A Liberal Case for Gun Rights Sways Judiciary

This must have killed them to print!.

From the notorious NYT:

In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

LOL! it took them 20 years to read the Constitution and what the Founding Fathers said it meant? This is why this country is in trouble, these are the people teaching law in our country. It took them 20 years to come to the understanding the Second Amendment is an individual right! They just caught up to the rest of us dumb knuckle dragging joe six packs out here; amazing.

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Breakneck speed??? All the information is just sitting there in the archives! Sheesh.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

It came as a surprise to him he could have an un-biased thought. I know I am surprised he could look past his Liberalist religion, shocked even.

Several other leading liberal constitutional scholars, notably Akhil Reed Amar at Yale and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas, are in broad agreement favoring an individual rights interpretation. Their work has in a remarkably short time upended the conventional understanding of the Second Amendment, and it set the stage for the Parker decision.

The earlier consensus, the law professors said in interviews, reflected received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution. “The standard liberal position,” Professor Levinson said, “is that the Second Amendment is basically just read out of the Constitution.”

The Second Amendment says, “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.” (Some transcriptions of the amendment omit the last comma.)

If only as a matter of consistency, Professor Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations of other amendments in the Bill of Rights, like those protecting free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, should also embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment. And just as the First Amendment’s protection of the right to free speech is not absolute, the professors say, the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms may be limited by the government, though only for good reason.

See he was almost there, he should know that the phrase "shall not be infringed' is the strongest legal language that can be used. It is a hands off statement, shall is the strongest command that can be made in a legal document or piece of legislation.

Let me translate shall not be infringed: Must not be trespassed/encroached upon.

As you can see, the government cannot encroach upon our individual rights to keep and bear arms.

So, stop the idiotic argument about needing assault weapons to hunt animals. We do not keep and bear arms for hunting, we keep and bear arms for self defense, defense of our nation and to prevent against a tyrannical government. We the people, all approx 200 gun owners, are the standing army of the USA. We could not fund a standing army that big to replace us. and yes Liberals we do have the right to defend ourselves with firearms.

Of course, they get to print this as well...

Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.

“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”

Now, I just explained it to you all very clearly. Certainly, these other professors know what I know, about the Second amendment and choose to ignore it; to fit their anti-gun ideology.

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