Barak Obama Wants to Ban Your Guns

Ruling on Guns Elicits Rebuke From the Right

Four months after the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess guns, its decision is under assault " from the right.

Two prominent federal appeals court judges say that Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the case, District of Columbia v. Heller, is illegitimate, activist, poorly reasoned and fueled by politics rather than principle. The 5-to-4 decision in Heller struck down parts of a District of Columbia gun control law.

The judges used what in conservative legal circles are the ultimate fighting words: They said the gun ruling was a right-wing version of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion. Justice Scalia has said that Roe had no basis in the Constitution and amounted to a judicial imposition of a value judgment that should have been left to state legislatures.

Comparisons of the two decisions, then, seemed calculated to sting.

“The Roe and Heller courts are guilty of the same sins,” one of the two appeals court judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote in an article to be published in the spring in The Virginia Law Review.

Similarly, Judge Richard A. Posner, in an article in The New Republic in August, wrote that Heller’s failure to allow the political process to work out varying approaches to gun control that were suited to local conditions “was the mistake that the Supreme Court made when it nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade.”

Sharp criticism of a recent Supreme Court decision by federal appeals court judges is quite unusual, though these two judges " both Reagan appointees " are more outspoken than most.

It is too soon to say much about the legacy of Heller. But Judge Wilkinson said that Heller, at a minimum, represented “the worst of missed opportunities " the chance to ground conservative jurisprudence in enduring and consistent principles of restraint.”

For my part,
I prefer a natural death
but if the election went the poisonous way,
then America woud no longer exist.
It woud still be around as a solid object,
but as being " the land of the free and the home of the brave "
that woud be over and soon forgotten, as we moved inexorably
into becoming the Borg, united in slavery to the collective.

"Oralloy" wrote:

"Always Eleven to him" wrote:

Please explain how the reasoning is not tortured.

The reasoning simply follows the crystal clear language of the law. The fact that the law doesn't say what you want does not make the reasoning tortured.

But you didn't explain how it follows the "crystal clear language of the law."

BTW if the language were that "crystal clear," we wouldn't be having this discussion.

"Oralloy" wrote:

That is incorrect. The court did not in any way limit the definition of arms so that it excluded military weapons.

How do you explain, then, the Court's definition of arms? “The term was applied, then as now, to weapons that were not specifically designed for military use and were not employed in a military capacity.” Id. (emphasis added) In addition, “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” Id. at 2791-92.

nope, no judicial activism here, move along now. move along.

Barak Obama Wants to Ban Your Guns

If that's true "enduring and consistent principles of restraint", then how does one explain the textualists' willingness to overrule cases that do not comport with their understanding of the "text" of the Constitution or a statute?

Did you even read what youve posted?.
Im a gun owner and Id endorse most of the same proposals.

The gun nuts are at it again. They are declaring "I WANT TO KILL SOMETHING" again. That what self defense means to a gun nut.