Never Let It Be Said That SOME Judges Can't Read

Courtesy of How Appealing and Emperor Misha comes a great bit of news...a three judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court has ruled 2-1 that the Second Amendment does, indeed cover the individual's right to bear arms, not just the right of gun ownership for anyone in a militia or the military. Of course, anyone who can and actually did read the 2nd Amendment could have figured that out, but far too many people who detest the idea of individual gun ownership and/or the existence of guns for any reason choose to read into the plain text of the Second Amendment a limitation that just isn't there. Hopefully this thing will reach the U.S. Supreme Court with similar results, thereby putting to rest for the forseeable future any real danger of large-scale firearm registration, confiscation, or banning by the government. Any emphasis below is mine.

How Appealing

According to the majority opinion, "[T]he phrase 'the right of the people,' when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual." The majority opinion sums up its holding on this point as follows:

"To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment's civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia."

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler

(To Judge Henderson, the dissenting judge, who argued for collective gun ownership rights on precedent and on some other rather strange grounds --Ed.) "Take your Stare Decisis and shove it up your arse sideways. Yes, we do agree that precedent should be taken into serious consideration, previous findings certainly aren’t irrelevant, nor should they be treated as such, but the notion that precedent is always and invariably infallible is, to put it charitably, a load of idiotic, ignorant, imbecilic nonsense. We’re sure that every single black citizen of our nation would agree. At least we haven’t heard any complaints from them about the fact that the legal precedent of treating black people like property was abandoned, but perhaps Justice Henderson would disagree on that too?

Short version: While precedent is important, it remains a fact that even people in black robes get it wrong from time to time, no matter how much some of them may think that they’re actually God. To ignore that and, furthermore, to use as an “argument” that you’re right solely because somebody else said so in the past proves only the shallowness of your sorely lacking intellect and the absence of any actual merit to your argument."