Update: Candidates React to Supreme Court’s Gun Ruling
via mal contends - The Supreme Court reinterpreted the Second Amendment in its landmark decision, District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290), and found a right to own and carry a handgun.
That's okay with me. I like the result.
Quote from ScotusBlog:
Examining the words of the (Second) Amendment, the Court concluded 'we find they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation' — in other words, for self-defense. 'The inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right,' it added.I think DC v. Heller is a partisan opinion by a corrupt and partisan Supreme Court (consonant with Republican electoral strategy to ward off Democratic gains in the west), but a citizen cannot have too many rights.
Hey, we may have to remove this government, in theory, by force sometime in the future.
As for politics, I have met women who keep guns in their homes and on their person for the sake of feeling safe. What man would presume to tell a woman that she cannot feel safe?
It's time for Democrats to realize that the libertarian urge to carry a gun is not all that different from the liberty interest that is vested in the right to privacy, and in the enumerated liberties in the Bill of Rights that progressives cherish and Republicans despise.
I personally do not like guns, so I don't own them.
But the liberty interest in owning a gun is valid, even if the rightwing jurists made up their interpretation of the Second Amendment out of whole cloth and political electoral concerns.
Let's hope Obama realizes this and realizes that not everybody who owns a gun is a nut. Some people, rational people, just like guns.
Some like guns for safety, some like guns just for fun. And as Scalia and the disingenuous members of the five-four majority know, a lot of these gun-liking folks live in swing states in 2008.
I must respectfully disagree. Not that anyone who owns a gun is a nut, but that it is clear that the right to own and carry arms is a collective and not individual right and is subject to reasonable regulation.
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. has the highest gun murder rate in the world. To suggest that the government cannot regulate the use of arms, I believe, is ludicrous.
The decision left open the door for regulation:
ReplyDelete"... we do not read the Second Amendment to protect the right of citizens to carry arms for any sort of confrontation ...
"... nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”