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A recent study by the Crime Prevention Research Center underscored how easily public opinion polling can be used to distort, rather than illuminate, peoples true feelings on gun control. Policy-makers should take note.

Sound policy requires a thoughtful and sophisticated understanding of facts and evidence, not just the shifting whims of public perception. Emotionalism, on the other hand, is the way anti-gun extremists would like to run our government. Gun ban advocates constantly point to survey results they help manufacture usually in the wake of some highly-charged incident, before all the facts are known as justification for imposing draconian restrictions on our Second Amendment rights.

There are numerous reasons why over-reliance on opinion polling is a deeply flawed approach to good governance.

First, and foremost, the United States was not founded as a direct democracy, where the electorate votes on virtually every public policy issue. We are, thankfully, a Constitutional Republic. At the federal level, we elect people to represent us, and they deliberate policy issues and vote to implement them or reject them. Should they consider public opinion polls when determining how they vote? Of course they should consider them; but that should never be the beginning and the end of the analysis.

The problem with relying on public opinion polls is that, with complex or controversial issues, how the poll is conducted has a tremendous bearing on both how accurate it is in determining how people feel, and what the results of the poll actually mean.

Recent research out of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), founded by Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., highlights the problem of relying on simplistic public opinion polls when considering complex policy proposals.

Lott, well known for his detailed, groundbreaking research on firearms and gun control laws, took a look at public opinion on one of the anti-gun movements favorite legislative proposals of the moment: red flag laws. His results illustrate how dramatically opinions can shift when the same issue is presented in different ways.

Using the polling company McLaughlin & Associates, the CPRC surveyed 1,000 general election voters, asking whether they supported red flag laws if, the question explained, their primary purpose is to allow judges to take away a persons gun based on a single complaint when there is concern about that individual committing suicide. The responses indicated 58% support, and 30% opposition.

That explanation of how red flag laws work is, of course, a vast oversimplification, as the laws are far more complex. Anti-gun organizations and the lawmakers who support their goals count on opinion polls avoiding details when it comes to questions about gun control, and would have preferred the survey stopped with just that oversimplification.

But Lott understands all this, and his survey followed up the initial question with the kind of detail the gun-ban movement hates.

The survey went on to ask, Would you be more likely or less likely to support Red Flag Laws if you knew there are no hearings before an individuals guns are taken away and there are no mental health care experts involved in the process? After learning how most red flag laws work, support fell to 30%, and opposition rose to 47%.

In the more detailed breakdown of the results, Lott found that the greatest movement in the views of respondents came in the Strongly Support and Strongly Oppose categories. Strongly Support fell by more than half when more specifics about red flag laws were included; plummeting from 34% with the first question, to 14% with the more detailed second question. Strongly Oppose, meanwhile, climbed from 18% to 29%.

Of course, these kinds of results are not too surprising, and simply add credence to the old saying, The devil is in the details.

This survey also bolsters what Lott found to be true in an earlier poll: When the public doesnt have all the facts, it can lead to support for bad public policy. Even worse than just not having all the facts, many, including the current president, affirmatively promote misinformation that can lead to people believing things that are demonstrably untrue.

In his constant war on the Second Amendment, Joe Biden has been trying to paint a picture about violent crime in America that blames everything on guns and their availability to law-abiding citizens. And, to some extent, that has worked to confuse many Americans.

With Biden constantly disparaging the right to arms as part of his messaging on combating crime, and with most in the legacy media supporting and amplifying his messaging, what Americans think about violent crime is not actually true.

Lott found that the average American likely voter thinks that over 46% of violent crime involve guns. Actual crime statistics show it is less than 8%.

Even with this wildly inaccurate view of the frequency with which firearms are involved in violent crime, Lotts research indicates Americans are not exactly clamoring for more gun laws, in spite of what anti-gun extremists would have you believe. His survey shows that only 21% of the respondents feel that more gun laws will do more to help fight crime and keep people safe. The majority, at 52%, felt that the best solution would be to focus on arrests, while another 22% felt the best approach was to enforce current laws.

In other words, even without an accurate understanding of violent crime in America, the vast majority of Americans DO NOT support gun control as a response. That is encouraging.

