Perhaps the Justices Can Read After All
According to Glen Reynolds:
I’M WRITING A SHORT PIECE ON HELLER FOR NORTHWESTERN, and something became clear to me as soon as I started writing: What’s most striking about Heller is that absolutely everybody — majority and dissents — says the Second Amendment protects an individual right.
It’s true that the dissenters’ view of that right is somewhere between “minimalist” (to be charitable) and “incoherent” (to be accurate). But nonetheless, all nine Justices specifically said the right is individual, and thus rejected the “collective right” position on the Second Amendment, a position that’s been the mainstay of gun-control groups, newspaper editorialists, and lower federal courts for decades, and one that was presented by those adherents as so obviously correct that those arguing for an individual right were called “frauds” and shills for the NRA.
Yet the collective right theory could not command a single vote on the Court when actually tested. It was, it seems, a paper tiger all along.
And some say I can never admit to being wrong. If being wrong means showing how completely asinine the collective rights argument was for the second amendment then I will be wrong all day long.
June 30th, 2008 at 11:27 am
well, the argument went like this: the constitution gives the collective the right to protect itself from the collective. Since that doesn’t really make any sense, it kinda had to be thrown out. Also, the new style is giving me a funky little bottom of the page, where it says “enableate is proudly powered by blah blah blah” Might want to fix that.