The Supreme Court made a ruling today which orders a lower federal court to reconsider its previous ruling regarding Chicago’s ban on handguns. It’s likely that ban will fall.
I don’t so much have a problem with extending certain gun rights to more owners. My passion on the issue isn’t as strong as, say, that of kooks like John Lott, but it does bother me how the purely political right-wing justices have routinely been ruling on these issues. This is how the Second Amendment reads:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The spirit of the law is in the regulation of a militia, something relevant and needed in the time the amendment was written. The only way it should be applied today is insofar as there is a need for gun ownership. It can be argued that the Chicago ban on guns runs counter to a genuine need for protection, even outside the existence of a militia, but the purely political right-wing of the Supreme Court never argues that. They simply ignore the opening clause. Under their misunderstanding of both the spirit of the law and basic grammar, there should eventually be a right to keep and bear nuclear weapons for the average citizen under the constitution.
It’s often a problem that people think we ought to be beholden to the times and wishes of the framers, but in this case just the opposite is true. The purely political right-wing of the Supreme Court is ignoring the common sense of the framers while outright discarding the context of their times. The consequence of this obvious mistake may not be grave, but their argumentation is weak and embarrassing.
Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: Chicago, Gun rights, John Lott, Supreme Court | 11 Comments »
For the Sake of Science 