Metal god said:
That describes the tension, but doesn't resolve it.
Arguably, Virginia wasn't "ready for" racially mixed marriage before Loving, but the Court resolved it.
I think most of the country is currently ready for no way to track arms and no background checks since that's the current law for whole classes of transactions in some states. A lot of people weren't "ready for" widely available concealed carry because they feared the ensuing wave of gun murder, but it just never happened, and those people adjusted. I'm not sure that people would really be spooked by fully automatic arms and suppressors. I don't see fully automatic arms as generally attractive to people who buy their own ammunition.
The problem with leaving the issue to the states is that whereas abortion is a public policy question on which many people have strong opinions, your 2d Am. rights are an explicit part of the basic law. We've decided that states don't get to make those calls.
I'm less concerned about what the country is ready for and what courts can be counted on to enforce. I think asking people who are largely not members of the gun culture to completely disconnect the political part of their brains and issue a very broad rule based on an ample extension of some existing law isn't realistic. There's a bias in favor of preserving what already is established.
It could be realistic to press challenges at the margins that over time effectively dismantle a lot of the NFA, but the process would unfold in parts, much like the dismantling of the ACA.
My observation is that Aguila Blanca's 100% correct point about the recent quality of the regulation we feel as ordinary consumers isn't that it is wrong, but that it's possible to overwhelm a Court's capacity to reason dispassionately if you virtually beg for defeat by asking too much at one time.
Last edited: