The Supreme Court Affirms An Individual Right To Bear Arms

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opinion/27fri1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

I seems to me that the New York Times editorial page used to be more intelligently reasoned and better written. The above link to their editorial on the Heller decision is a combination of the absence of legal reasoning, lots of examples of why guns are bad (interesting but irrelevant), and out and out falsehoods and misrepresentations.

Let us start with the examples of why guns being bad and are used for evil purposes. Great detail is provided in a number of example such as the shootings at Virginia Tech and more recently at Northern Illinois University and statistics about the large number of guns in the country. All of this is interesting, and factual, but it has nothing to do with whether the Constitution recognizes an individual right to bear arms. I believe the term is “red herring”.

How about the absence of legal reasoning? The New York Times claims a “radical break form 70 years of Supreme Court precedent”, but offers no legal facts. The truth is the Supreme Court has never ruled directly on whether the Second Amendment is an individual or collective right, and there is no radical break. The 70 year old case to which they are referring is United States v. Miller. Miller litigated a law enacted after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre where warring mobsters were machine gunned down a Chicago alley. The law restricted ownership of certain types of weapons that were not in general use, such as the fully automatic weapons used in the massacre. The Court agreed that the restriction was Constitutional, but in no way impeded individuals to own most types of guns.

There are only two other cases in Supreme Court history that directly rule on the second amendment. Both cases occurred after the Civil War, and neither addressed the individual verses collective right issue. The Supreme Court in Presser v Illinois did point out that the overall intention of the Bill of Rights was to restrict the federal government from infringing on individual rights. All three cases have affirmed that the right to bear arms is not unlimited, and have supported reasonable gun regulation. But the New York Times assertion that the Supreme Court ignored precedent is blatantly false.

The District of Colombia law required that any weapons kept in the home be rendered inoperative, such as by having them unloaded and disassembled. The Supreme Court ruled that such a restriction effectively bans an individual from bearing arms in the protection of his home, and is therefore effectively a ban on the individual right to bear arms.

If ever there was a case that you think would be ruled on 9 to 0, this was it. Even if you set aside the most radical members of the court, Justices Stevens and Bader-Ginsberg, the ruling should be 7 to 2. Let’s think about Justice Stevens assertion that this ruling “creates a new Constitutional right”. All of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are intended to limit the government from restricting individual actions. The drafters of the Constitution were very wary of a strong federal government. The Bill of Rights was added as amendments to the Constitution in order protect of individual rights and weaken the power of the federal government. Research shows that the founding members of the country clearly believed in an individual’s right to bear arms, separate from government service.

Antonin Scalia, who authored the majority opinion, is an originalist. He interprets the constitution on the strict construction of what it says, but also the plain original meaning of the day. In other words, when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were drafted, what was the common public meaning of the day? Justice Scalia brilliantly parses the prefatory and operative clauses of the second amendment to show how the right to bear arms is an individual right, and that maintaining an effective militia is one purpose, but not an exclusive purpose. The liberal argument that the second amendment is only a collective right that is controlled solely for the purposes of the federal government flies in the face of original intent.

If the right to bear arms, even with the use of reasonable restrictions, is untenable for our country, then we should change the constitution to make it so. Liberal judges, like Stevens, conjure up new meanings from the constitution as if it was some sort of legal ouija board. Liberal judges rely on a “right to privacy” for justifying all sorts of individual actions and behaviors. The “right to privacy” as a broad, individual right is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Using the excuse that the times have changed as cover to “reinterpret” the Constitution is the hallmark of legislating from the bench. The Constitution is not a living document. If it needs to be changed because circumstances have changed, then we should change it. In fact, many individual rights issues are not Constitutional issues at all. They are legislative issues.

I love the part where the New York Times states, “This audaciously harmful decision, which hands the far right a victory it has sought for decades…” Maybe these are the same "far right" people that make up working class families in middle America that are bitter and clinging to their guns and religion. So it is now “far right” to simply believe the constitution means what it actually says? Even Barack Obama believes that the right to bear arms is an individual right – subject to reasonable regulation, of course.