brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”
This statement was made by Justice Antonin Scalia when he wrote the majority opinion to the 2008 Supreme Court ruling on District of Columbia v. Heller. The decision was controversial because it granted citizens the right to own guns for personal self-defense, overlooking the amendment's opening language about “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” — i.e., the importance of protecting states from the tyranny of the federal government. The individual right to bear arms is now the law of the land. The “unlimited” access to guns is what the National Rifle Association conveniently forgets. Yet in his opinion, Scalia went on to say the Second Amendment is “... not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” He wrote: “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 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.” And yet here we are.
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Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |