Shot With Our Own Gun

So legal scholar Laurence Tribe now is in favor of the “individual rights” argument concerning the Second Amendment on guns, as noted here (actually, he has written in that vein for some time, and his work helped create the slippery slope that enabled the recent Parker decision that overturned Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban).

As you can read from here, Tribe is a titan of traditionally liberal causes, arguing before the Supreme Court 34 times (including Bush v. Gore in 2000), and he was instrumental in helping to overturn the infamous Texas sodomy law in 2003. He also created some lifetime enemies, unfortunately, when he blessedly opposed the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 (Scalia managed to get in right after Bork, though, the gift from Ronnie Baby that keeps on giving, as they say).

But now, we’ve lost him to the gun nuts, and we need all the help we can get on this issue. Ugh…

I wish that Tribe would instead take to heart the advice of former Supreme Court justice Warren E. Burger, who stated the following (as noted in the Times article)…

“The Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all,” Mr. Burger said in a speech. In a 1991 interview, Mr. Burger called the individual rights view “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.”

And by the way, the considerations here are a lot more than the type you’d find in a classroom…

Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.

“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”

And despite what anyone says about the Supremes wanting to take a pass on second-amendment cases, I think the court of “Hangin’ Judge” J.R. just can’t wait to rule on this in support of the so-called “individual rights” argument.

(And with all due respect to The Gun-Toting Liberal here, I think he is flat, dead wrong about the SCOTUS and other matters here, and if there’s one thing I’m fed up with out of my mind, it’s this paranoid idea that anyone who supports gun control wants to steal guns from people who observe the law and own the weapons legitimately; for the record, I categorically oppose confiscation under those circumstances.)

And finally on this, I leave you with this nonsense from Joe Lieberman Weekly, otherwise known as The New Republic; what’s their great idea in this whole argument? Why, abolish the Second Amendment altogether.

Brilliant!