Although I have to set aside the sound of his voice, I follow Mark Smith's "The Four Boxes Diner" YouTube channel, and he goes over this in great detail. Among other things, he explains
why SB2 will fail when it gets before SCOTUS.
Among other things, he points out that the WHY is as important as the WHAT and the HOW when examining founding era analogs for modern gun control laws. For instance, the left argues that in the founding era, there were laws limiting the amount of black powder one could lawfully possess in one's home (the WHAT). This is being pointed out as an analog for why ammunition access and magazine capacity can be controlled today. But that assertion ignores the HOW and the WHY of those laws. The founding era law didn’t forbid
ownership of black powder stores in excess of the legal limit for home storage; or even the
possession of large amounts of gunpowder, but it
did mandate that amounts in excess of that legal limit must be stored in a Powder House located outside of the town (the HOW). The
reason for this (the WHY) was because virtually every man-made structure in a town were made of wood, and if a fire got started in a home, and a lot of those homes had a lot of gunpowder in them, that fire could burn the whole town down.
Of course, their assertion about the WHY of the historical analog ignores the fact that a huge percentage of the population did not even live in towns, and they could have as much powder in their homes and barns as they could afford and have the space to accommodate. So, for the left to successfully argue that a modern law limiting ammunition possession and magazine capacity was analogous to the founding era law, they would have to meet that analog exactly. This means that they would:
- have to prove that the historical analog forbade the ownership of large amounts of gunpowder (it did not);
- have to prove that modern smokeless powder presents a fire danger equal to that of black powder (it doesn’t);
- have to prove that modern smokeless gunpowder is the same as magazines and cartridges; (it's not)
- and they would have to prove that the historical analog extends to how many rounds one can have in a magazine, or how many rounds they can store in homes that are largely no longer built out of founding era materials using founding era building plans……and then SOMEhow they would have to extend that principle to even rural residents where none of those standards would logically apply.
The biggest danger isn’t that any of these totalitarian laws would survive when having to face the current SCOTUS court makeup. That’s not it at all. Under the current court's makeup, these laws will most likely fail. The real danger is that, by passing a flood of unconstitutional laws, the dems are counting on it resulting in decades of constitutional litigation—each case of which will take years to each wend its way up to SCOTUS—and that by then the left will have been able to flip the left/right makeup of the court, and their unconstitutional laws will stand.
Prior to
Roe v. Wade in 1973, the left's preferred religious sacrament of making abortion a "right," and forcing those who objected on conscience to help pay for it all, was not the law of the land. With the
Roe decision, the left's preferred religious doctrine lasted for 49 years until it was overturned in 2022. That could change again down the road. Courts change. No matter how flawless the reasoning in
Bruen, courts change, and as Obama so loved to tell us, elections have consequences.
My point here is NOT to advocate for one party's presidential candidate or another. My point is that things can change, they can change for the worse, and it can happen seemingly all of a sudden…because most people are blind to the prodromal symptoms that are predictive of black swan events. Black swan events, when viewed in hindsight, have almost always been utterly predictable. (If you print too much money, inflation happens. Print
enough too much money, and your economy will crash. The crash was predictable, but nobody wanted to consider the possibility.) But black swans are not predictable on the foresight end because people are oblivious, and their natural state is head in the sand normalcy bias.
Bruen was a flawless decision, based on flawless reasoning. But it cannot be trusted, because humanity cannot be trusted. The center cannot hold. Sooner or later, court decisions in favor of liberty will have to be backed up by force of arms…not by our military, but by We The People, who have had their last button pushed, their last nerve trod on, and the pitchforks and torches will have to be brought out.
So the REAL lesson is, never trust your gov’t, even when some part of it seems to do something right. Gov’t WILL turn on you. It’s the ONLY thing in political life that you CAN absolutely count on. So it is incumbent on smart, right-thinking people, to be willing to hoist the Jolly Roger if necessary and tell gov’t where to step off.
