Interesing background on the 2nd amendment
How U.S. gun ownership became a ‘right,’ and why it isn’t
Excerpts:
Until 2002, every U.S. president and government had declared that the Constitution’s Second Amendment did not provide any individual right for ordinary citizens to own firearms. Rather, it meant what its text clearly states: that firearms shall be held by “the People” – a collective, not individual right – insofar as they are in the service of “a well-regulated militia.”
The U.S. Supreme Court had never, until 2008, suggested even once that there was any such right. Warren Burger, the arch-conservative Supreme Court justice appointed by Richard Nixon, in an interview in 1991 described the then-new idea of an individual right to bear arms as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Then in 2008, in a reversal of all its precedents and a bizarre overturning of mainstream legal and historical scholarship, the Supreme Court ruledthat there is indeed an individual right to own weapons (though one with limits). It was a court loaded with extreme-fringe figures, such as the decision’s author Antonin Scalia, appointed by Republican presidents in acts of partisan vengeance.
The individual right to bear arms is only a few years old, and based on nothing; its fall could be as quick as its rise. Once the Supreme Court has two more appointments by Democratic presidents, it will eventually provide a correct interpretation of the amendment, the interpretation Americans knew and respected for 217 years.
theglobeandmail.com
Difficult to believe that the individual right will ever be overturned. |
