‘Dangerous or Unusual’

Mike McIntire and Eli Murray, reporting for The New York Times (gift link)

For nearly two decades, judges across the country have invoked this language to strike down gun-control laws. It is a pivotal legal test.

It is also based on a misquote.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, attributed the “dangerous and unusual” language to Sir William Blackstone, an 18th-century English jurist whose writings became the basis for much of American law.

But in his seminal 1769 treatise, “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” Blackstone referred to weapons that were “dangerous or unusual,” suggesting that a gun did not need to be both in order to be restricted.

I’ve written before that Heller overturned two centuries of Supreme Court interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. The current interpretation — literally the NRA’s interpretation — was characterized by former Chief Justice Warren Burger as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

So it’s not like anything needs to rest on this and-vs.-or misquoting of something William Blackstone wrote before the United States was even founded. But, still, it’s interesting nonetheless how often the gun-fetish jurists like to cite the misquoting. The government should, and can, regulate unusually dangerous weapons.

★ Wednesday, 11 November 2026