Constitutional Law

Brady Campaign hoists the white flag on 2A?

From ABC News comes one of the most remarkable political concessions I've heard in my life, and a statement I'd never expected to see in three decades of Second Amendment work:

GUN CONTROL GROUP BRACES FOR COURT LOSS

The nation's leading gun control group filed a "friend of the court" brief back in January defending the gun ban in Washington, DC. But with the Supreme Court posed to hand down a potentially landmark decision in the case, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Vioence fully expects to lose.

We've lost the battle on what the Second Amendment means," campaign president Paul Helmke told ABC News. "Seventy-five percent of the public thinks it's an individual right. Why are we arguing a theory anymore? We are concerned about what we can do practically."

"We're expecting D.C. to lose the case," Helmke said. "But this could be good from the standpoint of the political-legislative side." If the Supreme Court strikes down the D.C. gun ban, the Brady Campaign is hoping that it will reorient gun control groups around more limited measures that will be harder to cast as infringements of the Second Amendment. "The NRA [National Rifle Association] won't have this fear factor," Helmke said.

Brady Campaign goes on to cite what they could push for, and could hope to pass constitutional muster: universal (i.e., private sale) background checks, AW bans, "curbing large volume sales," i.e., one gun a month.

Leaving aside whether those would pass muster ... how does the Brady Campaign hope to survive on them? I'd wager that a LOT of its contributors give only because they believe those are stepping stones to things more significant, a "good start" rather than an end. If they faced a reality in which everything would stop with background checks, an AW ban, and one gun a month -- that they'd never get beyond that -- they might well bail out.

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on June 12, 2008 (boomark / email).