This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm sure @gattsuru will have a more full analysis, but the Second Amendment case US v Hemani just dropped. The Supreme Court found that a man who unlawfully used a controlled substance cannot, by doing so, become automatically prohibited from possessing firearms. The big shock in this case is that it was 9-0.
Unfortunately, as is to be expected, the decision is so narrow as to likely not affect any other case.
It's one of those rough cases where there's not really a lot to talk about.
Will give a mea culpa that, when the case first got cert, I expected it to be either a loss or even-more-limited than this.
In theory, this is a big deal, since there's tens of millions of recreational pot users, and not a zero overlap with gun owners. In practice, this law was almost never brought as a random conviction: even in Hemani's case the feds were probably using it as a workaround for the multitude of other allegations that would have been harder to prove. Rough fermi estimate says low hundreds of charges on an annual basis, two or three thousands of extant prisoners, and for a lot of them there's indica of addiction, or individualized danger, of present intoxication, or of serious addiction. And pleas that get complicated when it comes to appeals. They might still get off with time served, or new cases brought, even if the feds could win in court, simply because no one really cases about the trivial cases enough to seriously fight it. But it's a limit in breadth.
While I'll argue against VanDerStok-style division of facial and as-applied challenges such that the as-applied ones are minimal, though, this case seems like a more natural use than most. If the feds had used this law as a real analogue to the habitual drunkard law, honestly, I don't think the court would have opposed it, and I don't think many gun orgs would have either. That's messy because a strict prohibition for marijuana definitely was within the original intent of the law, but it wouldn't be the first saving construction.
But in turn, the saving construction here isn't really splitting off parts of the law, just "you gotta try harder than this, bro". We'll see if that ends up mattering much at all.
There's some dicta fighting against the sometimes-hilariously broad levels of generality that the lower courts have been going with to justify pretty much any restriction. If lower courts were paying attention, the 'how' and 'why' emphasis could matter a lot. Big "if", though.
Makeup is kinda interesting. By the numbers, it's a unanimous 9-0. But Sotomayor and Jackson have a concurrence-in-judgement that's just an outright call to overturn Bruen and reinstate means-end scrutiny. And, notably, they do so without actually saying this conviction would fail under a means-end scrutiny. Kagan and Alito join a more conventional concurrence, where they basically say they'd stop at finding the habitual drunkard analog didn't cover this case. I think that's just dividing out the "Controlled Substances Act isn't tied to dangerousness as a category" reasoning, but I might be missing something more specific.
It's weird that it's come out before Wolford, which was argued months earlier. Not unprecedented, given the 'unanimous'-ish nature of this one, but suggests that there's a bunch of back-and-forths in Wolford's dissent.
It could make drug users dealing with ATF forms really interesting. And possibly some state permit-to-purchase laws go really weird. If lower courts apply it consistently. Gonna be real weird results downstream of it, but given New Jersey's reaction to Bruen, I don't expect them to suddenly get circumspect about past drug use.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link