To: Neeka who wrote (242767 ) 3/19/2008 12:08:03 PM From: gamesmistress Respond to Dahlia Lithwick went on and on about the grizzly bear theme, implying that Kennedy thought the average citizen needed a gun to protect himself against grizzlies today - in fact, that's the title of her column - "Bearing Arms … Against Bears. Justice Kennedy thinks D.C. residents need protection—from grizzlies." No mention of the average citizen's right (and need!) of self-defense from the modern-day urban version of the grizzly, of course. I don't wonder that the DC lawyer, Dellinger, was having trouble with arguments like these (assuming Lithwick was quoting him correctly):Dellinger opens by whooshing us back in time to the framers, who, he says, used the words "bear arms" to mean "rendering a military service." Chief Justice John Roberts immediately asks why the framers wrote "the right of the people" if they merely meant "the right of the militia." Justice Kennedy spoils any suspense by telling Dellinger, in the form of a question, that he has no problem "de-linking" the two clauses to read the first as "reaffirming" the right to a militia and the second as enshrining a right to bear arms. Justice Antonin Scalia does Kennedy one better and contends that the two phrases "go together beautifully." That's five votes to create a fundamental right to bear arms, only eight minutes into the argument.Dellinger warns that for the court to view the Second Amendment as conferring "a fundamental liberty interest"—unmoored from the militia rationale—risks undermining state and local government regulations on guns. When Kennedy goes even further back in time to the English bill of rights in 1689, Scalia starts fretting about the Scottish highlanders and Roman Catholics, for whom he worries in the manner of Kennedy and the grizzly bears.Dellinger replies that the handgun ban is only on "one kind of weapon that's considered especially dangerous," to which Roberts retorts, "So if you have a law that prohibits the possession of books, it's all right to ban newspapers?" Dellinger replies that the rifles and shotguns permitted under the D.C. ban are sufficient to carry out the purposes of the gun owner. [since you have to keep them locked and unloaded or broken apart, what purposes could they carry out?] He adds that the rationale used by the D.C. appeals court would make it harder for "machine guns or armor-piercing bullets" to be regulated. Dellinger contends that handguns can be more dangerous than other guns. They can be "taken into schools, into buses, into government office buildings." Samuel Alito and Dellinger then tussle over whether there is a self-defense exception to the D.C. law, and, as has happened rather frequently on Roberts' watch, Dellinger is given extra time to finish his argument. Dellinger asks the court to avoid turning every phrase of the Second Amendment into a "libertarian right." A well-regulated militia isn't about everyone owning a gun willy-nilly.[This one really frosts my shorts] The Constitution does not create some kind of sacred, fundamental right to guns. If there's a right here at all, he says, it's at the "penumbra of the periphery" of the Constitution: in a shack behind the river where the other unenumerated rights huddle.
