TexasCHLforum.com

mmestx wrote:Just a quick question. If the judge had ruled in favor of 18 year olds being able to buy handguns would that only affect his courts jurisdiction? Furthermore, by tossing the lawsuit and having it appealed, would the appellate court have a larger jurisdictional area? So, idealy, we would want this lawsuit to go up to the supreme court so that the decision would affect the whole country, correct?

If we had won that case in that court and assuming that there would be no follow up appeal from the government that ruling would only have applied to the plaintiff(s). A good strategy for the defense in that case would have been not to appeal in order to avoid a precedent setting ruling at the appellate level which would kill the case and require that we start a new one in order to get what we want.

Before we go and start a revolution, lets consider that this ruling is actually a good thing for our side. We have lost nothing at this point, and we get to appeal it and move the case on quicker than we would have otherwise. Remember that civil rights litigation is a strange creature that seems to move randomly, however even defeats can be counted as victories when they let the process move forward faster. An excellent example of defeats actually helping us was with McDonald V. Chicago, that case made its way through the court system and to the supreme court extremely quickly because of rulings just like this one.