In the words of New York Times reporter Adam Liptak, “So far, Heller is shooting blanks.”
Liptak was writing nine months after the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia vs. Heller, a gun-control decision that discovered in the Second Amendment an individual right to firearms that the country’s highest tribunal had not noticed before.
Portions of a law that all but banned private ownership of pistols in the nation’s capital, were, the justices said, unconstitutional. Local governments coast to coast braced for Heller-inspired lawsuits challenging bans on possession of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, gun ownership by such people as convicted felons and illegal aliens, and the like.
In the eighty-plus gun-rights cases decided since, lower courts have always upheld gun-control statutes. University of California law professor Adam Winkler told Liptak, “The Heller case is a landmark decision that has not changed very much at all. To date, the federal courts have not invalidated a single gun control law on the basis of the Second Amendment since Heller. So far the only real change from Heller is that gun owners have to pay higher legal fees to find out that they lose.”
Regular readers of this occasional blog know why. It has to do with the mistaken notion that the founding fathers intended the Bill of Rights to guarantee the liberties it enumerates against encroachment by the states. They did not. The Bill of Rights, originally, safeguarded those liberties only from federal encroachment.
After the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment during Reconstruction, the high court began to use its due process clause to enforce some, but not all, of the Bill of Rights against the states. Things like the First Amendment and the Fourth. But the Second Amendment falls in that “not all” category, and applies directly to the citizens of Washington only because the District is not a state but a creature of the federal government.
It’s even money that the Supreme Court will find an opportunity to broaden the reach of Heller. Or maybe not. Until it does, the impact is pretty much limited to the District of Columbia. University of Texas law professor Stanford Levinson told Liptak, “My own bet is that Heller will more likely than not turn out to be of no significance to anyone but constitutional theorists.”
There is fundamental illogic in the previous comment.
By definition, all of the gun violence committed in either Texas or Washington, D.C., has to have been committed by gun owners. A person can’t shoot someone with a gun unless that person has one.
To my mind, the comment is typical of what passes for “reasoned debate” among the pro-pistol crowd.
By the way, didn’t Texas secede once before? How did that work out for the state? Of course, then it was over the constitutional right to own people, not firearms.
What is so maddening to me is that every time there is a shooting incident, they try to blame gun ownership. Texas, where I live, has more guns than people and we have less gun violence than DC where guns are banned!!! Tell me it has to do with gun ownership!!! It has to do with morons who use violence to solve their problems. If it weren't guns, it would be something else.
If banning of guns becomes an issue, that will probably make Texas secede for sure. I don't think there is anyone who can disarm Texas. They will likely die trying.
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