While looking about today, I found this gem from Vox, a leftwing “news” sight. Now I have no issue with liberal (or conservative) opinion sights on the Web, in hard copy print, whatever the method. What I despise is their lack of truthfulness. No one with a two digit IQ calls the NY Times an objective news source. Breitbart and the Washington Times are conservative. The difference is they don’t lie about it.
Now this “news article” got my attention by its outrage that a ruling from a federal court, in this case the Supreme Court, could overrule the gun control laws of the fifty states (or in the case of Obama, 57 states). Now I checked the link to the author, Ian Millhiser, and he is listed as a senior correspondent, a person employed by a news agency, periodical, television network, etc., to gather, report, or contribute news, articles, and the like regularly from a distant place. He is not, at least openly, recognized as an opinion writer. Well, let’s see what the correspondent says about the Supreme Court and its pending review of New York’s gun laws.
The Supreme Court will hear a major Second Amendment case that could gut US gun laws
The Supreme Court could make the NRA’s dreams come true.
By Ian Millhiser Apr 26, 2021
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett, a case that could transform the judiciary’s understanding of the Second Amendment and lay waste to many of the nation’s gun laws.
The case involves New York state’s handgun licensing law — a law that has been in place since 1913 — which requires someone who wishes to carry a handgun in public to demonstrate “proper cause” in order to obtain a license permitting them to do so…
…The plaintiffs in Corlett include a New York state gun rights group and two New York men who applied for a license to carry a handgun in public and were denied that license. They claim that “law-abiding citizens” have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun in public — and the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, could agree with them…
The man is very incorrect on one point. The Supreme Court does not have a 6-3 conservative majority (we could only hope), we have a court with six of its nine members appointed by Republican presidents. The chief justice was originally thought to be solid choice. Time has shown he is not a conservative, but a member of the sewer that’s DC.
Indeed, Corlett could potentially dismantle more than a decade of judicial decisions interpreting the Second Amendment, imposing prohibitive limits on lawmakers’ ability to reduce gun violence.
Although the plaintiffs asked the Court to rule on a broad question — “whether the Second Amendment allows the government to prohibit ordinary law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside the home for self-defense” — the justices announced on Monday that they will only resolve a more narrow question: “whether the State’s denial of petitioners’ applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment.”
Nevertheless, this narrower question is still broad enough to allow the Supreme Court to rewrite a decade of Second Amendment precedents, to unwind a consensus within the lower courts that permits many gun regulations to stand, and then to allow those lower courts to complete the process of dismantling other gun laws…
Now the author is referring to state issued gun laws and regulations, where blue states have the most restrictive. These Democratically controlled states also have the most crime. The states seem to only want to control the law abiding public’s access to firearms, not the criminal’s access to firearms. Let’s look some more.
How the Supreme Court’s current precedents approach the Second Amendment
The Second Amendment provides that “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,” and until fairly recently, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of this amendment very seriously. As the Court explained in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. Thus, the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view...”
But again, back to my quest for intellectual consistency here. Mr. Millhiser is concerned that only one half of a right is protected by an amendment. Fair enough. Are we going to re-interpret the First Amendment that the press is actually only hard paper pressed out by a manual machine? I mean, you’re only looking at half the text, why should such selective emphasis be limited to only one amendment?
Besides which, the question is, what is a militia? At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, it was every able bodied man.
Militia, military organization of citizens with limited military training, which is available for emergency service, usually for local defense...Among the Anglo-Saxon peoples of early medieval Europe, the militia was institutionalized in the fyrd, in which every able-bodied free male was required to give military service. Similar arrangements evolved in other countries…
In colonial America the militia, based on the tradition of the fyrd, was the only defense against hostile Indians during the long periods when regular British forces were not available. During the American Revolution, the militia provided the bulk of the American forces as well as a pool for recruiting or drafting of regulars. The militia played a similar role in the War of 1812 and the American Civil War…
Again, every able bodied man was required to serve if needed. And he kept his weapons for that reason. But back to the intellectual aspect, I find it interesting that a liberal, writing for a very liberal publication, is worried about having state laws overthrown by a federal court. Since the court of Earl Warren, the federal courts have made that part of their MO. For instance, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965, by a 7-2 majority, the Supreme Court created a general right to privacy, and inferred it covered contraceptives:
In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Douglas, the Court ruled that the Constitution did in fact protect the right of marital privacy against state restrictions on contraception. While the Court explained that the Constitution does not explicitly protect a general right to privacy, the various guarantees within the Bill of Rights create penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy. Together, the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments create the right to privacy in marital relations. The Connecticut statute conflicted with the exercise of this right and was therefore held null and void.
And this led to another abortion of law, Roe v. Wade:
In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Douglas, the Court ruled that the Constitution did in fact protect the right of marital privacy against state restrictions on contraception. While the Court explained that the Constitution does not explicitly protect a general right to privacy, the various guarantees within the Bill of Rights create penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy. Together, the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments create the right to privacy in marital relations. The ConnecticuInherent in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is a fundamental “right to privacy” that protects a pregnant woman’s choice whether to have an abortion. However, this right is balanced against the government’s interests in protecting women's health and protecting “the potentiality of human life.” The Texas law challenged in this case violated this right…
And Lawrence v. Texas… and Obergefell v. Hodges… and others.
The point is, for liberals, the states are just something to get around. They want a one size fits approach in all areas of law, and if the legislature doesn’t do it, they will use the one unaccountable branch of government, the courts, to push their agenda.
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