AP has just reported that the winner of the D.C. gun case submitted to reasonable gun control and registered his handgun with the District police:

The man whose lawsuit overturned Washington's handgun ban has successfully registered his revolver, ending a more than 30-year wait to keep the weapon in his home.

Dick Heller walked out of D.C. police headquarters Monday, clutching a yellow firearms registration certificate stamped "approved." He gave the thumbs-up sign, grinned and said, "Victory!"

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Victory, indeed.

No report yet from the National Archives, but apparently this voluntary act of gun registration hasn't shredded the Constitution even a little bit.

We'll be sure to keep you posted.

Why doesn't the NRA leadership come clean about its role in the McFate case - disclose the full extent of its participation in this and any other spy operations it is currently or has previously undertaken - and publicly apologize for spying on gun violence victims and their families?

Their silence in the face of increasing public scrutiny is baffling.

That is, until one considers what Paul Helmke said last week:

... Does this behavior reflect the NRA’s membership? I don’t think so. I think this represents the bunker paranoia of leaders who will resort to any means – by hook or by crook – to get any information they can get about the gun violence prevention movement, and that contradicts every statement they make about being a "civil rights" organization.

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The Supreme Court's Heller decision defined a private Second Amendment right to own a gun for self-defense in the home for the first time in over 200 years.

Yet even after winning the biggest gun case in American history, there is still a "bunker paranoia" in some corners of the gun community.

They won the case, but don't seem to know it.

The July/August issue of Mother Jones has the story of one reporter's trip to a gun show, and features this short anecdote (from before Heller was decided):

... At one table, a little boy admired a .50-caliber sniper rifle, capable of downing a jumbo jet, while at another a man held a cheap Romanian AK knockoff to his shoulder. His T-shirt read "'Freedom At Any Cost.'—Randy Weaver, Ruby Ridge, Idaho."

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The sentiments of a lone extremist? Think again.

A couple of weeks ago, a Letter to the Editor was published in the Capital Times (Madison, WI) and was generally ignored as a crackpot's rant.

Except in the days that followed, a vigorous debate swirled in the online gun community, many of whom actually treated it as a serious proposal.

Here's the letter, written by Mike Vanderboegh:

Dear Editor:

Joe Bialek from Cleveland proposes the licensing and registration of all weapons currently in civilian hands. My question is, how exactly do you propose to do that, Joe?

There are some of us "cold dead hands" types, perhaps 3 percent of gun owners, who would kill anyone who tried to further restrict our God-given liberty. Don't extrapolate from your own cowardice and assume that just because you would do anything the government told you to do that we would.

Are you proposing to come yourself, or do you want someone else's son or daughter in federal service to take the risk? Are you truly prepared to stack up the bodies necessary to accomplish your plan? Seems a strange way to make a "safer society." More to the point, are you willing to risk your sorry hide to do it? No? I thought not.

Then quit proposing the next American civil war. We're done being pushed back from our natural rights without a fight. Be careful what you wish for.

Mike Vanderboegh

Pinson, Ala.

Forget the fact that almost 80% of Americans favor gun registration. Forget the additional fact that 61% of gun owners favor "mandatory registration of handguns."

Vanderboegh's ravings are clearly meant to get a rise out of people. Yet as hyperbole from a possibly unstable individual, they are virtually meaningless (unless ATF knows something we don't).

So, did gun bloggers simply ignore Vanderboegh's letter, or at least denounce it as morally degenerate and unrepresentative of gun owners at-large?

No. Instead, they debated Vanderboegh's rant on the merits - as a legitimate alternative.

In fact, one of the most consistent themes that readers of the gun blogosphere will find on the topic is: "while Vanderboegh's letter was bad politics, he was basically right in principle."

For example, see this comment from SnowFlakesInHell (a gun blog often criticized by other gun bloggers for being too "moderate"):

Back against the wall means that the second amendment is being relegated into meaningless, not through constitutional amendment, but through extralegal means, and we’re powerless to stop it politically. That does not describe our present situation.

But yes, I am suggesting that people either need to get involved in the political fight, or start shooting. There is no awkward period where you get to do nothing in the political sphere, because it’s all pointless, but you’re waiting for the shooting to start. What is Mike V. doing to defeat anti-gun politicians and help elect pro-gun politicians? What pro-gun politicians has he been donating money to? When was the last time he wrote a letter to the editor that was trying to change hearts and minds rather than saying “don’t do X, or I’ll shoot you?�

If we don’t end up with our backs against a wall it will be because a lot of people worked very hard to avoid that possibility politically. I won’t deny there’s a line that the government can’t cross, and what to do if the line gets crossed. That’s something to be discussed among ourselves. But not something to be discussing in front of the people we need on our side in order to avoid it coming to that.

Or take this example, from Sharp As A Marble:

...Waco. Ruby Ridge. The Katrina Gun Grab. The response to each of these events should have been hundreds of thousands of armed citizens fighting back. But they didn't.

Apparently, the "If you come for my guns, I'll shoot you" attitude only applies to your guns and not your neighbors. And that, my friends, is why telling the public in a letter to the editor that 3% of gun owners will rise up is a load of hogwash and does nothing to advance our cause.

Here's a fact - the gun rights movement has been making positive strides. Heller is just the first salvo in a long, drawn out war against those who would disarm us. But the problem is that gun rights are a small part of a massive battle, one that I think we're losing.

