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Don't "dissemble" on guns

Don't "dissemble" on guns: Today's Second Amendment ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290, was eagerly awaited and certainly will be closely scrutinized over the days, weeks, months, and years to come.

And the close scrutiny has already begun, as a reader emails to note a typo found on the very first page of Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion:

Not for attribution, but because you get results...

In the first paragraph of his opinion (after the intro), Justice Scalia quotes one of the relevant DC statutes as saying that long guns must be kept "unloaded and dissembled...." The correct word is "disassembled" (I checked the statute); "dissemble" means to mislead or put on a false appearance.

Thanks to this reader for drawing this to my attention. If there's a lesson here, it's that just because text appears in an opinion or brief between quotation marks doesn't mean that the text shouldn't be double-checked for accuracy. And kudos to the author of the opinion's syllabus for preserving the same typo there, in the very first sentence.

By contrast, on page 12 of his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen G. Breyer correctly quotes the "unloaded and disassembled" language actually found in the statute. Finally, and in his defense, Justice Scalia correctly quotes that language from the D.C. statute on page 58 of the majority opinion.

Update: The Court has corrected the typo on page 1 of Justice Scalia's majority opinion, although the typo remains for the time being in the syllabus. The original version of Justice Scalia's majority opinion, containing the typo, can be accessed here.

Full post as published by How Appealing on June 26, 2008 (boomark / email).