The Volokh Conspiracy reminds us of a few relevant facts concerning Obama’s choice to be the new Attorney General. Eric Holder has taken a rather extreme position on gun control. And another source reminds us that Holder argued for the regulation of speech on the internet.
Volokh recounts the arguments in Heller as well as the midnight raid on Elian Gonzalez:
Holder played a key role in the gunpoint, night-time kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez. The pretext for the paramilitary invasion of the six-year-old’s home was that someone in his family might have been licensed to carry a handgun under Florida law. Although a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo showed a federal agent dressed like a soldier and pointing a machine gun at the man who was holding the terrified child, Holder claimed that Gonzalez “was not taken at the point of a gun” and that the federal agents whom Holder had sent to capture Gonzalez had acted “very sensitively.” If Mr. Holder believes that breaking down a door with a battering ram, pointing guns at children (not just Elian), and yelling “Get down, get down, we’ll shoot” is example of acting “very sensitively,” his judgment about the responsible use of firearms is not as acute as would be desirable for a cabinet officer who would be in charge of thousands and thousands of armed federal agents, many of them paramilitary agents with machine guns.
Many argue that the Gonzalez raid caused Al Gore to lose Florida, and thus the presidency. Florida turned blue this year, but bringing Holder back into the highest levels of government will have the Cuban community seeing red.
More at Market Watch.
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