What do you mean by wrong? Which ones of the Guantanamo Bay cases do you think he got wrong? Was his dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld wrong?
No Constitutional right is absolute. The government can infringe a fundamental rights as long the restriction stands up to strict scrutiny.
http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/06/21/gitmo-report/
(Warning! Lefty site, anti-cooty protocols recommended)
Whether an error or a bald-faced lie is a matter left to the Gentle Reader.
Could one of the law-type dopers explain what the Heller case is all about? I haven’t really followed it.
If you read the opinion you’ll find that it is well cited, including two articles from the Washington Post, the first dated Oct. 22, 2004 referring to released detainees rejoining the fight, and the second dated May 8, 2008 about a released detainee involved in a suicide attack in Iraq. Unless the Post has become a bastion of conservatism and I missed it, I am a bit skeptical of your cite.
EDIT: Here’s the second article in question, courtesy of the Huffington Post.
I linked to the Wiki writeup in the OP.
My random predictions:
- The USSC will finally make a decision regarding individual right to bear arms, which it has not done before in any clear fashion. The decision will affirm that right, with a to be determined “reasonable controls” bit tossed in to ensure that we will have years of appeals to determine the boundaries of reasonable (just like we constantly adjust what cruel & unusual is or free exercise or establishment or speech entails).
- The NRA will have to change its message to be one of suing in every single state that has strict control provisions (like here in CA).
- Single issue voters will stay home a bit - hurting the Republicans.
Like I notice links at this hour of the morning. 
(Thanks, for some reason I mentally glossed over the fact that a link was there)
That’s an interesting point, that choice of word. I’d never noticed before that they used the word “people”, there, as opposed to “persons”. Why would they have used the singular collective term, instead of the plural individual term, if it were intended as an individual right?
It’s amazing that we allow such things as “people” to have individual rights.
“People” is the plural individual term for “person”. “Persons” is the plural affectation term of “person”.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens from this decision. I always assumed that the 2nd Amendment was inserted because the framers of the Constitution were trying to avoid having a standing army, and that in light of their recent victory, they assumed a self-armed citizen militia was cheaper and more effective. These days, one assumes a trained, uniformed professional army is much stronger, but heck — given how long it’s taking to accomplish the mission in Iraq, maybe a citizen-armed militia isn’t a bad idea.
In any case, I thought that the notion of “no standing army” was integral to the purpose of the 2nd Amendment. Am I mistaken?
They may have known their votes, but writing the opinions is a different matter. I’m by no means an expert on the arcane workings of the Supreme Court, but my understanding is that there can be a fair bit if back-and-forth between the justices writing the different opinions (assuming it’s not unanimous). The majority says X, the dissent says, no that’s wrong because of Y, the majority addresses that, and so on. So it’s possible that the opinions have been 95% written for some time, but not quite done. In any event, given the decades since the last time the Court addressed the second amendment, a few extra weeks doesn’t seem like a big deal.
I can’t disprove that, but it doesn’t make sense to me. If they were unwilling to deal with the fallout of addressing gun rights, they presumably would have declined to hear the case. And the fallout won’t be reduced by getting out of town. It’s not like they come out and debate the public on the courthouse steps; the fallout will be in the media, law journals, political campaigns, etc., and that’ll be the same wherever they are when they read about it.
I don’t think this is going to be the slam dunk that gun rights supporters have hoped for. I think that SCOTUS will recognize an individual right to bear arms (NRA: Yeaaah!!!) but find that it is reasonable to make someone do pretty much anything to get a permit (high cost, long waiting periods, no concealed carry, etc.) so that the only law affected will be the outright bans like in D.C. and Chicago.
The “infringements” like in Maryland, NYC, and New Jersey that the NRA bitches about may be upheld as totally constitutional. I don’t see that as a victory for the NRA…
Not to mention, I think they will have to address some kind of definition of “arms,” and determine whether any line can be drawn anywhere. Does a citizen’s militia have the right to own nukes? If not, then we’ve drawn a line. Once we’ve established that we can draw lines, we’re right back to where we started. The Court is either going to have to draw those lines itself (which awould be blatantly activist), or leave it to federal, state or municipal legislatures.
This could actually be amusing. The gun nuts might get nothing more than a symbolic victory.
Still better than a howling defeat.
Given the recognition of the RKBA as a Constitutionally guaranteed individual right, permitting the imposition of such obtrusive levels of hoop-jumping would contradict a very large body of precedent pertaining to other Constitutionally guaranteed rights.
The most likely result is a bit of dispute as to just how high a level of scrutiny local regulations must meet to avoid infringing on the Second Amendment, similar to the scrutiny applied in determining whether regulations pertaining to publications infringe on the First Amendment (e.g. “You have to keep nudie magazines behind those opaque shelf covers” is OK; “You can’t sell nudie magazines” isn’t).
I think I could argue that the 1st Amendment has been controlled and restricted, but leaving that aside, an absolute, unecumbered right to own any kind of ballistic weapon at all is not going to happen, so impositions are going to have to happen, and those impositions will come from the exact same legislatures already doing it. It will be interesting to see how the Court address that issue.
This is stupid. There’s already a line there that doesn’t have anything at all to do with the second amendment: the difference between arms and ordinance. Arms are kosher, ordinance isn’t, so you can take your nuke straw man and stuff it back where…crows threaten corn.
My point is that anything comparable to “high cost, long waiting periods, no concealed carry” has been ruled out of bounds in connection with other recognized Constitutionally protected rights (e.g. anonymous publication, which is to the First Amendment as concealed carry is the Second Amendment by a virtually textbook case of analogy-drawing, is recognized as Constitutionally protected outside of a narrow range of exceptional circumstances).