A Maryland win for gun rights, and -- for that matter -- all the others

Maryland cops were looking for an excuse  to refuse a gun permit to Raymond Woollard.  He got one in 2002 after a home invasion. Seven years later the masters denied him a renewal . They decreed that he couldn't prove he still had a need to exercise a Constitutional right. 

Now, Federal District Judge Benson Everett Legg has a birthday coming up, on June 8, and we should send him a nice card.  He told the regulators to stand near  a rope, unzip, and aim high. 

Or, in his more temperate  language:  “A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights,” Legg wrote. “The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

Needless to say, the Bradyites didn't bother to unzip before wetting, but in due course they whipped out their lawyer who said, " “The Supreme Court has recognized the right to have guns in homes, but there is no right in public places,”

Uhh,  Lawyer Lowy, you don't get to make binding judgements like that. Courts do.  And Judge Legg did.

Our friend Alan Jura again led the attack, and we suppose he'll still be with us when the case hits the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.


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A cursory Bing of the 4th doesn't give much fodder for speculating about how it views self-defense rights lately, but there's a small clue in US v. William Chester, Jr., (4th Cir. 2010).  (That's a long and complicated opinion, but, effectively, it questions government power to deny Second Amendment rights on the sole basis of a misdemeanor domestic violence  conviction.) 

Quote of the Day

From my government via the National Weather Service which ruminates about the minutia of advection and troughs and progging 850hb molecule collisions and all that before getting to the money quote:

...EITHER WAY NO COLD AIR IN SIGHT. 


Free market Nostradami agree, warm for at least the next two weeks.


Ahhhhhh.

Awwwww

The man who gave us the refined wookie, the self  we wish to be, had died. RIP Ralph McQuarrie.

Speaking of civil discourse...

Ron Paul finishes second in Washington and the local press reports;

 Attending his first caucus at the Labor Temple in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, Dillon Smith, 31, vowed to write in Paul's name no matter who is on the ballot in November...


Good for you, Dillon. And it isn't a "wasted" vote. It is a statement of enlightened disgust, of which we have too few.


"I would rather die than vote for any of the other candidates," said Smith,...


That may be carrying things further than necessary. You could just move to another country, like maybe Malawi, where all of our over-the-hill celebrity sex sirens lived and adopted babies during the eight years of the Bush Administration.


... because the country needs someone who will "basically slit the throat of the federal government."


Attention all aromatherapy clinics in the Los Angeles-Frisco corridor!   Surely you understand that Dillon is speaking metaphorically and has not demanded ventilating any actual human jugulars.

Five neighbors who showed up from his precinct also supported Paul and voted 6-0 to elect Smith as a delegate to an upcoming legislative-district convention.


On the other hand, you never know. If I were a thug bent on violence, I think I'd avoid taking my jugular to Seattle's Belltown neighborhood.