I don’t follow the twists and turns of US gun laws — it’s depressing enough trying to follow Canada’s determined attempts to suppress private gun ownership — so I wasn’t aware of a US Supreme Court case coming up soon:
Remember the scene from the movie “Billy Madison” where the judge says “… what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I’ve ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response was there anything that could even be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
I’ve been reading the anti-gun-rights amicus briefs in Viramontes v. Cook County, the case challenging Chicago’s ban on AR-15s (thank you @MorosKostas for making them generally available on X). They are like that — a ferrago of absolutely dizzying stupidity.
I’m used to the graboids making dodgy, crappy arguments, because what else can they do really? They don’t have any good ones. Their normal rhetoric isn’t designed to persuade the disinterested, merely to provides a colorable excuse for a judge that already agrees with their position to put a judicial stamp on it. Usually, though, they manage to utter at least a plausible simulation of intelligence.
This, though … these briefs are a whole ‘nother level. The quality of writing and argument is so bad that I repeatedly found myself rereading sentences I had just run my eyes over to verify that, yes, they did actually go there.
What does it all mean?
The fun, paranoid theory would be that the graboids have been infiltrated and this is deliberate sabotage by pro-2A law clerks. Could this be? Naah … but it’s telling that this is actually a tempting idea.
My actual theory is that everybody involved with this litigation knows that the anti-2A side was doomed from the beginning, so they’re not sending their best. They’re doing just enough to comply with somebody’s political direction.
If you trace it back far enough, you probably get to some politician grifting money from the Bloomberg and Soros advocacy machines. Wacky incentives leading to Kabuki theater, everyone involved performing an increasingly stylized and threadbare simulation of competence.
The oral arguments on December 2nd are going to be *lit*.
