Friday, July 11, 2014

Guy named Michael Waldman wrote a book on the 2nd, but

can't be bothered to get his information correct.  Or deliberately lied.  Who knows?
Yet in Waldman’s merely two sentences explaining what was at issue in the case that has defined the modern meaning of the Second Amendment, 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller (I wrote the biography of that case, Gun Control on Trial), he seems strangely ignorant—or wants his readers to stay strangely ignorant—about exactly what law the case challenged.

He writes that the D.C. statutes overturned by plaintiff Dick Heller (and, originally, five other co-plaintiffs booted off the case on narrow procedural grounds) “barred individuals from keeping a loaded handgun at home without a trigger lock.” In a later sentence he again refers merely to “the ban on loaded handguns.”

This is quite off-target. The laws challenged in Heller did not merely ban the possession of a loaded handgun without a trigger lock. They banned the registration of any handgun that you hadn’t already registered before the restrictive statutes went into effect in 1976. They also banned owning unregistered handguns. That means D.C. law banned handguns entirely for anyone who hadn’t been grandfathered in decades before.
If he can't get this correct, why trust anything else in the book?

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