An Unavoidable Conclusion

Recently The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution protects the individual's rights to own a firearm for protection or gaming purposes. This was the first time that the court ever officially interpreted the 2nd Amendment to mean that. For years and years we have assumed that that's what it meant, and in practice, it has, but now the Court has made it official.

When this came to the Court, there was really no other decision that could have been made, despite the 4 opposing votes. If the Court had ruled that the 2nd Amendment didn't protect the right for an individual to own a gun, things would have been absolutely chaotic. Suddenly, every gun law or statute in the country comes into question. What would the government do about those who already had guns? There's the possibility that despite the Court's ruling, Congress would refuse to implement any legislation to deal with the problem, thus creating a Constitutional crisis that not even the Court could solve, since they would be part of the problem. The Court HAD to make the decision they did, if not for any other reason than to keep their position as the defining authority of the Constitution within the United States.

There will always be the question of whether this case should have come to the Supreme Court at all. The case was based on a Washington D.C. statute that banned guns within the city. Obviously when they granted the case certiorari, the Supreme Court decided that it was important enough for people to own guns that it is a constitutional issue, which in many respects, it was. The D.C. gun ban seemed to go against the 2nd Amendment, and so the Court was well within their jurisdiction to decide the case.

What I find funny is that Conservative Justices like Antonin Scalia will preach about "original intent" and strictly following the words of the Constitution, unless they are trying to protect something else that they believe in. If they were to follow strict constructionalism all the time, they wouldn't be able to strike down the D.C. gun ban, because the Constitution definitely doesn't clearly say that individuals can own guns. They also would have never intervened in 2000's Bush v. Gore case, but since it was something that they believed in, they changed their tone for that case, just as they did for this one. That's the only thing I have wrong with this decision. If the conservative wing is going to protect the original intent of the framers when making decisions, they should do it full time, not just when it's convinient for their causes.

A little consistency never killed anyone. A lack of it might kill hundreds in D.C. when guns are let into the city in upcoming months.