Conservatism Today: It's like the Supreme Court would be, if I got to pick all the judges.
The Supreme Court today struck down the District of Columbia's ridiculous regulations which banned handguns and required shotguns and rifles to be kept in a manner inconsistent with their effective use -- disassembled and under trigger lock. So people who know how to read, and therefore understand what "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" means, are supposed to be overjoyed over this 5-4 ruling today?
Not me. This is asinine! Now I normally try to look at the positives, but there aren't too many positives to look at when you realize that we were one freaking vote away from losing our 2nd Amendment rights.
With the court split evenly ideologically (4 liberals, 4 conservatives and 1 intellectual ball of mush, Anthony Kennedy), one guy, the intellectual mushball, is the deciding vote on everything that matters to us as U.S. citizens and supposedly free people. He got this one right, but he sure missed yesterday when he ruled that it is never appropriate for the state to kill child rapists. Where am I supposed to find the positive side of the fact that the laws of the U.S. are currently being determined by the mental coin-flipping in Anthony Kennedy's empty head!?
Is this really what the authors of our Constitution envisioned? A country led by the whims of one unelected robe-wearing man? Of course not! But this is where we stand today.
If there is anything to be pleased about today, it's that Justice Antonin Scalia is still alive and well, and he's still condescending to liberals in every opinion he writes. Today's opinion is a classic where he basically gives the four dissenting justices a lesson on how to read and understand basic English. You can probably skip this if you aren't as amused by and appreciative of the agility of Scalia's mind as I am.
In any event, the meaning of “bear arms” that petitioners and JUSTICE STEVENS propose is not even the (sometimes) idiomatic meaning. Rather, they manufacture a hybrid definition, whereby “bear arms” connotes the actual carrying of arms (and therefore is not really an idiom) but only in the service of an organized militia. No dictionary has ever adopted that definition, and we have been apprised of no source that indicates that it carried that meaning at the time of the founding.
But it is easy to see why petitioners and the dissent are driven to the hybrid definition. Giving “bear Arms” its idiomatic meaning would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war—an absurdity that no commentator has ever endorsed. Worse still, the phrase “keep and bear Arms” would be incoherent. The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once: “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom.
It would be rather like saying, “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.
And this should further remind us of the peril will face if we elect Barack Obama.
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