“We Won’t Get Fooled Again!”

You just did.

In the SCOTUS ruling in US vs Rahimi, all 3 of Trump's justices upheld the insanely unconstitutional and totalitarian ‘Domestic Violence’ restraining order clause that allows the court to take your guns based on the accusation of a girlfriend or wife using a restraining order. This will now become the legal basis for Trump's red flag laws. But this wasn’t really about the 2A as much as it was about the entire Bill of Rights.

What no pundit I’ve read or heard mentions is this setting the legal precedent for a court to restrict, modify, or flat-out remove all of your rights, including any of your property, without due process and conviction by a jury of your peers. It establishes British-style totalitarianism, flipping the legal system on its butt, allowing the court a legal route in which it can accuse directly from the bench with the simple collaboration of a wife or girlfriend leaving you for another man. Or someone preparing to sue you. Maybe someone paid off by a crooked sheriff to act as a honey trap. Basically, you can be convicted and sentenced without any trial, any evidence, any jury, anything.  

The nation’s Pearl Clutchers depleted the ozone with their heavy sighs of relief. Typical of current articles, the focus is on future domestic violence victims. Other scribblers celebrated a longed-hoped-for anti-gun decision despite the “word salad” of Justice Roberts and a required “historically analogous law”. The rest plunged into the deep end of the Debate Pool, where “angels dancing on a pinhead” is still argued unabashedly, and hair-splitting remains the most popular distraction.

No one among the chattering classes seems ready to publicly declare the Rahimi decision is backdoor totalitarianism. Yet it does give the government the precedent for complete control over who can own what, live where, and have rights. It removes the Fifth Amendment, which eliminates all of the Constitutional protections concerning your rights and every last check and balance on tyranny and corruption built into our system by the Founding Dads. In its place, “… it’s just words on paper, what our framers would have called a parchment guarantee”- Antonin Scalia. As we see daily, our New Normal two-tier justice system is primarily levied against the poor and unconnected—the honest people. And one ex-president so far. 

Many significant legal changes happen through a series of seemingly minor decisions, making it hard to see the full picture until much later, often leading to those same unintended consequences. Justices may not always foresee (or may choose not to address) the full range of potential problems their decisions might have in various contexts. This provides plausible deniability. The complexity of legal reasoning and opacity of legal language provide another shield against accusations of political bias or overreach—except by biased media.

There will be big-time push-back to this conclusion. Some LLBs will be along shortly to pounce and point out that “This has never happened before!” in the Lofty Land of Juris Prudence. I would suggest a quick review of the ‘Lawfare’ currently being waged in courts aided by the prejudicial slant of the Evening News. With that drama fresh in the minds of ‘ordinary citizens’, it would be informative to hear how such a scenario could never take place (again) in the Land of the Free.

If you think we should vote for Trump solely because he will pick constitutionalist SCOTUS justices, think again; this is just the icing on the cake. Trump's justices have been baking for 7 years.

This case had little to do with Rahimi per se.  What the professional pundits miss is Rahimi was under a restraining order and still had a gun. For his ilk, restraining orders are as ‘restraining’ as if written on a Magic Slate with a wet noodle. Once again, those crafting the popular narrative have tricked people into thinking that gun control stops criminals when all it does is allow the government to control honest people in such a way they can steal from you and kill you at will. And they will use a crazy !#&@# like Rahimi to do it. Or they will use your own wife. 

Eventually, this case will be cited as the raison d'etre for taking away all of your rights and all of the protections in place for centuries. There already are hundreds of laws to be used against the mentally half-baked misusing firearms, but they haven’t, they aren’t, and they won’t. The 2A was just an excellent distraction. 

 BW

Thanks for reading this far. I’ll spare the “I’m not an attorney and….” etc. As noted, I’m sure brilliant legal minds will jump at the opportunity to point out the fallacies in my thinking. However, they could be overlooking the trouncing their credentialed legal brethren have given the Rule of Law with impunity (so far) in just the last 6 months.

More to come - of course!

Meanwhile…