A Call to Arms at the Supreme Court

[Elderberry]

NY Times by Linda Greenhouse 1/3/2019

Conservative judges worry that the Second Amendment has become “a second-class right.”

A specter is haunting the Supreme Court — disrespect for the Second Amendment. Perhaps you haven’t realized that the Supreme Court’s disinclination to expand on its landmark 2008 decision creating an individual right to gun ownership means that the justices are treating the Second Amendment as a “second-class right.” A “watered-down right.” A “disfavored right.”

If you are unaware of these outlandish claims, then you haven’t tuned into the rising chorus of judicial voices demanding more from the Supreme Court than gun fanciers already won in that intensely disputed 5-to-4 decision a decade ago, District of Columbia v. Heller.

Why is this happening, and why now? To understand why the “second-class right” meme is suddenly penetrating the judicial conversation, we have to begin with Justice Clarence Thomas. He is not the first member of the current Supreme Court to use the phrase; Justice Samuel Alito Jr. used it in his 2010 opinion that extended the analysis of the Heller decision, which had applied only to Washington, D.C., as a federal enclave, to the states. The court was being asked, Justice Alito wrote in McDonald v. City of Chicago, “to treat the right recognized in Heller as a second-class right,” which he said the court would not do.

But it is Justice Thomas who has taken up the phrase as a weapon, using it in a series of opinions over the past four years to accuse his colleagues of failing in their duty to keep pushing back against limitations on gun ownership and use. The opinions were all dissents from the court’s decisions not to hear particular gun-rights appeals.

In 2015, for example, he wrote that the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit had been wrong to uphold an Illinois city’s ban on assault weapons, and that by refusing to hear the appeal, his colleagues had failed to “prevent the Seventh Circuit from relegating the Second Amendment to a second-class right.”

Last year, objecting to the court’s decision not to hear a challenge to California’s 10-day waiting period for gun purchases, Justice Thomas mused that “I suspect that four members of this court would vote to review a 10-day waiting period for abortions.” He declared, “The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this court’s constitutional orphan.”

In another opinion, this time joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Thomas said it was “indefensible” and “untenable” for the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to have upheld California’s ban on carrying concealed weapons. By turning down the appeal, he wrote, the justices were enabling “the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right.” And in a remarkable concluding paragraph to his eight-page opinion, he added:

“For those of us who work in marbled halls, guarded constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous. But the Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense. I do not think we should stand by idly while a state denies its citizens that right, particularly when their very lives may depend on it.”

By calling attention to Justice Thomas’s Second Amendment crusade, I want to make four points.

More: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/opinion/guns-second-amendment-supreme-court.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

[Smokin Joe]

THe writers interpretation of Heller, applied to the first Amendment, would leave her free to scribble on the walls of her home, and perhaps she should. To go back and read the Second Amendment, the phrase is ...the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
I don't think the gentlemen who penned that Amendment meant free to carry them around your living room, but to keep one handy in case the need arose--i.e. on one's person (or within reach) at all times a person thought it appropriate.

The author further presumes that the actions of some state legislatures have been conducted with the full approval of their constituents. That is seldom enough the case, that making such assumptions as the passage of additional gun control legislation heralds a sea change in public opinion that the Second Amendment should be relegated to the back of the Constitutional bus, or perhaps, even thrown under it, is a shabby method of canvassing public opinion.

Instead, it is more likely a projection of the author's personal ideology and prejudices. While my personal contacts may be a limited group, NONE of them advocate additional gun control legislation, in fact, most would do away with many of the senseless constraints on a fundamental Right which currently exist.

Lest the author forget, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to secure the other Rights held by the People against Governments' avarice for power.  To advocate for infringements on that Right is only to subvert the very purpose, and in effect to embrace a more totalitarian way of life. Without the means to secure those Rights, the demise of any but Government approved writing, or indeed, thought is imminent.

Thankfully, despite the pressure of the communist MSM and their sycophants, we have been blessed with sufficient dissent on the Court to keep this issue from dying, and may yet be blessed with a resurgence in the Right to Keep and Bear Arms despite the foul machinations of those who would advance their desire for power over the fundamental Rights of the People.

[Fishrrman]

Linda Greenhouse?
The New York Times?
The Second Amendment?

C'mon...
Don' be wastin' my time!