Gun insanity started in 2008 when the Supreme Court ruled in the District of Columbia v. Heller case. The District of Columbia had passed a law that banned handguns. SCOTUS struck it down. They ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.
This egregious misinterpretation of the Constitution stands as the most irrational SCOTUS decision since it ruled that a human being was property in the Dred Scott decision. I mean, what part of “well ordered militia” did SCOTUS not understand? But that’s a different argument.
In this article, I will show that those of us who don’t want America to become a place where everybody has guns and you can get shot simply by walking down the street actually have a chance to succeed, even with District of Columbia v. Heller.
Just as a historical footnote, the Dred Scott decision has never been specifically repudiated by SCOTUS. Congress simply ignored the Dred Scott decision when they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. That stands now as a different kind of precedent. It shows that Congress can and has simply ignored the court and its decisions. The principle of “judicial review,” the idea that SCOTUS can rule that congressional acts are unconstitutional in the first place, is not in the Constitution anywhere. That principle was established by precedent in exactly the same way. In Marbury v. Madison, SCOTUS just started doing it, and they’ve been doing it ever since. Conservatives who argue that the court should never go beyond the Constitution should realize that the court has been doing exactly that since 1803.
On Dec. 7, SCOTUS passed up a perfect chance to strike down a gun law that was passed by the good city of Highland Park, Ill., in Friedman v. City of Highland Park. Highland Park passed a town ordinance that bans semiautomatic assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. The aggrieved deer hunters of Highland Park couldn’t use their military-grade weapons to cut down trees while blasting away at Bambi. (Sigh! It is next to Deerpark, Ill.) This wasn’t the first opportunity that SCOTUS has had to strike a blow for Americans packing heat. According to the New York Times, “Since [the Heller decision], the court has turned away appeals in any number of Second Amendment challenges to gun control laws.”
Justices Scalia and Thomas (aka “Tony the Cannon” and “Tommygun Thomas”) were hopping mad about it. They wrote a dissenting opinion castigating their fellow justices severely for not reaffirming the principle laid down in the Heller decision, viz. that their fellow Americans can haul around any damn weapons they want from TOW anti-tank missiles on down. (You never know when you might feel threatened by town hall. A TOW missile through the front door will solve that problem!) From their dissent, “several Courts of Appeals — including the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the decision below — have upheld categorical bans on firearms.” Like, “HOW DARE THOSE DASTARDLY COURTS OF APPEALS ALLOW FIREARMS TO BE BANNED! Well … they did dare. And seven other justices seem okay about it. (Maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg should start carrying a sidearm to protect herself from the wrath of Tommygun Thomas.)
Let’s go back and examine the Heller decision again. According to Scalia and Thomas in their dissent, the Heller decision gives us the right to own guns “for self-defense within the home.” Tommygun added that the Heller decision “holds that a law banning the possession of handguns in the home … violates the Second Amendment.”
So there you have it. Even the most rabid, gun-loving justices on the court admit that the Heller decision doesn’t protect the right to walk down the street armed to the teeth with assault rifles and grenades. Those laws were added by our elected representatives. This is why Tony the Cannon and Tommygun wanted to hear the case. They wanted to add that to the Heller decision.
It is a myth encouraged by the NRA that the Heller decision and the Second Amendment give people the right to walk around loaded like a storm trooper. Like Mickey Mouse in Disney’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” it appears that a majority of SCOTUS now understands how badly they messed up in the Heller decision, and they’re not going to make it worse.
Highland Park is just a town in Illinois. The thought occurred to me that we could pass a law like Highland Park in Springdale. Utah is big on local control, but not in the case of guns. Highland Park can decide for themselves if they want weapons of war to be legal there. But in Utah, the state legislature has taken that right away. The municipality of Salt Lake City probably would have passed a law by now if they could. In fact, the Utah legislature has bent over backwards to make Utah one of the most gun-friendly states in America. You can check out our laws in comparison with other states at Wikipedia.
I didn’t think the legislature could pass laws that were worse than the liquor laws, but they did!
