NickEllis
Member
For those who haven't been following, scotusblog has some pretty interesting reading on the topic and a fairly positive (for us) take on the oral arguments.
http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/01/argument-recap-when-compromise-is-the-problem/#more-204323
http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/01/argument-recap-when-compromise-is-the-problem/#more-204323
At times, the hearing actually bordered on the amusing — as, for example, when Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., conjured up the image of a “Mr. Straw” running a very busy gun-buying operation that showed how easy it was to get around the law. So, Alito said, Congress did something “utterly meaningless.”
Richard D. Dietz, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, lawyer for an individual convicted of being a straw purchaser, did his best to try to undermine the very notion of straw purchasing, but appeared to have his best moments when confirming for the Justices the variety of situations in which guns might pass from hand to hand entirely outside the regulatory structure set up by Congress. “The law,” he said candidly, “may have holes in it.” He told Justice Elena Kagan, for example, that compromises in passing the law at issue had shown clearly that Congress did not want to intrude into the wide range of private sales of guns “between citizens.” The law was aimed at the first sale, Dietz argued, but not beyond it, and especially not when a gun is transferred from someone legally entitled to have it to someone else also eligible to be a gun owner.
The seeming lack of clarity in the law — and the concessions the government had had to make about what it did not outlaw — were continuing problems during the argument of the government’s lawyer, Assistant to the Solicitor General Joseph R. Palmore. It also turned out to be a problem for Palmore that the government’s gun-regulating agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, had previously interpreted the law in much the same way as Dietz suggested it should be read now. Although Palmore said the interpretation had changed twenty years ago, that did not keep the Justices from bringing up the prior position several times.
His main argument was that, in trying to set up a system to monitor the movement of guns, to keep them from the wrong hands and to allow them to be traced after use in a crime, was that Congress had focused tightly on what gun dealers can do to identify the real buyers in the first instance . . . Perhaps the low moment for Palmore was when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., noted that the language in the law had been “fought over, tooth and nail” by the opposing sides in the gun control debate, and that the compromise which resulted simply had nothing to do with the idea of a “straw purchaser.” That, of course, was one of attorney Dietz’s main talking points.