A reader who signs as Quickwrit provided the following comment. Quickwrit described the Heller decision, written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. The decision overturned a D.C. law that prevented people from keeping handguns in their homes.
In his address to Americans on gun control, President Biden quoted from the Supreme Court’s Heller Ruling — a ruling which pro-gun advocates think was a huge victory for them…but they haven’t read the ENTIRE ruling: On pages 54-55 of their Heller decision, the CONSERVATIVE majority of the Court gave Congress and state lawmakers a guideline for presumptively constitutional gun control action.
Why hasn’t anyone previously focused on pages 54-55 of Heller on which the Supreme Court has provided lawmakers an action plan?
As President Biden noted in his address to our nation, in Heller the conservative Justices provide blanket approval for various kinds of gun control, declaring: “Like most rights, THE RIGHT SECURED BY THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS NOT UNLIMITED…” [it is] “…not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
Then the conservative Justices invite enactment of specific gun control laws by clearly pointing out which laws they would approve of, declaring: “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 on 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.”
The conservative Justices additionally state: “We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller [an earlier case decided by the Supreme Court] said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those ‘in common use at the time’ [when the 2nd Amendment was written]. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons’.” There were no automatic or semi-automatic guns “in common use at the time” the Second Amendment was written.
The CONSERVATIVE majority DID NOT HAVE TO write these things into their ruling — but they did in order to give lawmakers a clear path to constitutional gun control. The Court put the gun control ball into the hands of lawmakers.
[Please feel free to copy and share this information with your Friends and tell them to do the same because the more people who know about the Supreme Court’s ruling on constitutional gun control, the more likely it will happen.]
You can read the Court’s Heller ruling at:
