Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.
For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.
Antonin Scalia
Enter the modern National Rifle Association ... [which] pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”
But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. ...Read the full article here
And hear more from Jeffrey Toobin on a range of other issues in our recent conversation with him.
The N.R.A., emboldened by a Supreme Court rulingasserting an individual constitutional right to bear arms, has turned itsattention to further broadening the market, lobbying state legislatures toallow concealed weapons in churches, schools and other public places and torestrict the discretion of local police in granting gun permits.Read the full editorial here
We will leave most of the responses to the National RifleAssociation’s callous, cynical statement about the Newtown tragedy to groups like AFJmembers the Violence Policy Center, and States United to Stop Gun Violence.
Perhaps you’ve read about the controversy over new “Terms of Use” from the photo-sharing service Instagram, which now is owned by Facebook. Under the terms, if you use Instagram it is free to sell your photos, your likeness and pretty much anything else it knows about you to advertisers – without any further consent on your part, and without compensating you. And if, by some chance, you’re under 18, Instagram assumes that when you click “accept,” at least one parent has read over the terms and agreed to them on your behalf.