David Codrea.
Gun owners can thank supposed “originalist” Justice Antonin Scalia for perpetuating and solidifying the “confusion,” although it’s fair to suspect his motives were more deliberate than speculative.
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“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited,” Scalia volunteered, seemingly desperate to apologize for the majority ruling and to make a concession the gun-grabbers could use to later advantage.
I think Scalia was appealing to the beltway elitists for forgiveness. As we’ve observed elsewhere:
Heller offers a Second Amendment cleaned up so that it can safely be brought into the homes of affluent Washington suburbanites who would never dream of resistance-they have too much sunk into the system–but who might own a gun to protect themselves from the private dangers that, they believe, stalk around their doors at night. Scalia commonly touts his own judicial courage, his willingness to read the Constitution as it stands and let the chips fall where they may. But Heller is noteworthy for its cowardice.
Rather than being a great victory for the second amendment, I believe the Heller decision was one root of our interpretational problems with it.
Codrea does offer the remedy.
“For someone represented by the establishment as an “originalist,” Scalia’s views were anything but. In A View of the Constitution, which colleague Brian Puckett writes “was the standard constitutional law text at Harvard until 1845 and at Dartmouth until 1860,” William Rawle, “a contemporary of the Founders and the man to whom George Washington offered an appointment as the first U.S. Attorney General,” offered a vastly different opinion.
“No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people,” Rawle declared. “Such a flagitious (think “shameful,” “wicked,” “criminal,” “villainous”) attempt could only be made under some general pretense by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.”
Speaking of shameful, wicked, and criminal villains, fast-forward to the present. There is a Democrat eye-rolling feeding frenzy to strip Americans of what Continental Congress Delegate Tench Coxe called “the birthright of an American,” which he specifically identified as “every other terrible implement of the soldier.”
“[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people,” Coxe continued.”