Easiest way to kickstart it is arming at-risk minorities.
California's strict gun laws have their roots in white conservatives' reaction to the Black Panthers marching with rifles while St. Reagan was governor of the state.
The upside of this strategy is that if the gun laws don't change, then at least those minorities will have some means of protecting themselves.
The NRA is pretty low on the list of organizations that would have tried to push the issue if this involved someone not named Hunter Biden. They're very much a culture war outlet that won't go to bat for anyone they consider an undesirable.
There are other advocacy groups that have been talking about this issue for a number of years, though. And there have been lower court rulings this year that make whether that provision of Form 4473 is going to be able to withstand scrutiny questionable.
Like I said, where these gun rights groups land on this case is going to be pretty telling about where they stand generally. The culture warriors will come up with excuses. It should be an interesting barometer for whether these groups actually believe in universal application of what they consider rights.
A lot of gun rights groups have been champing at the bit for a good chance to challenge that section of Form 4473 for a while now. A common point of contention is that e.g., holding a medical marijuana card would be a disqualifier if truthfully filling out a 4473. It's so rarely actually prosecuted that finding a test case isn't particularly easy, though.
It will be interesting -- and telling -- to see how they react to this case.
Chiming back in here to say that yes, that was exactly my point.
To maybe make it a little clearer, a hypothetical: imagine a Republican-controlled state enacts a law banning late term abortions and makes it punishable with jail time for women to receive one.
That hypothetical law includes a clause defining a late term abortion as one taking place at any time past 37 weeks from conception.
A woman has an abortion at 36 weeks pregnant. Anti-abortion activists insist that she should be culpable under the law; an abortion at 36 weeks is functionally the same as an abortion at 37 weeks and 36 weeks is very obviously late term pregnancy, they claim.
If the local sheriff then arrests that woman, is the sheriff behaving lawfully?
That's why the government being bound to the letter of the law is so incredibly important. A law can be stupid, harmful, regressive, or otherwise bad in any number of ways, but if the government must act within the law as written, then at least we know what rules we're playing by and can work to change them.
If the government is allowed to arbitrarily and capriciously ignore the letter of the law in favor of what the people enforcing it wish the law were, that will be abused by bad actors. That sort of thing is more or less a universal component of authoritarianism.
tl;dr - we shouldn't do it because allowing it will allow it to be used against us.
If the law says you can’t kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?
It depends on how it's defined in the law. States generally don't write laws that define vehicular homicide solely as striking a person specifically with the front of a passenger car for exactly this reason. Further, the need for precision in law is why intentional acts and negligent acts are generally defined separately e.g., murder vs manslaughter.
Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances… in other words shit happens.
Discretion in enforcement/prosecution is not the same thing as enforcing something that isn't defined in law. One is arguably a necessary component of real justice, the other is how authoritarianism functions.
The National Firearms Act has very specific language defining what constitutes a machine gun. It does not include language giving the executive branch power to expand that definition. Either something meets that legal definition and is legally a machine gun or it isn't.
I'm not even saying that it's impossible for an enforcing agency to be given those powers -- the FDA, for example, has been given pretty sweeping authority to classify drugs. In fact, they have the explicit authority to classify analogs of illegal drugs as illegal. That's basically the parallel to what's being discussed here with the NFA and the ATF.
The difference is that Congress hasn't given the ATF the authority to do so. If you want the law to grant the ability to enforce a less specific definition than what exists in the current law then you need to either change the law to carry a more expansive definition and/or give the enforcing agency the power to make that definition outright. Either of those things would allow the sort of enforcement the other commenter was calling for, but it would be within the letter of the law.
The point wasnt that you can't enact a particular law or even that you can't allow for enforcement to be adaptive -- it was that rule of law requires that adaptiveness to be defined within the law itself. It's totally okay if the law says "it depends and here's who decides." It's not okay to decide to enforce the law on the basis of "this is what I feel like the law should do" even if the actual language of the law doesn't support it.
There’s the letter of the law and then there’s the spirit of the law.
Only the former should be legally enforceable. If you start enforcing the latter regardless of the former, the legal system stops being about rule of law and more about the subjective whims of those enforcing it.
If the letter of the law doesn't capture the intent, then the law needs to change, but laws shouldn't be subjectively enforced on the basis of what someone feels like they should mean rather than what they actually say.
Not sure I agree with this particular take. My recollection is that this usage of cancelled started in progressive internet spaces and was absolutely used to describe consequences for being an asshole.
It's the exact same trajectory woke took -- it was language used by left-leaning people that got co-opted and intentionally diluted by conservatives.