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JUNE 23, 2022
Cooper on TAP
Take the Constitution Back From the Supreme Court
A new ruling striking down most blue-state gun regulation is utter
nonsense.
On Thursday, the reactionary Supreme Court majority struck down
New York
City's concealed-carry law, first passed in 1913, which requires
applicants to show "proper cause" if they want to carry a gun in public.
About a quarter of the American population lives in states with similar
rules.
Both on the legal merits and in terms of plain common sense, the
Court's ruling here is deranged. The reasoning, if it may be so
dignified, is heavily based on the 2008 case
**District of Columbia v. Heller**, which struck down that city's ban
on handguns and established an individual right to own guns for the
first time.
As former Justice John Paul Stevens once wrote
,
**Heller** is "unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that
the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench." Until
dogmatic gun nut ideology conquered the Republican Party, it was widely
agreed
that the Second Amendment was principally concerned with
state-controlled militias (which de facto haven't existed since 1903
),
and therefore both federal and state governments had wide latitude to
regulate personal gun possession and use. Now, not only does the Court
confirm
**Heller**, but expands it to grant a constitutional right to carry guns
in public, which cannot be abridged with even a century-old condition
that the individual must prove, in order to get a concealed-carry
permit, that the gun is needed for self-defense.
But set aside legal arcana and just
**look around**. In my hometown of Philadelphia, for instance, issuance
of concealed-carry permits increased by about sixfold in 2021
,
mostly thanks to the city police department dramatically streamlining
the application process. Recently at a popular nightlife district, a
minor street fight between two men with such permits quickly escalated
to a gun battle, which sparked off a chaotic melee of panicked shooting
from three additional people that killed two innocent bystanders
and badly wounded several more.
The Court's decision here unquestionably increases the chances of that
kind of thing happening in New York City and every other place whose gun
control schemes have just been gutted by judicial rule-by-decree.
Careful research also demonstrates
that places that pass right-to-carry laws are associated with a 13 to 15
percent increase in violent crime.
The Constitution had many flaws when it was written and many flaws
today. But it cannot possibly have been intended to prohibit the
government from regulating the manufacture and sale of weapons that
would have appeared magical to 18th-century statesmen. Neither is the
Constitution a handbook for insurrectionists to overthrow the government
based upon it. Controlling the instruments of violence and protecting
the citizenry from each other are the foundational responsibilities of
any legitimate state, no matter what Samuel Alito or any other Supreme
Court justice says.
~ RYAN COOPER
Follow Ryan Cooper on Twitter
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