If it’s true that today’s District v. Heller ruling is the first time in U.S. history that the Supreme Court has has directly ruled on the meaning of the Second Amendment, it also seems likely to be the last. The battle has carried on for decades in lower courts, but those cases too are likely to be cut short, if not cut off altogether.
But what about the cultural debate? I noted in a recent post over at The Next Right that the left has largely acquiesced to gun rights. They may do so grudgingly, but for all intents and purposes they’ve given up. Except… that’s not what I found on some of the most influential leftroots blogs.
Instead, I found significant agreement with the ruling. Not just that, but matter-of-fact statements of support for an individual right that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.
At Crooks and Liars, the first commenter just asked:
Is this good or bad?
The question alone is kind of surprising. And the answers came quickly:
This, my friend, is good. This is an area where we lefties have dropped the ball in a most spectacular fashion. Gun bans such as the DC only affect those actually willing to obey the law. That’s not a tagline, that’s a fact. We need to crack down on the illegal gun trade, NOT on law abiding citizens.
And some I didn’t expect at all:
Wow. John Paul Stevens could not be more off base.
Here’s another:
yay for pro second amendment democrats
And I didn’t have to look hard. These are all in the first 9 comments. Still, these are comments. How about a genuine top tier blogger? Here’s Kevin Drum:
I’m basically OK with this. My personal, layman’s view has always been that both the history and the wording of the Second Amendment point toward a limited, personal right to bear arms, not merely the right for a militia to be armed. On a practical level I’m less sure whether this is a good thing, since I’ve never gotten into the policy weeds of handgun control and whether it’s effective. Still: a right’s a right. The wording of the Second Amendment suggests to me that the government can regulate guns a bit more than they can regulate, say, speech, but that they can’t flatly ban them.
This is not to say that support was universal, but even the dissenters realized that gun control is all but dead. And at Daily Kos, Adam Bonin had advice for those inclined to be upset:
I encourage you to read this fully before rendering your opinions, because, well, it’s a Constitution we’re expounding here, and this comes up in other contexts as well. Sometimes in life (and in law), there are things that we might desire from a policy standpoint — like certain forms of gun control, or restrictions on some election-related speech — which are nevertheless forbidden by the Constitution.
And in the comments, some indeed were. For instance, here is the first comment:
Tragic day for America
DC has a tremendously bad gun problem and they can’t take these extremely resonable step of banning the gun most frequently used in crimes? It’s outrageous and despicable.
This comment was rated up 16 times. But what’s really great about this is the reply:
Disagree
The D.C. law was sweeping in banning the possession of handguns, period. If it were less sweeping, say, you can’t conceal the weapon, or you have to have a background check, or you have to wait several weeks or months to receive your gun, blah blah blah, I do not believe that would have been struck down. But the right to own a gun, stop, should not be infringed upon.
How did this one fare among the Kossacks? This one was rated up 57 times.
As Drum hints, there will be state-level debates about concealed carry, gun shows and specific makes, ammunition, etc. But now that a) Heller v. District has affirmed the individual right to own a firearm and b) influential liberal commentators and communities agree, the cultural battle over gun rights is effectively over.
P.S. For what it’s worth, Lawyers, Guns and Money is essentially neutral.
The show stopper argument is that it is in the bill of rights. If the other nine are individual rights, how can the second not be? It never made any sense.
Whether gun control is good policy or not is another question, but now gun control advocates can approach it honestly. If they want to ban handguns, they have to change the constitution.
I’m left-of-center myself, and I think most liberals are ambivalent about gun rights. In my case, I pretty much agree with the Supreme Court decision but I also think there should be restrictions — background checks, what kinds of guns can be carried, etc…
That’s why I don’t understand why gun nuts are so knee-jerk about any attempts to impose restrictions. It’s not like the abortion issue, where restrictions are basically an unspoken attempt to incrementally outlaw it all together. Most people who want slight restrictions on guns aren’t trying to ban them, they’re honestly just trying to strike a balance.
Simon, us “gun nuts” never agreed with your assertion, and we did see ongoing restrictions as incremental attempts at a ban or else making the law so expensive, arbitrary and egregiously difficult to comply with that it would be an effective ban. Until this ruling came down, and in fact in the petition in this case, gun-control advocates argued that the 2nd Amendment didn’t protect individual rights at all, and was effectively a dead-letter. Calls since the 1970s for outright bans (The Brady Campaign, formerly Handgun Control, Inc., was originally called the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, and called for exactly that; powerful gun control politicians like Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, both of whom are on the Senate Judiciary Committee, have openly stated their desire to ban all guns) gave us a pretty clear idea of what would be coming if we didn’t keep up the fight.
A great deal of the claims and factoids put out by gun control proponents over the years, about “assault weapons”, “plastic guns”, “cop-killer bullets”, the “gun-show loophole” were either gross and deliberate distortions or outright lies. There was a ballyhooed book put out about 10 years ago by a history professor that tried to rewrite early American history and argue that guns weren’t prevalent or important at all, which was proven to be an outright historical fraud (he was caught citing records that didn’t exist, and was fired from his tenured position and had his book pulled by the publisher as a result). Then there was the effort to try to sue gunmakers out of business, until Congress put a stop to that. These sorts of things had us convinced that we were dealing with very dishonorable and powerful people who were operating in utter bad-faith, who intended to manipulate and twist the law, the courts, the media and history to disarm Americans forever. Add in the fact that all the various and increasingly restrictive gun control laws over the years never worked (murder in DC went up AFTER the ban), that meant that there would always be arguments for more and tighter restrictions.
It’s possible though that this ruling MIGHT paradoxically make some of those reasonable controls more likely. That the Amendment guarantees an individual right is now recognized precedent. A few more rulings that incorporate it under the 14th Amendment to apply to the states as well; maybe that hit back at unnecessary, arbitrary and purely harassing restrictions; and that have the courts and the Justice Department pursue violations of gun rights the way they do other civil rights violations, and I’d be a lot more comfortable with reasonable compromises here and there.