Bushco's Bang-Bang Judge

And of course, leave to the Philadelphia Inquirer to use the Blacksburg, VA massacre to grant a forum to Alan Caruba of something called The National Anxiety Center to claim that more guns would have saved lives, not fewer ones.

Well, at least Caruba didn’t question the courage of the victims as John Derbyshire did as noted by Time’s Ana Marie Cox here (via Atrios).

The only reason – and believe me, I mean when I tell you that the only reason – why I’m giving Caruba even the slightest acknowledgment here is because he uses the horrific verdict in Parker v. District of Columbia, which overturned D.C.’s 30-year-old handgun ban, as a basis for his argument (a ruling which, as acknowledged by Paul Helmke of Handgun Control, Inc. here, ignored all prior case law to reinterpret the Second Amendment – here’s a related New York Times story).

Here is Caruba’s nonsense…

A recent U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in the case of Parker v. District of Columbia restored Second Amendment rights to the citizens of the District and, by extension, to every citizen of these United States. Not since 1976 had residents of the District had the right to defend themselves with force of arms.

Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman (stating the majority opinion) wrote: "In sum, the phrase 'the right of the people,' when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual."

I realized that that name was familiar, though I couldn’t place it immediately; hmmm, Laurence H. Silberman, Laurence H. Silberman…

And then I remembered who he was.

Judge Laurence Silberman, along with former Senator Charles Robb of Virginia, headed the WMD Study Commission in 2004, which was intended to whitewash any negative findings from the 9/11 BakerKean-Hamilton commission for purposes of doing all it could to secure the presidential election and thus continue the Iraq war (Cheney described Silberman’s report as “enormously helpful” according to Bob Woodward in “State of Denial” – I’m not inclined to blame Robb so much the way Woodward recounts what happened).

So, it looks like Judge Laurence H. Silberman will secure a unique place in the history of both American politics and jurisprudence. First he does all he can to perpetuate the utterly and tragically failed Bush-Cheney regime, particularly in Iraq, and then he does all he can to repeal a measure to prevent untold senseless carnage in the District of Columbia in general and our nation’s capital in particular.

It may not be possible to truly measure in any real sense the blood on this man’s hands.

Congratulations, Your Honor. You must be proud.