He's right to some extent.
The rights of the American people hinge on our right to keep and bear arms. The abillity to resist violently, and even move on our own goverment if we're ignored is the root of our power. Guys like Martin Luthor King Jr. understood this, non-violent protests and the like base their power in violence, it's a show of force and solidarity "do what we want, or next time we'll come back with weapons". Oh sure it's dressed up a bit, but that is what it amounts to. It's better to make a show of force, than to actually inflict violence. However for it to work people have to believe your going to actually fight if you don't get what you want.
All of the petitions and bold statements in the world don't make one bit of differance to any branch of the goverment, especially when the people holding the offices might have personal benefits to be gained by doing whatever it is they want to do.
Right now, the big question here is whether or not enough people in our Supreme Court have enough vested interest in backing free speech, than supressing it. By the letter of the law, this should be an open and shut thing, with games remaining unregulated, however the big question arises as to what we, the people who are going to be affected by this, are going to do about it if they make the other desician?
In the end we're not going to do anything. For all the trash talking you might see on the internet from time to time, I'd be surprised if even one gamer got up and decided to gun down a politician over this, or made even a pathetic attempt to kill a Supreme Court Justice... never mind the kind of massive rally that would be needed to actually change anything. Our society is designed so that the authorities can deal with an armed individual, or even a small group of such people, but not with massive uprisings.
With no threat of armed insurrection, what we are ultimatly banking on is whether or not the game industry is going to offer more surpreme court justices a better deal, than the politicians opposing them. Cynical, but that's what it comes down to. The people cannot influance a bureaucracy on it's own terms, which is why in the US Constitution we were given the inalienable right to arm ourselves, that's something that cannot be ignored. Even if the volunteers in the military were to attack the people on behalf of the goverment, when the smoke cleared there would be nothing left for the politicians to rule over.
If this was about what the laws actually said, this case would not be being heard to begin with. It was pretty imprssive just that this was going to be heard before the Supreme Court given the way they operate, and previous rulings. While cynical, that pretty much means that they decided to open bidding.
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While unrelated I will also say that Jaffe's example was awful. While the media does lead people to believe that there is a left wing majority, there really isn't one. Or at least not a clear majority. Our nation is polarized 50-50, and has been for quite a while. Back in 2000 there was no real reason to interfere in the election as such tiny percentages of victory were to be expected. People tend to think Obama won the last election by a landslide, but he only had a 7% lead in the vote, which is only signifigant because of how the nation is polarized.
People who complain about the "Dubya" elections frequently seem to think that there was this massive majority of people who didn't like him, and that somehow a minority put their guy into power. That has never been true. The very fact that so many people think this kind of thing is why there is so much discussion about left wing media slant. It gives people who side with the left the perception that a lot more people agree with that side of things than actually do. In reality there is pretty much 1 person on the right for every person on the left. It flucuates a few percentage points here and there, but it's a deadlock.
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At any rate, I hope for the best, but I'll be blunt: As Heinlan put it, it's naive for people to think that they can have anything they want simply by voting for it, or wagging their lips. Anything worth having, especially freedom, must constantly be fought for.
Problems like the one we're dealing with are because we, the American people, have become increasingly softer with each generation, and this is exploited by our politicians who are increasingly corrupt because nobody is willing to take any kind of effort to do anything besides whine about it.
As Heinlan also put it, "You can either have freedom, or you can have safety, never both".
The fact that those of us who are going to be affected by rulings like this won't actually do anything that will compromise our safety, is exactly why we're in danger of losing our freedom.
