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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Presuppose Roe was decided correctly. But we still had 30% of US population voting to overturn it anyway as single issue voters. Is that good for society? It’s better now people can vote on it.

2A already has been butchered. Maybe it’s good maybe it’s bad. But status quo is a court that isn’t being textualists on 2A.

You have admitted yourself theirs plausible cover to rule either way. Slaves paid global taxes to US. Migrants do not etc.

I think the Robert’s court is pragmatic so I think they find a way to give a flexible ruling.

Presuppose Roe was decided correctly. But we still had 30% of US population voting to overturn it anyway as single issue voters. Is that good for society? It’s better now people can vote on it.

I think you would need to search hard and long to find someone here who will argue that Roe was the correct decision as far as the procedure was concerned. I certainly was happy that abortion was legal, but the fact on how that was determined seemed rather horrible to me, and indeed created a lot of additional problems, such as the politization of the SCOTUS.

I am a procedure fanboy. As far as the direct outcome is concerned, there is not a lot of difference between cops assassinating a drug dealer and him getting arrested, convicted of murder, exhausting his appeals and finally getting executed. Yet the indirect consequences will be very different because once you grant cops the ability to do summary executions, they are unlikely to stick to just killing drug dealers. It is better to suffer the occasional dealer to go free for lack of evidence than to live in some fascist dictatorship.

Roe was basically the judicial equivalent of just shooting drug dealers.

2A already has been butchered. Maybe it’s good maybe it’s bad. But status quo is a court that isn’t being textualists on 2A.

That depends a lot on your understanding of 2A and what it is for.

As far as keeping the means to fight battles in the hands of the population, the diverge happened no later than WW1. Not all of it is the judiciaries fault either, parts of it is just that the cost of the equipment which tended to win battles skyrocketed: the median American could probably afford to keep a state of the art rifle in 1800 or 1900, but he could certainly not maintain a tank in 1930! Another part certainly was judicial, in that 2A was simply not applied to Tommy guns.

On the other hand, while the judiciary has been fine with not adding new weapon systems to the 2A pool, and has certainly okayed background checks and waiting periods, there was also little attempt to reneg on earlier precedent. Double-action handguns had been in the 2A pool since they were first invented, and there they stayed.

Today the US is one of very few jurisdictions where a citizen can own a rifle or semi-automatic handgun without giving her government any justification why she wants a gun. (Sure, carrying the gun in public is a bit trickier and might require a license in blue states, but contrast this with Germany: to even own a 9mm, I would need to show legitimate need (such as being a hunter or long-practicing sport shooter), and to get a license to carry in everyday life I would basically have to become a cop.)