The 2nd Amendment Is One Justice From Repeal

If you think our Second Amendment rights are more secure because of the Supreme Court’s Heller v. DC decision, think again.

Because, as the National Review explains it, it only takes one Justice to turn our right to keep and bear arms into so much mush.

Remember, Heller was a 5-4 decision. That means four Justices are “committed to the absurd view that the operative clause of the Second Amendment – “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” – doesn’t actually mean “the right of the people.”

Read the dissents, Justice Stevens circuitous logic that the Fourth Amendment may, in fact, be a collective right, kind of, and that the word “people” is in that Amendment, so the Founding Fathers meant for the Second Amendment to be a collective right.

It’s nonsense and ahistoric.

It is certain that the next Democratic nominee for the Supreme Court will adopt that same ahistorical view, and if that nominee replaces, for example, Justice Kennedy or Justice Scalia, then the five-justice majority in District of Columbia v. Heller will be gone. If that majority goes, then the next gun-rights case will transform the Second Amendment into nothing more than a historical artifact of the era when the militia consisted of able-bodied men with muskets over their mantles.

And once Heller is overturned, it’s Katy bar the door for gun restrictions, starting in our biggest and most crime-ridden cities. Then the most liberal states. Then a Democratic President can use the power of the massive bureaucracy he has at his disposal to finagle all sorts of rules and regulations that leads to a defacto confiscation and ban.

It’s easy to imagine the regulatory possibilities — regulatory action against ammunition; public-employee rules creating “gun-free employment communities” that prohibit or greatly restrict private gun ownership by public employees; aggressive regulatory action against various types of ammunition; OSHA rules that require employers to restrict employees’ gun rights on “work safety” grounds. The list could go on and on.

The 2016 election is vitally important on a number of fronts, but few Americans realize that the combination of judicial supremacy and the modern regulatory state can essentially repeal the Second Amendment and systematically roll back gun rights without a single act of Congress. Hillary Clinton has vowed to use executive action to roll back gun rights, and when that executive action includes not just regulatory authority but also Supreme Court nominations, American gun rights are in grave danger indeed.