What it means for gun rights if Scalia’s replacement is a liberal
This week, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz warned that Antonin Scalia’s death leaves us “one justice away from the Second Amendment being written out of the Constitution altogether.” Although I share the Texas senator’s concern about the fate of the right to keep and bear arms if a Democrat nominates Scalia’s replacement, the short-term consequences may be less dramatic than Cruz implies.
Writing for the five-justice majority in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 decision in which the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to armed self-defense, Scalia said that right was violated by a law that banned handguns and required owners of long guns to disable them with trigger locks or keep them unloaded and disassembled. But he strongly implied that nearly every other existing gun control law would pass constitutional muster.
Scalia wrote that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
He also said the Second Amendment applies only to weapons “in common use for lawful purposes,” a condition that seems designed to justify any pre-existing national ban, and mentioned “prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons'” as “another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms.”
http://nypost.com/2016/02/17/what-it-means-for-gun-rights-if-scalias-replacement-is-a-liberal/
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