A fellow Illinois Carry member recently offered an analysis of the Supreme Court brief submitted Friday by the District of Columbia in the D.C. v. Heller case. This analysis was not only superbly penetrating and thorough, it was also written in terms simple enough for me to understand--no small feat. It occurred to me that this analysis deserved exposure on a wider stage. Although Armed and Safe is hardly a "wide stage," the level of traffic I get now would have astonished me when I started less than a year and a half ago, and I sometimes get some generous help from some of my betters in the gun blogging community.

I was not the only Illinois gun rights blogger to whom the thought of publishing "Carl in Chicago's" excellent work occurred, though, and in fact I was not even the first. DW beat me to it (as if he's the one who needed to bring in additional intellectual muscle--talk about the rich getting richer), so I'll content myself with a link, and an excerpt.

Statement of the Case

In the Statement, DC commences by stating that the Nation's capital has regulated guns for two centuries -- initially with laws forbidding the firing of guns in residential areas, and culminating with today's total prohibition on handguns and functional long arms. While this history is true, what the statement effectively if not ironically does is outline the very real 'Slippery Slope' argument. This phenomenon is addressed in a Hamline Law Review paper by Olson and Kopel (1999), which provides an analysis of the situation in England. To visualize the 'slippery slope', imagine a graph with time on the X-axis and gun rights on the Y-axis; from the origin (of the graph), time runs from past to present, and gun rights run from absolute infringement to absolutely no infringement. Notwithstanding the criminals to whom gun laws don't necessarily matter, we are talking about gun rights that are infringed by institutionalized law. If you examine the history of gun control in the United States, you will witness increasingly more restrictive laws over time. Thus, over time, the line has moved down this slope with the passage of gun regulations (infringements). Based on history, it is apparent that movement of the line is not equally bi-directional; it appears very easy for the line to move downward over time and likewise, very difficult for it to move up. Hence, the 'slippery slope.' The only logical end-point of this history, and of that line, is an eventual absolute ('lawful') infringement of the right to keep and bear arms.

Please follow the link and read the entire analysis--you'll be glad you did.

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