice in Trump Judge Rules Guns Are Sort of Like Airbags. Nice, Murderous Airbags.
Obviously, this ‘journalist’ should not be writing about a legal opinion he read out of context and cherry picked and doesn’t understand to begin with. Heck, if we went back and read court opinion on the 1st amendment in the out of context and cherry picked manner as reflected in this ‘journalists’ ignorant rant – he would be in prison now.
Joe Patrice is an utter hack who became a “legal journalist” because apparently he couldn’t hack it as a practicing lawyer.
Even when he is confronted with irrefutable evidence that contradicts his arguments, he is incapable of acknowledging that he is wrong.
Don’t believe me? See this: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/01/31/the-emory-law-journal-scandal-coda/