Sumo wrestlers and rattlesnakes
Politics, Quotes 05/07/2003 |The sheer ponderousness of the panel’s opinion — the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text — refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel’s labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it — and is just as likely to succeed.
— Justice Alex Kozinski, in his dissenting opinion to Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case Silvera v. Lockyer (PDF)
(via Cory Doctorow, via trubble)
[See also: ACME catalog | Justifying the space program | Haunted Mansion Trailer | Pinocchio | From vinyl to .mp3 ]
2 Responses to “Sumo wrestlers and rattlesnakes”
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dang
Cheryl
Bertamum
Michael Hanscom
Snail_5
May 8th, 2003 at 11:23 am
I really appreciated his entire dissent - good points that are often forgotten about why the second amendment (the right to keep and bear arms) exists. So often the violence that fills the news makes us imagine that everything would be so much better if only all those guns would be taken away. But I think Kozinski’s point regarding the second amendment as the ‘doomsday provision’ of the constitution is well put - that an armed populace is much harder to subjugate and tyrannize than one that is unarmed. I often wonder what our founding fathers would think of our country today and all the strange modern amenities we have. Handguns would be on that list, as well as semi-automatic and automatic guns. Back then it took a long time to load a gun!
October 8th, 2003 at 11:18 am
sumowrestlers in japan rocks