Skip to main content

Common Sense and the Second Amendment


Perhaps someone in Connecticut’s General Assembly should propose a law forbidding legislators and state officials from misusing the expression “common sense” and its derivatives.

“The nation’s highest court,” a Hartford paper reported in late June, “overturned a New York law that dates back to 1913 and says that applicants need to show ‘proper cause’ that they need a gun for self-defense in order to obtain a license that they could carry the concealed weapon in public.

“But the court ruled 6-3 that the New York law ‘violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.’”

The ruling produced a spate of objections from Connecticut politicians in which the expression “common sense” and its derivatives were painfully iterated by so called “gun control advocates.”

William Tong, Connecticut’s Attorney General advised that Connecticut gun restriction laws, different than those of New York, are not “immediately impacted” by the high court’s ruling. However, Tong nevertheless characterized the ruling itself as “a radical rewrite of the court’s prior positions on the Second Amendment and states’ rights to pass commonsense gun safety legislation.”

Tong left it to others to explain how a ruling that supported the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution could possibly violate common sense. And Connecticut “fact checkers” were unmoved by Tong’s notion that the Court’s most recent decision was a “radical rewrite” of the High Court’s previous Second Amendment decisions.

In effect, the ruling says, in blunt language, that state licensing laws cannot be permitted to trump Second Amendment rights, a decision most commonsensical lawmakers would regard as commonsensical.

After quelling the notion that the High Court’s decision might put in jeopardy Connecticut’s gun restriction laws, Tong went on to characterize the court decision as “reckless.” The consequences “for public safety nationwide are dire,” he said, but not so dire as to dethrone Connecticut’s own gun restriction laws. Facing such absurdities, commonsense immediately took flight.

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, suffering for years from a nagging bout of hoplophobia, an irrational fear of guns, characterized the High Court decision as a spur to gun violence: “This deeply destructive decision will unleash even more gun violence on American communities,” Blumenthal said. “It will only put more guns in public spaces and open the floodgates to invalidate sensible gun safety laws in more states. Worse yet, it is a significant step backwards at a moment when horrendous shootings happen across our country every day, taking too many beautiful lives and terrorizing generations of Americans.”

And, in keeping with a Democrat Party campaign theme, the High Court’s recent ruling, Blumenthal added, fails to uphold “commonsense safeguards to reduce gun violence.” However, “This opinion in no way impugns the constitutionality of the commonsense Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that the Senate should approve this week. As gun violence soars, Congress must heed the will of the majority of Americans who support gun safety measures and break the legislative logjam to stop this senseless violence. This activist Supreme Court is once again legislating from the bench, but Congress must continue to legislate for a safer America.”

By upholding the clear language of the Second Amendment, the Court is “activist,” and “legislating from the bench.” However, the court’s “activist” decision in no way “impugns the constitutionality of the commonsense Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that the Senate should approve this week,” a bill fashioned by a refreshingly bipartisan Congress and U.S. Senators Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, just in time for the 2022 off year elections.

Are Blumenthal, Murphy and Tong prepared to cease and desist attaching invidious labels to a court that upholds uncommonly sensible Bill of Rights Amendments?

Neither Tong nor Blumenthal nor Murphy have yet argued that the Court’s recent decision subverts the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Surely none of these supposed Constitutional scholars believe that licensure, often overused to subvert commonsensical processes, should take precedence over constitutional provisions such as the Second Amendment – “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” or the Fourteenth Amendment -- “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” ? 

Neither Blumenthal nor Murphy has been asked why their compromise legislation could not have passed bipartisan muster if offered immediately following Connecticut’s Sandy Hook massacre. Nor have they been asked to explain why murders involving guns in the nation’s urban areas have not been halted – say, in Chicago and Hartford, Connecticut’s Capital City – by highly restrictive gun laws.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p