Guns and the Judges who Love Them

De dicto or de re, that is the question

This one takes a while to get going, and they say it’s good to start a long speech with a joke¹:

Why is that joke funny? I submit it’s because the wife was asking her questions de dicto, and her husband was answering de re. I want to explore those two terms and see how they relate to Constitutional jurisprudence. Specifically, I want to consider the case of United States v. Rahimi, in which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that issuance of a restraining order against a man for threatening his girl friend cannot be grounds for taking away his gun under Federal law.²

First, some originalism for the computer age.

Here’s some simple computer code:

A=3
x=A
A=4
? x (What is x?)

This code says that x equals A. But is the code saying that x equals what A was when x was declared (3), or that x equals whatever A is when x is queried (4)? Does x refer to the original value of A or to the contemporary value of A? Either way, x must equal some version of A, i.e., the program must respect the original meaning of x, but not…