Open Thread: Robert Byrd, the KKK, the Second Amendment Ruling and What the MSM Doesn't Want You To Know About Guns

By some ironic twist of fate, the Senator from the Ku Klux Klan has died on the same day the Supreme Court — by a distressingly narrow 5-4 ruling — affirmed that the Second Amendment is incorporated, via the 14th Amendment, to the states, and that Chicago’s gun ban is therefore unconstitutional. In part, the ruling rested on the historical fact that African Americans were denied gun ownership in many places following Reconstruction, and thus were not fully free:

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Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, who has written extensively on the Second Amendment, has just posted his reactions:

OKAY, having quickly skimmed the McDonald opinion, a few thoughts…

… it really is interesting how much emphasis the majority, and Justice Thomas’s concurrence, put on the racist roots of gun control. See this article and this one by Bob Cottrol and Ray Diamond for more background. And isn’t it interesting that this is happening on the same day the Senate’s last Klansman went to his reward?

… personally, I’d like to note that a lot of “respectable” commentators were, just a few years ago, calling the individual-rights theory of the Second Amendment absurd, ridiculous, and something that only (probably paid) shills for the NRA would espouse. (I’m talking to you, Garry Wills and Robert Spitzer, among others). Yet it is impossible to read this opinion, and the Heller opinion, and conclude that the individual right is really just a “fraud” concocted by the NRA. So were those who were saying so until quite recently being dishonest, or merely inexcusably ignorant?

Ironic as well that Justice Thomas, having survived his own “high-tech lynching,” wrote an impassioned concurrence and that his vote was, in essence, the only vote that mattered.

Somewhere this man is not smiling:

That’s Big Tim Sullivan on the right, architect of New York City’s draconian 1911 Sullivan Law, which effectively outlawed hanguns by banning concealed weapons. Will it be next to fall?