Vox has gone full Calculon proclaiming “O tears, O lamentations” over the upcoming Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, and their tears of unfathomable sadness are yummy.
The biggest Second Amendment case to reach the Supreme Court in nearly a decade, explained
Gun control supporters are desperate — and have already taken drastic steps — to get the Supreme Court to dismiss this case.
If by drastic steps, you mean a mafia-like threat to shakedown the court then yes.
This is the picture that is at the top of this Vox article.
Last January, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, the first major Second Amendment case to be heard by the Supreme Court in nearly a decade — and also the first since Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement shifted the Court dramatically to the right.
Or… a shift away from Leftist judicial activism. That’s an equally good way of putting it.
The case centers on an unusual — and recently changed — New York City rule that limited where gun owners with a certain kind of permit were allowed to bring their guns.
Gun control advocates, including policymakers in both New York City and the New York state legislature, fear a big loss in the Supreme Court and are desperate to make the case go away. Indeed, New York City changed their gun rules after the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case, and state legislators enacted a new law forbidding the city from bringing back the old rules — all in the hopes of obviating the need for the Court to weigh in. Because the legal controversy between the city and the plaintiffs is now over, the city asked the Court to dismiss this case as moot.
New York City, in a desperate attempt to make this case go away and not get hammered by the Court, eased their restrictions a tiny bit. Instead of shackling their residents by both ankles, they are shackling them by one and saying the court no longer has any reason to intervene and free the people.
New York State Rifle, in other words, is of two-fold importance. It is important because the Supreme Court’s current majority is likely to expand the scope of the Second Amendment significantly if they decide the merits of this case.
But it is also important because the debate over whether to dismiss this case will offer a window into the psychology of the Court’s Republican majority.
Like using the court to defend the Constitutionally protected rights of the people via judicial review as has been the court’s duty since 1803.
The argument that New York State Rifle must be dismissed as moot is very strong. Should the Supreme Court move forward with the case, it will only add to fears — including fears that were recently raised by Justice Sonia Sotomayor — that the Court is bending the rules in order to achieve conservative outcomes.
This is the same bullshit that Sheldon Whitehouse and the other Mafioso senators said.
A few months before his death this summer, retired Justice John Paul Stevens offered a surprisingly candid window into the Court’s internal deliberations.
In its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. The Court split along familiar ideological lines, with Kennedy joining his fellow conservatives in the 5-4 majority.
This is the narrative that always gets pushed: when the Court has a Right/Left split that the Left wins, it’s justice, when the Court has a Right/Left split that the Right wins, that partisan bad acting.
Heller, however, was hardly a total victory for advocates of gun rights. Indeed, Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion is riddled with caveats. Heller suggests that “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or 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” all remain valid, as are bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons.”
In a November interview with the New York Times’ Adam Liptak, Stevens revealed that Kennedy asked for “some important changes” to Scalia’s original draft of the Heller opinion. At Stevens’s urging, Kennedy requested language stating that Heller “should not be taken to cast doubt” on many existing gun laws. Without Kennedy’s intervention, in other words, Heller may not have included the important language limiting the scope of the Second Amendment.
It shouldn’t have. It is ridiculous just how much effort is put into limiting the scope of a Constitutional Amendment. The whole point of the Bill of Rights is to limit the scope of government, not the rights of the people. The Left has flipped this entirely upside down. Gun restrictions, when they are allowed, should be very narrow and specific and the default is to the rights of the people. The Left wants the restrictions to be the defaults and what is allowed to be narrow and specific.
What Kennedy did was wrong.
But Kennedy is gone. And his replacement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, appears very eager to expand gun rights.
Fuck yes!
Shorter after Heller was decided, the District of Columbia’s government passed legislation banning semi-automatic “assault weapons” and requiring gun owners to register their firearms. Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, also led the challenge to this new gun law, and the case — Heller v. District of Columbia — was eventually heard by a panel of three Republican-appointed judges.
Two of those judges largely upheld the law in 2011 (although they called for further proceedings on the registration requirement). The third judge was Brett Kavanaugh, who claimed that “both D.C.’s ban on semi-automatic rifles and its gun registration requirement are unconstitutional under Heller.” (This second iteration of the Heller litigation was never heard by the Supreme Court.)
You are damn right it was Unconstitutional. I can’t wait for Kavanaugh to lay the smack down on New York.
And Kavanaugh’s dissent also went even further than that. The future justice did not simply argue that this specific DC law should be struck down. He also suggested that nearly a decade of Second Amendment jurisprudence should be tossed out.
Oh yes, very much yes.
This is why the Left went all-in with false accusations of gang rape to keep him off the Court. I hope Kavanaugh gets his revenge by overturning the NFA. It’s a dish best served with belt-fed.
The Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence, in other words, is underdeveloped. In Heller, the majority basically hit a reset button that wiped out the Court’s prior Second Amendment decisions, which held that the “obvious purpose” of this amendment was “the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” not an individual right to bear arms.
Heller replaced this older framework with an uncertain new framework that emphasized an individual right to self-defense. But the Supreme Court has done little to develop that framework since Heller.
Don’t you just hate it when the Supreme Court reverses and oppressive precedent to expand the rights and liberties of American Citizens. I don’t think I am understanding it when I say Heller is the gun rights equivalent of Brown v. Board of Education.
Previous Supreme Court cases on respective matters upheld the power of the state and were a reflection of their time. US v. Miller was the last SCOTUS gun case before Heller, it took place in 1939 and established the Constitutionality of the NFA banning a short-barreled shotgun on the grounds that such a weapon was not necessary to preserve a well-regulated militia.
Heller put the Second Amendment back in the hands of the people. No framework is necessary there because as a right of the people, the default answer is “liberty.”
At least 10 such courts apply what United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Stephen Higginson describes as a “two-step analytic framework.” Under this framework, “severe burdens on core Second Amendment rights” are subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most skeptical level of review that courts typically apply in constitutional cases. “Less onerous laws, or laws that govern conduct outside of the Second Amendment’s ‘core,’” are subject to a more permissive test known as “intermediate scrutiny.”
It should be more difficult, not less, to curtail a Constitutionally protected civil right.
Kavanaugh, for his part, rejects this consensus framework altogether. In his 2011 dissent, he argued that the consensus view should be abandoned for a different test — “courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.” While it’s unclear how Kavanaugh’s test would apply in every individual case, the fact that Kavanaugh took a position well to the right of his two Republican colleagues strongly suggests that his test would invalidate more gun laws than would the consensus framework.
God, I hope so.
The plaintiffs in New York State Rifle, each of whom has a premises license, raise a very narrow challenge to this framework. As a federal appeals court explained, some of them “seek to transport their handguns to shooting ranges and competitions outside New York City.” One of them also owns two homes, and he wishes to be able to transport one gun between those two homes.
New York State Rifle, in other words, involves what Judge Higginson described as a “less onerous law” that governs “conduct outside of the Second Amendment’s ‘core.’” This isn’t a grand showdown over when and where people can carry guns — or whether they bring a gun into their own home. It’s a small legal dispute about little more than whether lawmakers can require certain gun owners to practice shooting at certain specified gun ranges.
No, it is so hyper-restrictive that it all but nullifies the Second Amendment. If the point of the Second Amendment is the right to self-defense and act as a bulwark against tyranny, what is the point if the permit says you can have your gun in one of three places, your home, your premises, and a half-dozen specified ranges. This is core to the Second Amendment.
But New York City changed its rules to let people with premises licenses do what the plaintiffs in this case want to do. And the New York state legislature also passed a law providing that gun owners with premises licenses may bring their gun to “another dwelling or place of business of the licensee where the licensee is authorized to have and possess such pistol or revolver,” to “an indoor or outdoor shooting range that is authorized by law to operate as such,” or to “a shooting competition at which the licensee may possess such pistol or revolver consistent with” the law.
So NYC added a few more places to the list of where a permitted person can have their gun, like a vacation home or a range upstate. Not much of an improvement. Lightening the ball and chain by a few ounces isn’t the same as granting liberty.
So the plaintiffs won! They asked for specific, narrow relief, and the state legislature gave it to them. There’s no longer a legal dispute between the plaintiffs and the defendants in this case, and that makes the case moot.
Nope.
We could know as soon as next week whether the Supreme Court will dismiss the case — or whether it will add to Justice Sotomayor’s fears that the Court is ignoring its own ordinary procedures, in this case by finding away around the mootness doctrine.
Yet even if the case is dismissed, such a decision will only delay a reckoning on the Second Amendment. Eventually, the justices will hear a gun rights case that is not moot. And when that happens, Justice Kennedy won’t be around to inject a note of caution into the Court’s opinion.
Screw Justice Kennedy. This case is much bigger than New York City saying that a premises license also includes a vacation home or upstate hunting cabin.
This is about establishing the meaning of the Second Amendment, building on Heller and McDonald. If this case goes the way we want it to, it has the potential of going all Moore v. Madigan on New York – and the rest of the may issue states – and force those state to recognize that the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense means the right to possess guns in public with the burden of restricting that right being fairly high.
Vox and the far Left know this deep in their bones which is why they are trying to make this case go away.
It’s why they want to impeach Kavanaugh and slander him with false rape allegations.
He is the champion of gun rights on the Court now and if he decided to go all judicial activist on the Court, he could legitimately open the door to mandated national concealed carry.
You can sense the fear and desperation in this article.
My only hope is that all that fear is warranted and Kavanaugh strikes down most gun laws like the vengeful hand of an angry God.
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