Even though "Machine Gun Sammy" would be the coolest nickname for a Supreme Court justice since "Wizzer" White, the truth must be told.

Vincent Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News sets the record straight on Alito and machine guns. (Thanks to RealClearPolitics for the heads up.)


" 'Machine Gun Sammy,' a perfect Halloween pick," is how the Brady Campaign headlined President Bush's latest Supreme Court nominee. But what the Brady activists failed to acknowledge is that Alito's dissent in the 1996 case United States v. Rybar had nothing to do with a desire to legalize machine guns and everything to do with the judge's determination to follow a Supreme Court precedent from the previous year.

In that earlier case, United States v. Lopez, the court overturned a federal law banning possession of guns within 1,000 feet of any school because the statute was an intrusion into states' regulatory arena and utterly unrelated to interstate commerce. Congress had been steadily nationalizing local criminal codes for years, and the Supreme Court finally threw up its hands and said, "Halt!"

The Constitution doesn't give the federal government the power to regulate every activity in this land, the court said. At the very least, Congress must establish some plausible link to interstate commerce.
In his Rybar dissent that is now being mocked, Alito faithfully tried to apply Lopez to a case involving the possession of machine guns. "Was United States v. Lopez a constitutional freak?" he wrote. "Or did it signify that the Commerce Clause still imposes some meaningful limits on congressional power?"

Meanwhile, not only did Alito point out how Congress might remedy the law's fatal flaws, he also noted that the "Commerce Clause does not prevent the states from regulating machine gun possession, as all of the jurisdictions within our circuit have done."

Alito didn't favor legal machine guns. He favored abiding by the supreme law of this land.