The court's decision about hearing the Parker/Heller case is supposed to be released today at 10:00am!  Any minute now!

If they decide to hear Heller, be prepared for the media barrage of anti-gun stupidity.  There will be so much gun coverage you will want to vomit.

If the court decides to examine the case, it would likely be heard sometime between February and April, with a ruling before the end of June.  That would put it just a few months before the November 2008 presidential election.


-b0b
(...oh please, oh please, oh please!)

From AR15.com...


Quote:

At 7:45am CNN reported that an "unconfirmed source" has told them that the USSC will hear the Heller case.  No other information was given.

This is good news!

-b0b
(...hopes it is true.)

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!



Quote:

Court takes no action on gun case Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 10:02 am | Lyle Denniston | Print This Post The Supreme Court on Tuesday announced no action on a new case testing the meaning of the Second Amendment. The next date for possible action on it is likely to be November.

Dang it!  The court is taking no action, so we'll be waiting until at least the end of the month to hear whether or not they're going to grant cert.  The date I'm hearing thus far is November 26th for the next "closed door conference" on the case.

-b0b
(...should have expected less from the "Kelo" court.)

SUCCESS!

The Supreme Court has granted cert on the Heller/Park case!


Quote:

Court agrees to rule on gun case Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 1:02 pm After a hiatus of 68 years, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to rule on the meaning of the Second Amendment — the hotly contested part of the Constitution that guarantees “a right to keep and bear arms.” Not since 1939 has the Court heard a case directly testing the Amendment’s scope — and there is a debate about whether it actually decided anything in that earlier ruling. In a sense, the Court may well be writing on a clean slate if it, in the end, decides the ultimate question: does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual right to have a gun for private use, or does it only guarantee a collective right to have guns in an organized military force such as a state National Guard unit? The city of Washington’s appeal (District of Columbia v. Heller, 07-290) is expected to be heard in March — slightly more than a year after the D.C. Circuit Court ruled that the right is a personal one, at least to have a gun for self-defense in one’s own home. The Justices chose to write out for themselves the question(s) they will undertake to answer. Both sides had urged the Court to hear the city’s case, but they had disagreed over how to frame the Second Amendment issue.

Here is the way the Court phrased the granted issue:

“Whether the following provisions — D.C. Code secs. 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02 — violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?”

The phrasing is fairly broad, which is exactly what I was hoping for.  This indicates the court is almost guaranteed to settle the "individual vs. collective interpretation" debate once and for all!

-b0b
(...is pinning his hopes on this one.)

Quote:

www.csmonitor.com/2007/1210/p25s10-usju.html The primary authority for the justices' decision was the English language – specifically, the common meaning of the word 'use.' The US Supreme Court has reversed the conviction of a Louisiana man who was charged with "using" a gun during a drug deal after an agent handed the man the gun in a swap for drugs during an undercover sting operation. In a unanimous decision announced Monday, the high court said the federal gun law is designed to prevent criminals from "using" their own guns during crimes. When federal agents introduce unloaded firearms into an undercover investigation, the suspect should not be held criminally liable for the presence of the gun at the scene of a crime, the court ruled. The Supreme Court's primary authority for its decision was the English language. Writing for the court, Justice David Souter says the government's defense of its reading of the law "would trump ordinary English." "The government may say that a person 'uses' a firearm simply by receiving it in a barter transaction, but no one else would," Justice Souter writes. "A boy who trades an apple to get a granola bar is sensibly said to use the apple, but one would never guess which way this commerce actually flowed from hearing that the boy used the granola." Law-enforcement officials have increasingly used the federal gun law as a means to boost potential prison sentences for drug dealers. The statute can add a mandatory five more years or more onto a drug-dealing conviction. The ruling, in Watson v. US, comes in the case of Michael Watson of Ascension, La. In November 2004, Mr. Watson told an acquaintance he wanted to buy a handgun for protection. The man, who is legally blind, said he needed the gun to safeguard his home from break-ins. As a convicted felon, Watson was barred from legally purchasing or possessing a firearm. Unknown to Watson, his acquaintance was working as an informant for law-enforcement officials. The officials told the acquaintance to suggest a drugs-for-gun barter deal between Watson and an undercover federal agent who would be posing as an illegal gun dealer. Watson agreed to swap 24 doses of the prescription drug OxyContin for a .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol. Shortly after Watson exchanged the pills for the gun, he was placed under arrest. Federal authorities charged him with drug dealing and possession of a gun by a felon. But prosecutors also charged Watson with "using" a gun during a drug-trafficking offense – a crime that carries a five-year minimum mandatory sentence. Prosecutors reasoned that since the unloaded pistol was "used" as payment for the drugs, the gun was used in a way that triggered additional criminal liability. Watson pleaded guilty to drug dealing and unlawful possession of the gun, but he appealed the charge that he "used" the gun in the drug deal. The unloaded gun provided by the undercover agent was only under Watson's control for a few moments before his arrest. At issue in the case was how to define the word "use" in a statute that outlaws the "use" of a gun during a drug crime. The justices rejected the government's contention that Watson's brief possession of the gun qualified as a prohibited "use" in a drug transaction. The government had argued that in 1993, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a south Florida drug dealer who used his machine gun as payment for a load of drugs. In that case, the issue before the court was whether the statute outlawed the use of a gun as payment in a barter deal or instead prohibited the use of a gun as a weapon in a crime. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a concurring opinion to the Watson decision. "It is better to receive than to give, the court holds today, at least when the subject is guns," she writes. She adds that despite agreeing with the outcome of the case, in her view the earlier 1993 case had been wrongly decided. "I would read the word 'use' in [the gun law] to mean use as a weapon, not use in a bartering transaction," Justice Ginsburg writes. She said she was prepared to overrule the 1993 decision "and thereby render our precedent both coherent and consistent with normal usage."

Although this doesn't directly have anything to do with the Parker/Heller case, it does bode well for a positive outcome for Heller next year.  It shows that SCOTUS can exercise common sense and understand basic english, something that is woefully lacking in the lower courts.

Since the Heller case hinges primarily on the phrasing of the second amendment, the court will have to consider a very similar argument to this case.

-b0b
(...is excited.)

Common Sense....government...Supreme Court???????

:o