Or this example from The Smallest Minority:

... I don't think Vanderboegh's 3% is out there. I think the Great New Orleans Gun Grab illustrates it. Nobody shot at a cop or a National Guardsman. Nobody jumped into a car and headed for New Orleans armed to the teeth. Like McVeigh's destruction of the Murrah building, as a fuse to light the revolution New Orleans was a dud.

We read here on the internet, on an almost daily basis, of events where government actors abuse their powers in egregious ways against individuals - and no one's "threshold of outrage" is exceeded. In fact, when someones threshold is exceeded, it's a rare, newsworthy event! Man bites dog! The most recent example of egregious misbehavior by government was illustrated by David Codrea just today. This was gun confiscation. Apparently Gabriel Razzano's threshold of outrage wasn't exceeded. Is he still a patriot? Where's the 3% on this? Why aren't we all saddling up?

In the wake of the Vanderboegh letter, to one degree or another, armed revolt has been treated as a legitimate policy answer to popular gun control measures by one blogger after another in the gun community - rather than denounced as immoral or as street-corner gibberish uttered by one who wears a tinfoil hat.

It was NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre, after all, who coined the phrase "jack-booted thugs" to describe Federal law enforcement officers merely doing their jobs. President George H.W. Bush was so incensed at the slur that he resigned his NRA membership because of it.

If even most gun owners support reasonable controls - including a common-sense idea like gun registration - and recoil at any suggestion that they should engage in armed "revolution," why would the NRA cater to the "smallest minority" that does not?

Has a "bunker paranoia" gripped the NRA leadership, so clouding their judgment as to justify the moral bankruptcy of spying on gun violence victims and their families?

The NRA should come out of their bunker and explain themselves.

The winner of last month's landmark Supreme Court decision is back in court.

According to the Washington Post:

... Without commenting on Heller's latest lawsuit, D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) said the new gun-registration law was enacted as emergency legislation shortly after the Supreme Court decision. He said the District will probably change the rules in coming months. "The council's action in introducing emergency legislation . . . was meant to be a quick response," said Mendelson, chairman of the council's Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary. "It was not meant to be a comprehensive response."

The committee has scheduled a Sept. 18 hearing to discuss possible changes to the registration rules.

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The back-and-forth over at Cato Unbound is very instructive. Dennis responded today to an earlier piece by Robert Levy.

This extended excerpt explains the central difficulty - and the supreme irony - faced by the gun lobby after winning the most significant gun case in American history:

... Indeed, this likely effect may explain why the NRA did not lead the legal effort against the D.C. law. Were it not for Bob Levy, there is no reason to believe a constitutional challenge to D.C.’s law would have been filed. Levy’s suit embarrassed the NRA into filing its own tag-along action, which was quickly dismissed for lack of standing. The NRA clearly preferred to press Congress to repeal the D.C. handgun ban, perhaps because it foresaw the unintended consequences of a Second Amendment victory. Any ruling that could diminish the NRA’s core strategy of keeping gun owners in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety about gun confiscation could be quite damaging to the organization’s interests.

A few days after the Heller decision, Chuck Michel, a West Coast lawyer who has long represented the NRA and other pro-gun interests, was involved in a panel discussion with Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke on public radio in Los Angeles. When he was asked about Heller’s effect on licensing and registration proposals, Michel argued that the problem with licensing and registration was that they “led to confiscation� and that there are “a lot of people in the gun control movement who are really gun . . . banners� who are “in favor of civilian disarmament.� As to Heller, he observed “[t]hese folks are never going to get their way now as a result of this [Heller] opinion, so I think licensing and registration is . . .going to be. . . tougher to criticize.�

Moments later, Michel realized the implications of what he had said, and he remembered the NRA talking points. “Well, let me just first clarify,� he said, “so I don’t get overly criticized by the members of the NRA that may be listening, you can’t license a civil right.� He then began to dissemble about different kinds of licensing that may be constitutional while others are not. But the damage had been done. Michel had committed the classic political “gaffe,� as famously defined by columnist Michael Kinsley. He had told the truth by accident.

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Did they consult with the Franklin Mint first?

As seen over on DC'ist and in the Journal's Law Blog, Smith & Wesson has apparently made a set of "commemorative" revolvers to celebrate more guns coming into the District of Columbia:

... Introducing the Smith & Wesson commemorative Heller v. D.C. revolver! That’s right, the Springfield, Mass.-based gun maker announced Monday it would present engraved Model 442 revolvers (pictured) to the six plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the high court’s June 26 decision.

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Equal parts silly and dangerous. Yet, in a perfect irony, the D.C. plaintiffs will have to get these guns registered in order to keep them at home.

Happily, Smith & Wesson decided to abide by the District's new gun laws and give the D.C. plaintiffs revolvers. These firearms - "engraved with the words 'D.C. vs. Heller' on a scale of justice" - will be subject to strong, sensible gun control if they are to be kept lawfully in the District.

On the other hand, if S&W had really wanted to make a statement (rather than launch a PR stunt) they could have made commemorative Heller assault rifles for the D.C. plaintiffs, to see if the Second Amendment prevents elected officials from strictly regulating those, as well.

But that would have taken courage.