Do Gun Rights Depend on Abortion Rights? That's Now Up to the Supreme Court. by Linda Greenhouse
'It might have looked like a coincidence that questions of abortion and guns both reached the Supreme Court in the same week. But it wasn’t, really. Powerful social movements have devoted years to steering these two issues toward a moment of truth in a court reshaped in large measure by those same movements.
Recall that in the Rose Garden ceremony in September of last year in which President Donald Trump introduced his third Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to the country, he couldn’t refrain from observing that “rulings that the Supreme Court will issue in the coming years will decide the survival of our Second Amendment.” The president didn’t mention abortion. Given his nominee’s well-known opposition to Roe v. Wade, he didn’t have to.
So, perhaps inevitably, it has come to this: One right, established for nearly half a century, faces erasure, while the other, extracted 13 years ago from a contorted reading of an 18th-century text, may be poised for an ahistoric expansion.
Little emerged in the arguments this week to knock the rights to abortion and gun possession off these apparent trajectories. Although the consensus seems to be that a majority of the justices may not permit Texas to get away with walling off its appalling anti-abortion law from judicial challenge, the fate of the actual right to abortion itself depends not on the pair of Texas cases the court heard this week, but on the case from Mississippi it will hear on Dec. 1.
And on the Second Amendment case, a challenge to New York State’s limits on licenses for carrying a concealed weapon, there was little surprise that a majority appeared ready to interpret the Constitution to require a substantial expansion of individual gun rights.
Still, something interesting did emerge from the proximity of the week’s arguments. The Texas law, S.B. 8, seeks to take state officials out of the role of enforcing the ban on abortion that the law imposes at roughly six weeks of pregnancy. Instead, any individual may bring a private damages action for at least $10,000 against anyone who provides or enables an abortion in violation of the law. At least while Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey remain as precedents, the six-week ban is flagrantly unconstitutional. The idea of turning every citizen into a potential vigilante is to immunize state officials from a federal court lawsuit that would challenge the law’s constitutionality, on the theory that no official has anything to do with the law’s enforcement.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/abortion-guns-supreme-court.html
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