Liberal ideology...

How did four Supreme Court justices wind up arguing against the Constitution?

The Supreme Court has made an individual right to gun ownership settled law, more than 220 years after the founders mistakenly believed they had settled the issue.

Some on the left were none too happy about the decision...

In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If “the people” want to ban handguns, they say, “the people” should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives.

What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church, or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.

Jacob Sullum from Reson magazine, notes that Stevens argued that firearms have a “fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty,” which is amazing from a jurist supposedly working within the Constitution. The document itself recognizes that a free people have the right to self-defense by owning firearms, an explicit rejection of any such ambivalence. In fact, they found the connection between gun ownership and liberty so unproblematic that they guaranteed the right of the people to keep and bear arms in the second explicit statement of uninfringeable individual liberties in the Constitution.

If the issue is that the right to gun ownership can be abused, well, so can all of the other rights. Part of the reason why gun owners need to keep their own weapons is precisely because gun ownership can be abused. While the Left side of the Court extols the ability of states to act as laboratories for social and legal innovation, they ignore the fact that the “experiments” in gun bans have proven without exception to be failures. Banning handguns and other firearms in Chicago didn’t keep guns out of the city; the laws just ensured that law-abiding citizens would be disarmed and at the mercy of those who would abuse gun ownership for criminal enterprises. Those hardest hit are citizens in urban areas, who are more likely to be poor and members of minorities, as well, who cannot rely on police to act as personal bodyguards at all times.