SCOTUS, Guns and the Second Amendment
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the individual right to bear arms can’t be impinged upon by local and state governments — a decision that immediately affects Chicago and, as this New York Times editorial argues, spells trouble for the country as a whole. –KA
The New York Times:
About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody.
… Once again, the court’s conservative majority imposed its selective reading of American history, citing the country’s violent separation from Britain and the battles over slavery as proof that the authors of the Constitution and its later amendments considered gun ownership a fundamental right. The court’s members ignored the present-day reality of Chicago, where 258 public school students were shot last school year — 32 fatally.