So what did these geniuses want the Supreme Court to do?

Peter Smith's blog post in the Huff 'n' Puff Post "Second Thoughts and Second Guessing: Second Amendment and the Supreme Court 2008," is a few weeks old, but there's something about it that I would like to point out. In it, Smith seems to take the position that the Supreme Court was somehow wrong for taking up the District of Columbia v. Heller case.

And isn't it convenient that somehow the court has decided to take up the issue in an election year? No reason to suspect collusion with the NRA there. Nope. None whatsoever. Not a bit.

Hey, genius--you do realize that it's the citizen disarmament advocates who rule D.C. who appealed to the Supreme Court, do you not? Granted, the pro-rights side also wants a Supreme Court ruling, but would have had no way of getting the case to SCOTUS without D.C.'s appeal. As to the especially ludicrous implication that this is some kind of shadowy conspiracy cooked up by the NRA and the Supreme Court, I suppose it would be too much to ask that Smith take note of the fact that the NRA worked actively to keep this case away from the Supreme Court. Interestingly, by the way, the Brady Bunch apparently tried to talk D.C. into retreating on its draconian gun laws, rather than appealing to the Supreme Court (not much faith in the strength of your side's case, Brady Bunch?).

In fairness to Smith, he is not the only one who seems to think the Supreme Court is butting into an issue in which it doesn't belong--the International Herald Tribune (on the same day of Smith's blog post) opened an op-ed piece with the claim that SCOTUS had "inserted itself" into the debate:

By agreeing this week to rule on whether provisions of Washington D.C.'s stringent gun control law violate the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court has inserted itself into a controversy with large ramifications for public safety.

I am, by the way, intentionally ignoring the IHT's not-so-subtle attempt to re-frame this as a debate about "public safety," rather than Constitutional rights.

What is perhaps most amusing about this apparent anguish over the Supreme Court's involvement is that had the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, the pro-rights side would already have won. Granted, a gun rights victory in the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals would have lacked much of the national importance of a favorable outcome in the Supreme Court, but it would still have been a significant victory for gun rights, and a fairly major defeat for citizen disarmament (the D.C. circuit is, apparently, considered an especially important and influential one). As things stand today, citizen disarmament advocates can still claim that "no gun control law has ever been struck down in federal court on Second Amendment grounds" (as the D.C. ban is still in effect pending the Supreme Court appeal).

The Supreme Court, therefore, has (for the moment, anyway) come to the rescue of D.C.'s draconian gun laws. I fervently hope the reprieve is a temporary one (and am cautiously optimistic that it is), but on the local level, that reprieve (courtesy of SCOTUS) is the only life support that D.C.-style "gun control" has.

It seems to me that the objections to the Supreme Court taking this case are based not on the idea that somehow it's not an appropriate case for SCOTUS, but on the disarmers' fears that they're going to lose. What does that say about the strength of their case?