Irish Trojan in Tennessee

Individual right to bear arms vindicated; still no right to arm bears

By Brendan Loy

The Supreme Court is expected to rule very shortly on, essentially, what the Second Amendment means, in the Washington, D.C. handgun ban case, D.C. vs. Heller.

SCOTUSblog is liveblogging.

UPDATE: By a 5-4 vote, with no plurality or concurrences -- i.e., the five justices in the majority all agreed on the same rationale -- the "Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm." (That quote is from SCOTUSblog, not from the opinion.)

UPDATE 2: Here's the opinion and the dissents (PDF). Scalia wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by the other four conservative justices. There were two separate dissents, one by Stevens and one by Breyer; each dissent was joined by the other three liberal justices. So, like I said, a clear 5-4 split, with no muddying of the waters by multiple plurality opinions and such.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, some relevant quotes from the majority opinion can be found here. And here's an initial analysis from SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston -- although, as the Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr says, "the details of the opinion are critical; it will take a bit of time to read the decision to get a sense of what it means."

Help me name my new blog!

By Brendan Loy

All right, I know I've been dragging my feet on this, but I have indeed decided -- as I alluded last Friday -- to try out the weekly blog format. My intention is to make the switch on Tuesday. (I figure July 1, the halfway point of the calendar year, is a good arbitrary date to make such a change.)

However, the timing of the switch may change, depending on how much free time I have this weekend. There's a lot of back-end stuff that I need to do, both to close down this blog and to set up the new blog. If I don't make the switch on Tuesday, it probably won't happen until July 14 or thereabouts, because Becky and I will be traveling over July 4 weekend, so I won't have much free time again until the weekend of the 12th-13th.

Anyway, I need help from y'all on something. In switching from this "hyperactive" blog to a new, weekly blog, I want to make a clear, clean break by giving the blog a new name. I figure the subtitle could include the phrase "Irish Trojan," in order to maintain some semblance of "brand" continuity, but I want the title of the blog to be something different -- and a more drastic difference than my switch last year from "The Irish Trojan's Blog" to "Irish Trojan in Tennessee." I want a real new name.

Ideally, the new name would in some way emphasize the blog's weekly/occasional nature. But at the same time, I don't want it to be something totally pedestrian, like "Brendan's Weekly Blog" or whatever. The problem is, I'm terrible at coming up with good, non-pedestrian ideas for things like blog names (as the "Ably Nerd On" fiasco demonstrated). So, I need your help. I need some suggestions for what I should call the new blog!

So far, the only decent idea I've had is to call it "Hopefully Considered," which was the name of my Papa Loy's old weekly newspaper column. (The subtitle, I think, would be "The Irish Trojan's Weekly Blog." So, in toto, the title and subtitle would read "Hopefully Considered: The Irish Trojan's Weekly Blog.") But although imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I'm not sure I like the idea of simply copying exactly the name of Papa's column. Something that alludes to "Hopefully Considered," without being precisely the same name, would be great... but I can't think of anything good.

Don't limit yourself to spin-offs of "Hopefully Considered," though. That's just one idea. Any and all other ideas are welcome! Please, submit 'em in comments, and please feel free to comment on other people's ideas as well. This isn't a democracy, exactly, but at the same time, I'm definitely curious to know what my "regulars" think.