Amy Coney Barrett & the Second Amendment
On Saturday, President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat on the United States Supreme Court vacated upon the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett presently serves as a Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. With Barrett's confirmation by the U.S. Senate likely in the near future, many responsible gun owners are wondering how this new justice will impact them.
Judge Barrett applies the methodology of the late eminent Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked after graduating first in her class from Notre Dame Law School. Consistent with the methodology employed by the late Scalia, her mentor, Barrett interprets the Constitution in strict accordance with its original meaning. Barrett is a firm Constitutional originalist and textualist and she has already demonstrated that in a Second Amendment case.
In Kanter v. Barr, Barrett dissented from the Seventh Circuit Court's ruling upholding the law prohibiting convicted felons from possessing firearms. The plaintiffs had been convicted of mail fraud. The majority upheld the felony dispossession statutes as "substantially related to an important government interest in preventing gun violence." In her dissent, Barrett argued that while the government has a legitimate interest in denying gun possession to felons convicted of violent crimes, there is no evidence that denying guns to non-violent felons promotes this interest, and argued that the law violated the Second Amendment.
The Supreme Court has now twice ruled, by narrow 5-4 majorities, that there is an individual right to self-defense. Democrats, however, steadfastly promise to overturn those decisions. They claim the Second Amendment only guarantees the government the right to own guns. The Supreme Court considered ten Second Amendment cases this year but ultimately declined to hear any of them. Four conservative justices support defending the individual right to self-defense but they likely feared that Chief Justice John Roberts would side with the liberal justices and declined to hear the cases. It has been a decade since the Supreme Court has heard any Second Amendment cases. During this period, lower courts controlled by liberals have approved even the most draconian state gun control regulations.
The Second Amendment is hanging in the balance. Even if Biden were to get elected on November 3 and enacts his promised restrictions on self-defense rights, Amy Coney Barrett's expected Senate confirmation will create a solid court majority to rule them unconstitutional based on District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago.
