While most Second Amendment supporters threw parties and danced in the streets after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Washington D.C. v. Heller case, I was overcome by a very different emotion.
I’ll call it what it was: It was dread.
Rather than hearten me and lift my spirits, the Heller decision propelled me to the unhappy realization that handgun ownership will likely become illegal sometime in my life.
The Heller case, as most everyone knows by now, was decided 5-4 in support of a lower-court decision to strike down the District of Columbia’s ridiculously restrictive anti-gun law.
Before the ruling, it was illegal to keep an assembled or unlocked gun in your own home in D.C.
Justices Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were joined by swing justice Anthony Kennedy to form a slim majority that recognized the U.S. Constitution is an important document and it means what it says.
What was incredibly alarming, however, was that four justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer chose to completely ignore the Second Amendment. One of the dissenting opinions, written by Breyer and signed by the other three, argued that justices should weigh the pros and cons of restrictive gun-control laws.
What? If that’s the case, why do we even have a Constitution?
More and more the court has chosen to make things up as it goes along, as evidenced by its recent rulings granting prisoners of war full access to U.S. courts and striking down Louisiana’s law allowing child rapists to be executed.
Clearly, the U.S. Constitution makes no provision for foreign enemies and terrorists to have full habeas corpus rights in our courts, but that matters not to the liberal wing of this court. Are our soldiers now supposed to collect evidence and protect the crime scenes whenever taking prisoners?
Likewise, nowhere does the Constitution protect child rapists from a quiet, painless death by lethal injection. The citizens of the state of Louisiana, through the representative process, decided that was a suitable punishment, but the erudite, bleeding-heart justices obviously know more than us hicks down here in the Bayou State.
Although few politicians admit they favor an outright ban on guns in America, the liberal agenda is to restrict gun ownership to the point that effective use of firearms for personal protection is impossible.
This is particularly frightening if you believe, like I do, that Barack Obama will be our next president, and he’ll have four or eight years to replace any Supreme Court justices who retire or pass away.
“I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby,” he wrote in his book, The Audacity of Hope.
Obama also stated before the Heller decision that he thought D.C.’s anti-gun law was constitutional, even though he backtracked on that after the decision was announced.
Is Obama more likely to appoint strict constructionists, who love the constitution and adhere to it, like Scalia, Roberts and Alito or activists like Breyer, Ginsburg and Stevens?
Now you see why I was so depressed after the Heller decision.
