gun rights
The job description for U.S. Supreme Court justice does not include the ability to predict the future. Federal appeals court judges must rule on constitutionality, not probability.
But through the years, the “likelihood” of something occurring based on a law or an action under review by the court seems to have crept its way into rulings.
That may have merit, and it may not.
Guest blogger Richard B. Stemmer, Jr.
While William Standring is obviously smarting from Thursday's Supreme Court ruling, I, on the other hand, am enjoying a guarded optimism about it.
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Read Fourth in the Series What the Court Said
In 1931, the Supreme Court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause applied to the states the First Amendment’s ban on free press prohibitions, a stricture that had until then applied only to Congress.
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The Heart of the Case
To grasp aright the Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, the gun control case, you have to know a few of things about the Second Amendment.
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The Opening Shot
At the heart of the gun control dispute the Supreme Court settled in District of Columbia v. Heller was the meaning of twenty-seven words, three commas, and a period: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
First in a Series of Five
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision that the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns violates the Second Amendment is but the opening shot in a long, and likely to be inconclusive, war of litigation between gun control opponents and advocates.
Depending upon your interpretation of the Second Amendment the United States Supreme Court is about to make America a more dangerous, or a safer, place.
Before the court are twenty-nine words and three commas: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” How you diagram the sentence determines the amendment’s meaning.
The shoot-out between gun-control forces and gun-rights defenders moves into the Supreme Court when its justices hear oral arguments March 18, 2008, in District of Columbia v. Dick Anthony Heller . They’ll consider whether the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to keep and bear arms or whether it merely protects a collective militia right.