Another factor to consider, which is not addressed in the CPRC research mentioned here, is that, when asked if more gun laws would help, most Americans dont even know what gun laws already exist. Again, most Americans do not believe we need more gun laws, but of those that do, how much do they really know about current laws? How can you justify asking for more when you dont even know what is already there?

Polling, like other analytical and messaging tools, is neither good nor bad in itself. When done with care and without bias, and with the necessary detail for more complex issues, polls can accurately gauge how Americans feel about any number of things. Those results, in turn, can be used by policy makers to help guide their decisions; but the critical qualifiers in that statement are with care and without bias and help. Opinion polls can never capture all the complexity of human understanding and sentiment and should never be used as the only input for determining what laws will govern us.

That said, the most critical poll for the future of the Second Amendment is fast approaching: The 2022 Midterm Elections. Some states have already begun Early Voting, and November 8, Election Day, will be here before you know it. NRA has a number of online resources available to better ensure the pro-Second Amendment community is ready to work to elect a pro-gun majority in Congress that will derail the Biden Administrations anti-gun agenda, and strip power from anti-gun extremists like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

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Excerpt from:
Manipulated Public Opinion Polling Should Not Drive Public Policy on Guns - NRA ILA

Second Amendment scholars and historians have almost completely skipped over a detailed analysis of the debates in the First Congress. What wasnt discussed might be as important as what was.

In his dissenting view in the Second Amendment case Heller v. District of Columbia, Justice John Paul Stevens cited congressional debates surrounding the amendments adoption as proof that it related to the right of militias to keep firearms and did not convey a right to private persons.

In the original draft submitted by James Madison, the Second Amendment included a conscientious objector clause, meaning a person could not be compelled to bear arms or serve in the militia if they had religious or moral objections.

Although in his majority opinion, Justice Scalia argued it is always perilous to derive the meaning of an adopted provision from another provision deleted in the drafting process, the proposed clause offers us a glimpse into the priorities surrounding discussions in 1789.

In his paper Revisiting the Original Congressional Debates About the Second Amendment, research professor Dru Stevenson concludes that the question of individual firearm ownership played virtually no role in the debates. Instead, it focused mostly on whether to include an exemption for conscientious objectors (especially Quakers), and if so, how to phrase it.

Quakers were a religious sect that founded Pennsylvania. It was the only colony where abled-bodied men were not required to join a local militia. Quakers were deeply distrusted by the people of other colonies, especially after refusing to fight in the War of Independence due to their pacifist beliefs. Everybody assumed they would refuse to participate in any future militia called up by the federal government.

While founders like Tench Coxe argued strenuously in favor of an individual right to keep and bear arms, Stevenson writes that during congressional debates prior to adopting the amendment there was zero discussion of an individual right to own or carry weapons for self defense, but inferring a reason for this requires speculation silence could indicate they thought the point was so obvious as to be trivially true, or it could mean that the idea never occurred to them. Either view is an argument from silence.

He writes further:

Looking at those discussions together can help our understanding of what the drafters of the Second Amendment hoped to accomplish and wanted to prevent, as well as how their constituents who would ultimately ratify the Amendment, understood its terms.

However, statements made by several congressmen at the time made it clear the Second Amendment was motivated by fears of a standing army and a strong central government overwhelming the states. The Virginia Ratifying Conventions proposed Second Amendment specifically cites a permanent army as something to prevent.

That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free state. That standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power.

Congressmen Eldridge Gerry reiterated this view during the congressional debates about the amendment.

What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins. This was actually done by Great Britain at the commencement of the late revolution. [Emphasis added]

Stevenson writes that the debates reveal that three of the twelve Congressmen to speak during the debates over the Second Amendmentwanted to focus on the dangers of a standing federal army, to which they seemed to think state militias were the antidote.

One of the possibilities for the lack of discussion about individual firearm ownership is that self-governance was far greater at the time than today. There were no law enforcement agencies at the time as we know them in the modern sense. An ordinary man was expected in all but one state to be ready and capable of bearing arms to maintain civil order, whether against Indian attacks, revolts, mobs, or invasion.

Put plainly, an overlapping identity existed between people as civilians and government as a ruling authority that does not exist in modern America. Today, there is an enormous legal separation between a civilian and an armed public agent.

