THE WINGNUT BENCH LEGISLATORS ARE COMING FOR YOUR GUN LAWS

If this Weekly Standard post is correct, and you live in a state or locality that's passed restrictions on guns, you can start the process of saying goodbye to a lot of those laws now, because right-wing judges are going to take them away from you:

D.C. Gun Ruling Could Open Door To Universal Carry Laws

In a surprising decision, a federal judge overturned Washington, D.C.'s open and concealed carry ban this past weekend.

(I don't know what's "surprising" about this. Judge Frederick Scullin became a U.S. attorney under Reagan and was recommended by the vile Senator Alfonse D'Amato. He's an ex-prosecutor and a pious daily churchgoer. In many ways, for this role, he's out of Central Casting.)

While the ruling has received some fanfare, few reports have paid attention to the section in the order that invalidated D.C.'s firearms residency requirements....

Legal experts say this is the first time a judge has ruled on—or even been presented with in this manner—the hot-button firearms issues of residency and reciprocity. The judge determined that non-residents cannot be barred from carrying handguns in D.C. simply because they do not live there. This establishes an uncharted precedent that has the potential to affect gun laws across the country....

What the gunners are hoping for is that this case leads to the achievement of one of their Holy Grails: national reciprocity.

National reciprocity would allow all states to recognize each other's carry permits (or carry laws, for the constitutional carry states that don't require permits).

And by "allow," we mean "force."

Currently, states decide whether they will have formal reciprocity with another state, or they have an informal recognition, or one state accepts permits from another state, even if the second state doesn't accept the first state's permits. One state denying reciprocity with another state --thus preventing a non-resident from carrying a handgun in a state -- goes against the spirit of Scullin's orders for D.C.

If this happens, we're all going to be D.C. with regard to concealed and open carry. If you're from a state that lets anyone with a pulse pack (and brandish) heat, we'll have to let you do that up here in New York or New England, and no backtalk.

Gun laws are being treated by the courts as quaint relics of a bygone era in which we were deluded about the all-but-limitless constitutional right to pack:

Each of the recent cases are seen as building blocks by gun rights advocates. The Supreme Court affirmed the right to keep a gun in the home for self-defense in the District of Columbia in Heller.

Then in the 2010 McDonald ruling, the Court established that the Second Amendment extends to all states via the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment....

Two years after McDonald, a panel of three Seventh Circuit judges ruled Illinois' concealed carry weapons ban unconstitutional in Moore....

This past February, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit struck down San Diego County's very restrictive "may issue" concealed carry permit process in Peruta.... The Ninth Circuit also made a lower court revisit a ruling in Hawaii over its similar "may issue" laws....

The Supreme Court is likely to take up one of these cases sooner or later -- Standard blogger Whitney Blake thinks it'll be that San Diego case, Paul Barrett of Bloomberg Businessweek thinks it might be this D.C. case. Meanwhile, right-wing legislators in robes are chipping away at gun laws, and that doesn't seem likely to stop.