U.S. Supreme Court Embraces the Second Amendment

Thursday, 26 June 2008

In America, the rights of the individual prevail today over the sometimes questionable prerogative of state and government.

The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right of an American to have a gun and, especially, for the purpose of self-defense in one’s home. This individual right has been clearly acknowledged independent of the necessities of military or militia service, duty and training. The ruling comes out of the Court’s review of District of Columbia v. Heller. Additionally: Washington, D.C.’s many year ban on handguns and a mandatory requirement for gun locks was deemed unconstitutional.

District of Columbia v. Heller is the most important Second Amendment case in American history. Today’s decision is a historical decision that will guide the way courts and States consider questions about the American right of responsible citizens to own a gun for a long time to come. The American right of an individual for self defense is more clearly defined as a Constitutional right.

This historical decision represents the deeply considered and powerful reasoning of Justice Antonin Scalia who led the majority opinion. According to Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett, Justice Scalia’s opinion “is the clearest, most careful interpretation of the meaning of the Constitution ever to be adopted by a majority of the Supreme Court.”

This opinion, writes Barnett in The Wall Street Journal, “is the finest example of what is now called original public meaning jurisprudence ever adopted by the Supreme Court.”

Get the decision here.

More from me about this historical decision soon. Check out my past blog post on the Court’s review of this Second Amendment issue here. Read about an eye witness account of the debate by Victoria Lloyd here.

Below, some initial remarks by others about this historical U.S. Supreme Court decision:

“‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’ is the best way to describe today’s decision,” writes Mathew Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law. “The right to self-defense is a liberty at the core of the American Revolution. It was ordinary people who defended life and liberty against organized tyranny. The King of Great Britain sought to disarm the colonists because he, like any criminal, knew that a disarmed people are a weak people who can easily be overcome. The Second Amendment stands as an impenetrable wall between tyranny and freedom.”

Wayne La Pierre, National Rifle Association’s Executive Vice President, writes in his NRA news blog: “It looks to be a phenomenal day for gun owners and District of Columbia residents. Our Founding Fathers wrote this as an individual right, they intended it to be an individual right, and the Court is now acknowledging that right. It’s a historic day for us as gun owners and us as Americans… The next step is to ensure that every American has access to this right, no matter where they live. This court decision, I believe, will help us get there.”

Within an hour of the release of the Heller decision, Lawrence Solum had his initial remarks online here.

“My initial impression is that Scalia made a compelling case for striking down the statute within the original public meaning framework. Moreover, he is surely correct that the prior decisions of the Court do not foreclose the result reached in Heller,” writes Solum. “Heller is important for many reasons, but one of them is that it offers a rare glimpse of originalist methodology operating outside the constraints of a field impacted by controlling Supreme Court precedent.”

“Anti-gun politicians can no longer deny that the Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right,” said NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox. “All law-abiding Americans have a fundamental, God-given right to defend themselves in their homes. Washington, D.C. must now respect that right.”

Below, Iron Maiden (Trooper) with footage from the movie, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson.
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Stan Faryna
June 26, 2008
Bucharest, Romania

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About Stan Faryna

Mr. Faryna is the founder and co-founder of several technology, design and communication companies in the United States and Europe including Faryna & Associates, Inc., Halo Interactive, and others.

Stan Faryna is also a Global Voices author and translator. Global Voices is a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society.

His political, scholarly, social and technical opinions have appeared in The Chicago Defender, Jurnalul National, The Washington Times, Sagar, Saptamana Financiara, Social Justice Review, and other publications.

Mr. Faryna also served as editor-in-chief of Black and Right (Praeger Press, 1996), a landmark collection of socio-political essays by important American thinkers including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Copyright

Copyright 1996 to 2008 by Stan Faryna.

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