This overlapping identity is reflected in a follow-up draft of the Second Amendment introduced on Aug 17, 1789:

A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms. [Emphasis added]

This is a point that the militia-only crowd continually misses. Their interpretation is based on the attitude that only members of government enforcement agencies have a right to keep and bear arms. In todays world, this constitutes a relatively small group of people with clear legal distinctions and privileges. At the time of the Second Amendments adoption, militia participation among the male population was nearly universal. In fact, in most places it was mandated by law.

In other words, the militia-only people make their case on the unspoken assumption that only a select group of people have a right to access to firearms, and that government should be able to restrict firearms among private citizens. But if they are to be consistent then they would need to reintroduce laws mandating participation in militia and removing privileges such as qualified immunity and sovereign immunity from those entities.

Stevensons research also dispels the erroneous claim that the Second Amendment was enacted to uphold slavery, since in some southern states militias conducted slave patrols. Ardent pro-slavery congressmen such as William Loughton Smith claimed the precise opposite during the 1789 debates. To be fair, Smith feared that allowing any amendments would eventually lead to federal interference with slavery. But this also puts to rest the notion that slavery proponents were pushing for the amendments adoption.

No protection clause for Quakers or other conscientious objectors was included in the final amendment. Stevenson writes that the debates provide strong historical clarification of the perceived need for militias. The debates also reveal the significance, for those in Congress, of the existence of groups that refused to participate in militias, the expediency of reassuring those groups that they would not be subject to conscription, and the problems of funding the militias and sourcing firearms.

Stevenson argues that considering the right to bear arms in isolation from other related issues is problematic if we are to be faithful to the original public meaning of the Amendment and its text. They did not treat an individuals right to keep and bear arms in isolation whatever that right may have entailed but considered it alongside the need to provide legal protection for the unarmed as well. This is a lesson that courts could apply today. [Emphasis added]

While Stevenson argues against reading into the lack of discussion around private ownership, we can turn to others like Coxe who wrote newspaper articles describing the amendment as a way to protect private firearms. He sent copies of the article to James Madison, who despite remaining quiet during the congressional debates about the Second Amendment, complimented Coxe in his description of it and the other amendments under consideration.

Stevensons research demonstrates that the Second Amendment was birthed amid a complex and complicated political environment far removed from the 21st Century, and that only by viewing it within context can we fully appreciate its true meaning, which goes well beyond modern debates about it.

Tags: 2nd-amendment, Congressional Debates, First Congress, James Madison, Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Second Amendment

Visit his personal site at http://www.tjmartinell.com. Join his Facebook page here. Listen to his weekly podcast on Sound Cloud.

Read the original here:
Second Amendment: Revisiting the Original Congressional Debates - Tenth Amendment Center

What to Know Today

Representative Jamie Raskin says the Second Amendment does not protect a right to overthrow the government. In a New York Times op-ed, the January 6 committee member notes that none of the Capitol rioters charged with crimes related to the insurrection have had their cases dismissed on Second Amendment grounds. Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, argues that rhetoric from his Republican colleagues purporting that the Second Amendment gives people the right to armed rebellion courts disaster, and that the amendments reference to a well-regulated militia means well-regulated by the government. Raskin has long been a proponent of stricter gun regulations; as a state senator, he sponsored assault weapons bans for several years, according to WAMU.

Predictable and preventable: Highland Park victims sue Smith & Wesson over marketing practices. The civil suits, filed by families of victims and survivors of the Fourth of July massacre, allege that the gunmaker violated Illinois consumer fraud laws by marketing its assault rifles to young, impulsive men by appealing to their propensity for risk and excitement, The Chicago Sun-Times reports. Families of victims in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting sued Remington Arms on similar grounds, ultimately accepting a $73 million settlement that allowed the gunmaker to avoid releasing documents on its marketing practices beyond the initial trove that was shared in discovery. In the Highland Park case, families and victims are also suing two gun stores, the shooter, and the shooters father.

