With current Supreme Court, we’re staring down a Wild West of gun ownership

In her excellent op-ed “Expand the Supreme Court,” Elizabeth Warren lists a number of recent rulings in which the court has pulled back rights of US citizens but she glances over another instance in which the current radical court overturned established precedent. While the threat she cites that the current court poses to localities’ rights to limit an individual’s right to bear arms under any circumstances is indeed daunting, it stems from the court’s bizarre decision to ignore the language of the Second Amendment itself, which was formulated at a time when citizens lacked the benefit of either a national army or local police force.

Though the vagueness and ambiguity of the language suggests compromise, the reference to “a well-regulated militia” should make it clear that the Founders were not referring to an unlimited right of individuals to keep and carry weapons. Thus, justices who claim to rely on the text of the Constitution yet pretend that this is what the Constitution says must be viewed as either illiterate or hypocritical and motivated by political considerations. Until 2008, and D.C. v. Heller, the court held that no such individual right to bear arms existed in the Constitution. We are now left with the awful consequences of this reversal, and it may only be the beginning.

[Published as a letter to the editor in the print edition of The Boston Globe on December 21, 2021 and reprinted here in slightly modified form with their permission.]

Here is a link to other related letters published that day in the Globe: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/12/21/opinion/some-rethink-supreme-court-9-is-not-so-magic-number/