Word: gunness
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...instant celebration of the Supreme Court's ruling on a citizen's right to bear arms - and of the newly articulated "individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation" - the burly new fantasy Wanted reveals the magic that can blossom when you put a gun in the hand of a meek wage slave and tell him he was born to be a righteous killer. Directed at a pitch of gritty giddiness by the Kazakhstan-born Timur Bekmambetov, who did the DVD faves Night Watch and Day Watch, this hard-R splatter-fest about a team of sanctified...
...thousand-year-old sect of killers whose sacred mission is to end the lives of evil people before they can commit their worst crimes: "You kill one, maybe save a thousand." (It's a little like the Pre-Crime Unit in Minority Report.) The team includes a specialist in gun lore (Common) and a fat man (Konstantin Khabensky) who's sharp with knives. But Fox is the star, and in poor, confused Wesley, Sloan believes he he's found another one - that the lad must have powers passed down by his father. To prove it, he puts Wesley through...
...Supreme Court ended its 2007-2008 term by handing down a flurry of big decisions the last few days, most notably granting a constitutional protection for individuals to own guns (District of Columbia v. Heller) and banning the death penalty as punishment for the rape of a child (Kennedy v. Louisiana). These two particular cases resulted in closely contested 5-4 decisions, with justices falling lockstep into the predictable conservative and liberal factions and Justice Anthony Kennedy playing his expected role as the swing vote. But ideological blocs such as these have been a much rarer occurrence this season, belying...
...legal adviser to Obama says both cases are consistent with his previous positions. "I don't see him as moving in his statements on the death penalty or the gun case," says Cass Sunstein, a former colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago. Sunstein says Obama is "not easily characterized" on social issues, and says the Senator's support for allowing government use of the Ten Commandments in public, in some cases, is another example of his unpredictability on such issues. On the issue of gun control, he says Obama has always expressed a belief that the Second...
...center surely won't stop conservatives from using the specter of a Democratic-appointed Supreme Court to try to rally support. "Its pretty clear that if he's elected and Justice Scalia or Kennedy retires that he's going to appoint someone who's very likely to reverse [the gun control decision]," says Eugene Volokh, a professor at the UCLA School of Law. Given how Obama has been responding to the recent Supreme Court decisions, however, you're not likely to hear him talking about appointing liberal justices much between now and November...