Shooting at a high school in Oakland, California, injures six. Two adult students and four school workers were shot Wednesday at the King Estate campus on the citys east side, the The San Francisco Chronicle reported. Two were transported to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. Police are searching for two shooters, and the citys police chief told reporters on Thursday that one or both of them had likely used handguns with large-capacity magazines, which are illegal in California. It was the second shooting at an East Oakland school in the past month, the Chronicle reported, amid a wave of violence across the city: Oakland recorded eight homicides last week alone.

A violence prevention program in New York is running low on money and more may not be coming. This summer, the Manhattan District Attorneys Office awarded 10 $20,000 grants to community-based organizations in an effort to curb youth gun violence. The groups are using the money to pay young people to participate in restorative justice programs, tech classes, and healing circles, among others; the grants also fund beautification projects in parts of the city where gun violence is concentrated. But only about 15 percent of the $250 million allotted for the grant program remains, Gothamist reported this week, and the DAs Office hasnt said whether it will allocate more. Uncertainty at a federal level: As The Traces Chip Brownlee reported in August, for smaller organizations, getting access to federal money earmarked by the Biden administration for community violence intervention can be a challenge.

On the campaign trail, Texas lieutenant governor promises to pass 10-year mandatory minimum for anyone convicted of using a gun while committing a crime. Republican Dan Patrick, who as lieutenant governor presides over the state Senate, has not said how legislation would define what constitutes using a gun during a crime or whether possession of a gun would count, The Texas Tribune reports. The two-term incumbent has made curbing violent crime a significant part of his reelection bid, and is leading his Democratic challenger by 7 points, according to the latest poll by the Texas Politics Project.

115 percent the increase in the number of young people killed in gun homicides annually in Virginia since 2012. [VPM News]

Original post:
Second Amendment Doesn't Protect Insurrection, Raskin Writes - The Trace

In news conferences throughout the week, Gov. Ron DeSantis has mostly suppressed political rhetoric in the fallout of Hurricane Ians devastating impact.

But on Friday, his tone shifted, suddenly reaffirming that the state will be upholding law and order even as flooding occurs, bridges are down, and one county does not have reliable access to water.

After a list of recovery efforts such as the 1.7 million power outages across the state DeSantis said that another one of his main concerns are looters.

The other thing that were concerned about, particularly in those areas that were really hard hit, is you know, we wanna make sure were maintaining law and order, DeSantis said. Dont even think about looting. Dont even think about taking advantage of people in this vulnerable situation. And so local law enforcement is involved in monitoring that.

He did not specify if any so-called looting had already occurred among these homes but he did paint a hypothetical:

You can have people you know bringing boats into some of these islands and trying to ransack peoples homes, the governor said.

I can tell you, in the state of Florida, you never know what may be lurking behind somebodys home, DeSantis continued, and I would not wanna chance that if I were you, given that were a Second Amendment state.

DeSantis discussed looting at least twice on Friday at news conferences, once near Fort Myers and then St. Augustine.

Meanwhile, the Florida Department of Health issued several boiled water notices, for Collier, Hillsborough, Pasco, Orange and other counties.

Power outages continue, and some areas will need days or even weeks to recover and get power back on. Earlier Friday, the figure on power outages was 1.9 million, so there has been some improvement in restoration.

FEMA also is distributing millions of meals and liters of water in affected areas.

As to deaths, there were no additional updates.

Read the original:
'Don't even think about looting,' DeSantis warns about Ian-hit areas. 'We're a 2nd Amendment state' - Florida Phoenix

Alex Jones has, experts say, used the U.S. Constitution as both a shield and a sword.

When Jones first started talking about the Sandy Hook shooting, the day of the massacre itself, he said it was a manufactured crisis intended to create enough sympathy and outrage to enact gun control legislation.

Now that he faces the second of three civil trials to decide damages after courts in both Connecticut and Texas handed down a default judgment in favor of Sandy Hook families, he has claimed that his First Amendment rights to free speech have been limited by a judge hes called a tyrant.

During the current trial, Chris Mattei, attorney for the Sandy Hook families, played a video of Jones saying Sandy Hook and the Aurora, Colo. movie theater shooting a few months prior were false flag operations designed as a pretense to limit the Second Amendment and part of a global conspiracy out to kill and enslave them, Mattei said, quoting Jones.

Earlier in the trial, Jones went on Infowars and told his viewers they came for the Second Amendment with Sandy Hook and now they were coming for the First Amendment, too.

