As those who carry water for the gun-control crowd do so feverishly in the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting, the New York Times (NYT) is leading the pack by trying to convince students of American jurisprudence that the Supreme Court created a right to keep and bear arms out of mid-air in the 2008 DC vs. Heller ruling.
In other words, there is no inherent, intrinsic right to individual firearm ownership or self-defense. Rather, there is just some ruling in which Justice Antonin Scalia allegedly twisted the 2nd Amendment to make it “create a right” a keep and bear arms.
What absurdity.
To be clear, the 2nd Amendment does not create a right, and Scalia would be the first to tell you that. Rather, it recognizes a right with which God endowed us through nature (according to the Founders).
It seems the NYT is trying to give legs to a false narrative so that in time — sooner rather than later in their minds — they can justify a court decision that completely reverses the one we saw in Heller (and in McDonald vs. Chicago in 2010).
Thus they fill their columns with commentary from judges whose opinions differ from Scalia — judges like J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who say Scalia “read an ambiguous constitutional provision as creating a substantive right” not addressed by the court since the adoption of the Bill of the Rights. This same judge says “Heller represents a form of judicial activism that is new, yet familiar.”
So apparently, this is the newest anti-gun argument being discussed at inside-the-beltway cocktail parties: namely, that there is no inherent right to private gun ownership in the 2nd Amendment. There’s just the right that Scalia created in a moment of desperation.
Counter to this argument stands common sense, the opinion of centuries of gun-owning Americans, and the fact that this right was so settled that the court did not even have to address it until recent attacks against it from liberals who read the NYT and other leftist rags.
Remember the words of George Washington, “free people ought…to be armed.”