The Supreme Court yesterday, in its final day of decisions before the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, dealt a blow to sanity by extending gun rights beyond the Washington DC case of two years ago to Chicago, and by implication, to other big cities where gun violence is widespread and frequent!
The National Rifle Association hailed the ruling as a winner for gun owners, but it is actually a victory for more extensive death by gun fire than it is a victory for individual rights to own a gun! 🙁
This activist conservative Supreme Court has distorted the meaning of the Second Amendment which was meant to cover militias in the states, not the right of citizens to own an unlimited number of handguns, leading now to over 275 million handguns in private hands!
With the growing diversity of our population, and the tensions that grow between people based on race, ethnicity and religion, gun violence will grow! 🙁
One of the biggest groups that will suffer from this are the youth of America in the cities, with Chicago an excellent example of the dangers of being minority youth in that city, with 258 shot last year, and 32 dying! 🙁
Chief Justice John Roberts led the traditional 5-4 majority, including Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy. It is ironic that Roberts, in his confirmation hearings five years ago, talked about a Justice being an “umpire” calling balls and strikes, rather than hitting or pitching, and yet this Court has become the most activist in a conservative direction since the 1920s and early 1930s! They are doing extremist things, of the kind that if activist liberals did so, the Republicans in the Senate would condemn them!
Conservatives love to talk against activism on the Court, but it is conservative activism that is harming democracy and stability in this nation!
This is important to consider as the Republicans set out to attack nominee Elena Kagan as too activist! If Kagan’s record is called activist, then we need more of that to balance off the extremists in charge of the Supreme Court in a very difficult economic time, too reminiscent of the Great Depression! 🙁