The judge in the case, Barbara Bellis, has attempted to avoid the whole issue by barring Jones from saying in the courtroom that his free speech rights under the First Amendment have been compromised. This trial is about damages. Jones was already found liable for defamation.

The First Amendment is not an issue, Bellis said.

That has not stopped Jones from talking about it outside the courthouse.

We're supposed to be the land of the free, home of the brave, and they're using these dead children not just to try to get rid of the Second Amendment, but now the First Amendment, he said during a press conference on the courthouse steps.

There are limits to the First Amendment. It does not, for example, protect a right to spread misinformation.

It's very frustrating to see someone who has apparently, from all indications, been spreading knowing lies, said David Schulz, director of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. To try to hide behind the protections of the First Amendment is quite frustrating. It's not what the First Amendment protects. The Supreme Court has said that there's no First Amendment value in lies, and lies that cause harm can be punished.

While Jones might have the First Amendment right to say what he thinks on the air or in court, he cannot use his platform to lie about individuals if those lies cause harm.

He certainly has a right to express his opinion about the right to bear arms, but that's not what's going on, Schulz said. And he doesn't have the right to make up lies to try to fan the flames of, you know, Second Amendment advocates.

William Dunlap, a Constitutional law professor at Quinnipiac University, said there are many limits to the freedom of speech.

Both Congress and the states have a lot of law regulating or punishing speech, he said. "Among the categories of speech that are not protected completely by the First Amendment is defamation, which is what this case is all about.

Throughout the current trial, and the previous trial held in Texas, the question arose of whether or not Jones is a journalist and if Infowars practices journalism. The First Amendment protects not only freedom of speech but freedom of the press.

Opinions are protected, as are honest mistakes.

The Supreme Court over the years has been very careful to protect innocent mistakes when they're made by news organizations on issues of public concern, because, as it is explained, errors inevitably happen in the give-and-take of covering the news, particularly when you're under a deadline, Schulz said.

But Jones and Infowars, Schulz said, did not make an honest mistake when they suggested, year after year, that the parents were actors and the massacre never happened.

What has been going on here is a pattern over the years of repeating information that has been shown to be untrue, he said. The First Amendment says that when you're talking about matters of public concern, that there has to be a knowing falsehood.

Jones has said that he genuinely believed the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, but thats not good enough, according to Schulz.

You can misbelieve something, he said. But when something is so outrageous, so unbelievable, that only a reckless person would put it into circulation. would repeat it, that's not protected. And to continue it over a number of years, it's certainly conduct that can be punishable consistent with the First Amendment.

Ryan ONeill, a professor at Quinnipiac University and a partner with the Law Offices of Mark Sherman, practicing in the areas of criminal defense and defamation, said he believed Jones is being misleading.

Jones is not allowed to say in court that his Constitutional right to free speech is being violated. Hes also not allowed to say in court that he believed Sandy Hook was a calculated false flag maneuver to take away Second Amendment rights.

That, ONeill explained, is because Jones was already found liable.

I understand that he has a problem with the fact that he never had a jury decide whether he was liable, but that was decided by the judgment of the court, ONeill said. The problem is, that that judgment happened because he did not follow the rules of the court with respect to how information is supposed to be exchanged.

New Haven-based attorney Alex Taubes explained that there are rules in any court case.

Both sides have to comply with deadlines, both sides have to hand over to the other side their evidence, he said. Alex Jones wants to claim our system of government, or freedom of speech, open courts, as his savior, but when it came time to actually comply with court orders he refused to do so.

Its not just the court in Connecticut that issued a default judgment in favor of the Sandy Hook families because Jones had so flagrantly ignored the courts rules, specifically the rules on discovery. A judge in Texas decided similarly.

The fact that two judges in two different states reached the same conclusion about Alex Jones litigation conduct tells you, I think, that it was very substantial violations and it wasn't just something that was done by accident, ONeill said.

In ignoring the court's rules, Jones lost his chance to make a free speech argument.

He's talking about things that he would have had the opportunity to potentially argue if he had followed the rules, ONeill said. He didn't follow the rules, and so what Bellis is saying is, It doesn't matter whether you believed it, or what your beliefs are based on right now, because that issue has come and gone. You had the chance to litigate it. You decided not to follow our rules when litigating it, and I had no other choice but to sanction you by deciding the issue of liability.

