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ScotusBlog on amicus briefs
Here. I thought it nice to cite the Academics for the Second Amendment amicus. Altho the complaints about the amicus briefs being advocacy rather than dispassionate history don't ring very true when DC's historians' amicus was among the more hopelessly biased pieces of advocacy/history that I have ever seen. If a person wants to look at historians' craft as somehow impartial and scientific, they only have to look at Michael Bellesiles and, more importantly, all the big names in historians' work who enthusiastically praised it. Obviously they didn't verify anything in it before leaping aboard, or they wouldn't have been caught when it was flattened as largely fraudulent.
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The Chicago media has been relatively silent on this case. This is at first glance surprising, given the obvious implications the constitutionality of DCs ban has on the constitutionality of Chicago's ban.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-guns_bdmar16,1,5235140.story
But speaking of "advocacy", note the spin taken on the Tribune's article....especially their contention that the collective view is "conventional" and that the individual rights view is modern political advocacy created and propagaged primarily via the NRA.
Here is my comment on the article:
Carl in Chicago (Comment #46, 16 March 2008)
The Tribune admits this case exists! This is going to be a hot commentary.
What leaps at me from this Trib coverage are the statements regarding (1) that the collective view is conventional,(2) that the NRA has "cast" the amendment in a new, individualist context, and that (3) the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) support the collective view.
Talk about misleading your audience! First, and obviously to anyone that has a high school education, the individual rights view is conventional...after all, it is the "standard model" of the 2A. The Trib has it backwards, because the modern collective view has been created and promoted by the gun control advocacy lobby.
Further, it is not the NRA that has advanced and promoted modern scholarship on the 2A. Indeed, much of this scholarship was developed after some Federal courts misread the cursory and somewhat ambiguous opinion of Miller (1939). The NRA has supported 2A cases before, but they were denied cert at the SCOTUS. With Heller, in fact, not only was NRA not responsible for this case, they at one time actively tried to keep it from being heard! So for the Trib to paint this case, and 2A scholarship, as being NRA's baby (and given that the NRA has unfairly become the whipping boy of a generally misguided public) is disingenuous. This case, in fact, has nothing to do with the NRA outside that they wrote an amicus brief on behalf of Respondent (Heller).
Finally, the Trib brings up the IACP. This is a special-interest fringe-group while the Fraternal Order of Police is nothing of the sort. They are special interest precisely because they are heavily paid by Chicago's Joyce Foundation. In 2006-2007 alone, Joyce has given the IACP $950,000.00. They then produced an advisory policy, edited by a Joyce employee herself, which predictably supported a strict gun control agenda which is remarkably in line with other gun ban groups, such as the Brady Campaign, and other gun ban groups also supported by Joyce, such as the Violence Policy Center, the Legal Community Against Violence, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and Chicago's very own Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence. Each and every one of these groups has one crystal-clear agenda - the criminalization of private firearms ownership in the United States.
But as mentioned above, Joyce didn't pay only the IACP. During 2003-2007, they have given more than $12 MILLION dollars toward "gun violence" which includes gun ban organizations, public health institutions who support gun control, and toward supporting "scholarly" research designed to re-write the 2A in collective terms (with the goal that the constitution will no longer be a barrier to their agenda to ban guns). See here for Joyce's anti-gun rights funding list ( http://www.joycefdn.org/GrantList/AllGrants.a... )
Saul Cornell,(Director of Ohio State's "Second Amenment Research Center") and his colleagues are leading this re-write of the 2A. Not surprisingly, much of the scholarship cited in DCs briefs and the briefs of their amici, have been produced by Cornell and associates, and published in Law Reviews that have been ultimately bankrolled by the Joyce Foundation.
So the Tribune undeniably has it backwards, and is playing right into this strategy of misinforming the public. It is the Joyce Foundation, via their bankrolled organizations and individuals, who have attempted to re-write the conventional view of the second, which is that it protects the right of individual paople to keep and bear arms.
All of this funding and intellectual dishonesty are known and understood by the Supreme Court Justices. Soon, they will be known and understood by the American public.
The most vocal historian are usually just your average hysterian.