Slate "The Supreme Court created a gun rights crisis its unwilling to solve."

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/the_supreme_court_created_a_gun_rights_crisis_it_s_unwilling_to_solve.html

Bloody Heller

The Supreme Court created a gun rights crisis it’s unwilling to solve.

By Dahlia Lithwick

After Sunday night’s horrific gun massacre in Las Vegas, here’s a question that is at once lingering and pointless: When is it permissible to discuss gun control in the wake of a disaster? Were we to follow Marc Thiessen’s advice and not dare discuss gun policy while bodies are warm on the ground, we would never discuss gun policy ever. There is, on average, at least one mass shooting a day in this country. The bodies on the ground will never cool. Congress, too, is effectively paralyzed by the power of the gun lobby and promises from Republican leadership that they will have a good hard look at whether there is some causal relationship between lethal gun massacres and guns as soon as the “dust settles.”

There is, of course, another branch of government that has the institutional capacity to consider the relationship between guns and personal liberty. This entity might do so free from the encumbrances of inflamed popular sentiment and the scourge of corrosive dark money, and could perhaps even use actual statistics—data the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been bullied into staying away from. This magical arm of our federal apparatus would be the Supreme Court, which unleashed upon the nation in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the previously undiscovered constitutional proposition that the right to bear arms is an individual one. Then, two years later, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the court told us that the rule enunciated in Heller applied in all the states and not just in the District of Columbia.

In the intervening seven years, we’ve had no more elaboration on the nature of that right from the same court that scrupulously cautioned—as Justice Antonin Scalia put it in Heller —that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” After decades in which the courts had concluded that there was no individual right to bear arms—Chief Justice Warren Burger, a zealous conservative, famously called the individual rights argument a “fraud”—the majority in Heller changed course, found a right, and then also waved their arms saying that of course this right could be subject to regulation, in terms of where weapons could be carried and the types of arms that could be regulated. As Scalia clarified in Heller: “We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms … that the sorts of weapons protected were those ‘in common use at the time.’ We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”


The Supreme Court, then, has both announced that there is a personal right to bear arms, which is what the gun lobby had been begging for, and also announced that it is permissible to regulate that right, which is what government has continued to do. Indeed, lower courts continue to uphold all sorts of regulations and the gun lobby continues to hoot and holler that they are all unconstitutional. All the while, the Supreme Court has refused to act, leaving a massive Scalia-shaped hole in the doctrine. We know now that we have a “right” and that it implicates our “freedom,” but the Supreme Court has left us to guess at what the contours of that right and that freedom might be. And into that vacuum, the gun industry has continued to promote and froth up a mythology about the necessity of armed vigilantes pushing back on a tyrannical government, a mythology disproved once and for all by the events in Las Vegas, as Matt Taibbi notes in Rolling Stone.

snip - more to read at the link

[MyOwnPeace]

1. and we CERTAINLY know..........

THIS Supreme Court is not going to be of any help!

[procon]

2. Name any other other disaster with hundreds of casualties where the government

refused to even discuss the tragedy immediately and begin working on a solution to minimize future destruction. This is just political cowardice!

[world wide wally]

3. Ultimately they are as much to blame as the NRA and it should be said more often.

Their interpretation of the 2A is perverted and I think 4 of them know it.

[SharonAnn]

4. They also created a campaign funding crisis they're unwilling to solve.