That is, unless plaintiffs decide to raise questions of motive themselves. If Mattei and his colleagues suggest, as they have, that Jones motive was money, that allows Jones to offer a counter argument.

ONeill called it a calculated high-risk, high-reward scenario. Every time the plaintiffs lawyers raise political issues, Jones lawyer, Norm Pattis, says they opened the door.

Injecting some of these things into the case certainly does arouse more negative emotions toward Alex Jones when they frame it in their way, ONeill said. But it does allow opportunities for Pattis in the defense to start injecting some of these other things that can create more distractions, or also create more justifications in the minds of some folks that might be deciding this.

On the day of the Sandy Hook shooting, literally as the parents were learning that their children had died, Jones was on the air claiming that the massacre was a manufactured false flag operation intended to take away his and his viewers Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Plaintiffs have argued in court that Jones was essentially fear-mongering, that his real motivation was and remains money.

It's come out in the trial so far that he had sponsors, advertisers that were gun manufacturers, and that they were courting other gun manufacturers as advertisers, said University of Connecticut journalism professor Amanda J. Crawford.

The Second Amendment has been, to some degree, a pivot point on which the strategies of both the plaintiffs and defense have rested. When Pattis questions a plaintiff on the stand, he asks whether or not they knew how Jones felt about the Second Amendment, and how the shooting changed their anti-gun activism.

He wants to convince the jury that the goal of the plaintiffs is to silence Jones free speech to talk about guns, that this is a plot to undermine Jones because they don't like what he believes about guns, Crawford said.

There is a connection between mass shootings and gun sales, as Dunlap said: Every time that there is a mass shooting or some other atrocity involving guns, that the sale of guns would go up, because the manufacturers and organizations like the National Rifle Association would say, OK, now they're going to come after your guns.

Claiming that your Second Amendment rights are at risk is a business and advocacy strategy Dunlap said has been going on for years, for decades. Proposals for gun legislation may make it harder for certain people to get guns, those laws are not unconstitutional, he said.

Though he said he disagrees with the substance of Jones arguments disagree with them in a big way Dunlap said using the Bill of Rights to defend your beliefs is, in and of itself, why the Bill of Rights exists.

There aren't very many individual protections in the Constitution itself, but in the Bill of Rights, in the post Civil War amendments, are a lot of rights that I think people are entirely justified in using to protect their behavior, he said.

Jones cannot speak on the record, in court, about the First Amendment, something Crawford sees as a bit of a missed opportunity.

Jones spread misinformation about a national (and local) tragedy. A discussion on the record, in court on where First Amendment protections begin and end might have been valuable to our society.

The court has said that because he didn't cooperate, he can't make his First Amendment argument, she said. Does that help our conversation about what is misinformation, what's allowed in the First Amendment? Not at all.

The default judgment is good for the families, Crawford said. It means they dont actually have to prove liability, just the extent of the damage Jones caused. But that also means the discourse is limited.

If you're looking at this as a case that is important in our current moment, about how do we deal with misinformation through the institutions that exist, from an academic perspective its somewhat disappointing that we don't get to have a trial that deals with the merits of this case, she said.

Jones did not explicitly name many of the people who are suing him (though he did name and publicly mock father Robbie Parker, who took the stand recently). But there will be no serious discussion about what Crawford called the finer points of libel.

There will be no arguments about whether or not his speech was protected by the First Amendment, she said. There'll be no arguments about group libel, and whether or not he actually libeled, defamed or inflicted emotional distress on individuals that he did not name.

The default judgment may have been warranted, Crawford said, but it hands Jones a talking point, the ability to claim on television, in press conferences and everywhere else outside of the courtroom, that his rights have been stolen.

He will forever be able to argue that he didn't have a trial on the merits, that he was hamstrung by the legal system, she said. He gets to prove his argument that they were out to get him.

He gets to say that this was the government going after his First Amendment rights, because he didn't get to make that case, she said.

Originally posted here:
How Alex Jones twists the Constitution in his Sandy Hook trial - Danbury News Times