[wildhawker]

Originally Posted by kcbrown

Ahem. Santa Clara. Scocca v Smith. Los Angeles. Lu v Baca. I'm sure both Smith and Baca are quaking in their boots.

A subset and a predictable one. You're forgetting that there are 58 sheriffs and 58 counties counsel with 58 boards of supervisors.

You did hint that there was some interesting action that was likely to happen on the former, and I await that eagerly. However, that does nothing to diminish my skepticism because I expect that case will have to go to the Supreme Court before we get any relief there.

Scocca will not see past CA9.

And I expect the same will prove true of Lu v Baca.

And your lack of subject matter knowledge is failing you here.

May I remind you that even the victory we won in Sacramento is, as of a number of months ago, a rather hollow one due to the sheer amount of time it takes for anyone to get an LTC from them?

While I'm as frustrated as anyone over the backlog, that is a good problem to have and an easier one to fix than one rooted in outright hostility.

And you can't claim that it's not their own doing -- you know it is.

Whose doing - the County? Yes. The Sheriff's Office? Perhaps in part, but perhaps not entirely.

I will, however, be the first one to admit that it is an improvement over what was there previously. It will take further work to straighten that out (and Sacramento could easily wind up being a perfect target for part of our strategy. ).

Maybe it will. It does present nicely, but so do a few others. Maybe they all will be.

The victory we seek will take a very long time.

Our fight will never be over, but the core issues will be decided within the next ~10 years.

But time is not on our side anymore, and that is why I am as deeply skeptical (while remaining hopeful at the same time) as I am.

I'm not happy about the election, either, but we do have a pretty full pipeline of cases that will hit the Heller 5 unless something happens to one of them.

My skepticism is limited primarily to the anti-gun strongholds. My statements were not meant to refer to more "pliable" counties such as Sacramento, though even those are still resisting.

Thank you for finally acknowledging that most CA counties will not require the U.S. Supreme Court to order them before taking some action.

There is a very large chance that we will lose the Supreme Court before we can position our pieces for a checkmate. This is chess, not checkers, but with one crucial difference: we're on a clock, and the timing of our moves is not under our full control.

There is no checkmate, ever. It's a game that never really ends, but the moves get smaller.

What do you think will happen if Scocca v Smith winds up hitting the Supreme Court after, and not before, we lose the Heller majority?

See my previous comment on Scocca.

What do you think will happen, in the event of a loss of the Heller majority, with the followup lawsuits that we will inevitably have to file in order to combat the "creative" ways counties such as Santa Clara will come up with to deny us the right to carry in public?

Who said Santa Clara was creative? They most definitely are not. In fact, it's pretty shockingly milquetoast on their side.

The loss of the Supreme Court will renew the vigor with which such counties will resist, because they will know that if we have to take them to court, we will lose at the top.

Please name all of the counties. I want you to make actual predictions rather than just stand on the streetcorner screaming about the end of the world and the urgency of our salvation. Name the day and the hour or please admit your posts are really about being pessimistic for the sake of being pessimistic.

So if we lose the Heller majority before the right to carry in public is fully secured -- before counties such as Los Angeles and Santa Clara are out of ammunition -- then we lose, period.

:sigh:

We are in grave danger. This is why we must fight that much harder and that much faster.

I don't disagree with fighting smarter, harder, faster ever.

The biggest problem by far is that we could win everything outside of California, but that is meaningless for Californians unless we win everything in California as well. That's because laws, regulations, and enforcement all remain in place until either explicitly and successfully challenged in court or voluntarily withdrawn, and the latter will not happen in the anti-gun strongholds. Even that wouldn't be a problem were it not for the near certainty that the Supreme Court will continue to be, in effect, the court of first resort for cases brought in California even in the face of strong Supreme Court jurisprudence. The Supreme Court will continue to "have to say so more plainly", and it will not put the hammer down to stop that.

Well, if that's true then you may as well stop donating and volunteering. Because if you are right, your donations and volunteerism is really an irrational exercise.

-Brandon