Last year’s Supreme Court decision in the Bruen case is “upending gun laws across the country,” Huffington Post says (see story here).
That’s because the court changed the rules about how gun laws are reviewed for constitutionality, in a way that’s very bad for public safety, to wit: “Judges should no longer consider whether the law serves public interests like enhancing public safety, the [conservative] justices said.” As a result,
“Courts in recent months have declared unconstitutional federal laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, felony defendants and people who use marijuana. Judges have shot down a federal ban on possessing guns with serial numbers removed and gun restrictions for young adults in Texas and have blocked the enforcement of Delaware’s ban on the possession of homemade ‘ghost guns.'”
The conservative justices who engineered this monstrosity are elevating rightwing ideology above common sense and practical necessity. Allow persons awaiting trial for violent crimes and convicted wife-beaters to have guns? Conservative ideology says yes. Republican politicians say yes. The Supreme Court’s conservatives say yes.
But that’s not what America wants. This extreme interpretation of a vague constitutional provision comes nowhere close to representing the views or wants of a vast majority of Americans. But public opinion be damned; an aggressive minority political faction has decreed that everybody can have guns, and now 6-year-olds are bringing guns to first grade class (a teacher has already been shot).
This is idiocy on steroids, and justifies whatever political maneuvering it takes to defang this out-of-control Supreme Court majority. After all, it was underhanded political maneuvering that put a conservative majority on the court that is wildly out of sync with both public opinion and the public interest. It borders on judicial tyranny.
To get to its absurd gun rulings, the rightwing justices adopted a stance that conforms to the gun practices of long-dead generations who lived on the edge of wilderness over 220 years ago and hunted for food and fended off Indian attacks.
What they’re saying is “this is what the Second Amendment meant 220 years ago, and it can never change.” C’mon, give us an effing break. That’s stupid. The Founding Fathers aren’t Moses, and the Constitution isn’t the Word of God engraved in stone. It’s the social contract we agree to abide by to hold our disputatious society together in the here and now.
But by their own reasoning, the rightwing justices are full of it. The “traditional gun customs” they hold holy don’t include AR-15s, 100-round drum magazines, laser sights, silencers, filing off serial numbers, or letting toddlers take guns to school. If the Second Amendment means what they say it does, then nobody can have anything except flintlock muzzle-loading muskets (rifling not allowed) and pistols. Period.
A court decision that isn’t well-reasoned is weak law; one that’s purely arbitrary, and politically motivated, is illegitimate law. I’m certainly not saying the Second Amendment should be ignored; it clearly gives states the right to arm their National Guard units. But this court is bending it so far out of shape, the court has become a public menace. When American citizens get tired enough of getting shot, and their children getting shot, Congress may begin taking a look at its options for reforming the court so it’s a court again.