Progress. . .

. . . and the Constitution . . .



(from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/the-second-amendment-is-no-barrier-to-stricter-gun-laws.html)

". . . (to the) millions across America desiring stricter gun laws . . . the Constitution is no impediment to reform. . . all-out bans on assault-style weapons — the kind accused gunman Nikolas Cruz used in his rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida — are perfectly in harmony with the law as it exists today. No need to wait for a broken Congress or an apathetic president to do something. States and localities can lead the way today. And they have. . . (Antonin) Scalia’s own opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller — his greatest originalist achievement, in the view of many — left ample room for the regulation of firearms. In a passage that has become a thorn in the side of gun-rights enthusiasts, Scalia warned that people shouldn’t read too much into the fundamental right that he had just helped announce. Among other caveats and restrictions, Scalia wrote, “long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” were still fair game. . . Connecticut, legislators there and in New York sprang to action and passed stringent bans on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines — The statutory schemes were broad, defining “assault weapons” as any semiautomatic rifle with at least one “military-style feature” — a definition that rendered the arsenal of prohibited weapons decidedly large. In Connecticut, the ban singled out 183 specific firearms by make and model. Court challenges were of no use. Both laws survived judicial scrutiny, and the Supreme Court didn’t bother reviewing the statutes’ constitutionality. In a one-line order, the court refused to add the case to its docket. . . Maryland enacted its own sweeping set of gun-control measures in response to Sandy Hook and other tragedies, declaring that the right to bear arms doesn’t extend to firearms that otherwise belong in the battlefield. “Put simply, we have no power to extend Second Amendment protection to the weapons of war that the Heller decision explicitly excluded from such coverage,” . . . the Supreme Court again didn’t bother with the Maryland ban and left the ruling in place. And so it has been for the past decade or so. Over the supplications of the National Rifle Association and others who have implored the court to revisit Heller, the court has refused, time and again, to clarify its contours. Could it be that there’s nothing to clarify? Just last week, the Supreme Court declined an invitation to review a California law that imposes a ten-day waiting period before an individual may purchase a firearm. The justices didn’t explain why the case didn’t interest them — maybe the Parkland school shooting in Florida was on their minds — and so it fell to Justice Clarence Thomas to be the lonesome voice crying out in the wilderness. “The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this Court’s constitutional orphan,” Thomas lamented in a 14-page dissent that not even Justice Neil Gorsuch dared join. “And the lower courts seem to have gotten the message.”. . ."

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