The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment

The Second Amendment is, without question, the most infamous and vilified section of the Constitution today. Ask ten random people on the street to name what is discussed in Article I, Section 8, or the 21^st Amendment, or the 10^th Amendment, and most will stare at you blankly. But ask about the Second Amendment, and the majority of those same ten will likely know: “right to bear arms.”

It is under assault today—this many conservatives know. What they may not understand are the ways in which this assault directly relates to the Supreme Court. Until the landmark rulings of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010), there was no major Supreme Court ruling, in at least the past fifty years, which protected an individual’s right to bear arms. The Second Amendment was, in many legal circles, a dead letter, a law still technically on the books but no longer enforced or taken very seriously by anyone of consequence.

Then came the legal battles that eventually culminated in the Heller and Chicago decisions. Democrats were scandalized—but unlike other major decisions, from Roe v. Wade to Citizens United, they could not easily take a firm, united stand on the issue. The simple fact is that, whereas Americans are divided on abortion and suspicious of large corporations, they by and large love their guns. For hunting, for self-defense, for any other legal and ethical purpose for which Americans have been using guns for centuries. So Democratic opposition to the rulings had to be disguised, or at least toned down. Democratic Senators like Harry Reid needed to protect their favorable NRA ratings.

Under liberal pressure in the years since, that disguise has gradually been dropping. Hillary Clinton said in a debate last October that the she opposed the Heller decision because it made toddlers more likely to shoot themselves.

This was, obviously, nonsense. But it underscores how the gains of the last few years might be put at risk by the confirmation of just one additional liberal judge to the Supreme Court. Just as conservatives want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, so too do many liberals dream of the Heller and McDonald decisions also being overturned, and the Supreme Court declaring that the Second Amendment only applies to the National Guard and is a “collective”, rather than individual, right (their favorite kind).

And even without express challenges to Heller and McDonald, less ambitious liberals could still work through the courts to undercut the Second Amendment, piece by gradual piece. Both decisions allow that some gun control is constitutional, as long as those laws do not effectively deprive an entire class of people from exercising their constitutional rights. No Court decision has yet clearly defined what the constitutional limits on such laws truly are, beyond stating, as Heller and McDonald did, that an absolute ban on handguns is beyond the pale. That still leaves many unanswered questions, which liberals will seek to subvert for their own purposes.

The Most Progressive Platform in History

Much as the 2016 Republican platform largely adheres to conservative orthodoxy, the Democratic platform approved in Philadelphia this week reaffirms many liberal principles. The main difference between the two is that while the GOP platform makes few substantive changes to basic party principles (a summary of the changes that are present can be found here), the Democrats’ platform veers far to the Left, even when compared to the historically liberal platform of four years ago.

One of the sharpest illustrations of this can be found in the evolution of the abortion plank over the past several decades, as described by Fred Lucas at the Daily Signal. For the first time the platform expressly calls for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment prohibiting most direct federal funding of abortions—previously a bipartisan and noncontroversial issue. Democrats also refuse to call for abortion to be “rare”, until 2008 a hallmark of Democratic language, and the abortion section as a whole is the longest and most detailed in platform history.

But the abortion plank is nowhere near the only section of the platform that has taken a dramatic left turn. The platform takes stridently liberal positions on same-sex marriage, LGBT protections (opposing “bathroom bills” and religious liberty laws), and gun control (endorsing a variety of tailored gun bans and other measures designed to effectively choke the Second Amendment. And the platform is the first in history to endorse eliminating the death penalty entirely, calling it a “cruel and unusual form of punishment”. The vast majority of the American public disagrees on all points.

On economic and other domestic issues, the platform endorses increased regulation, amnesty for illegal immigrants, a universal health care system which goes even further than Obamacare in expanding the reach of the federal government, a $15 minimum wage, and more. All of those proposals are like siren songs promising everlasting prosperity, but all have been repeatedly discredited in practice. Obviously nothing to appeal to conservatives or moderates there.

Only on issues of national security and foreign affairs does the platform show any recognition of a need to appeal to voters beyond the most liberal and isolationist parts of the Democratic base. While less willing than its Republican counterpart to endorse military action or a leadership role for America in world affairs, the platform at least acknowledges a watered-down version of American exceptionalism, expresses a need to defeat ISIS and radical terrorism (of course without explicitly naming radical Islam), and takes a strong stance in opposing the power-hungry tactics of Russia and North Korea. However, even here the platform fails by praising the Iran deal and devoting a section to the supposed national security threat of climate change.

If 2016 was merely a referendum on the two major party platforms, the choice would be easy, and voters would be able to pick based on policy and principle alone. But of course, both nominees make the choice an agonizing one.

The full text of the 2016 Democratic platform can be found here.

Germany Responds to Last Week's Terror Attacks With A Call to Ban Axes

Just kidding. That would be the intellectually consistent argument, but liberals in Europe, like in America, don’t always follow arguments to their logical conclusion.

To recap: There have been four mass killings or other terrorist attacks in Germany in just the past week, including both a suicide bombing and a machete attack on Sunday, a mass shooting on Friday, and an ax attack on a train last Monday. The bombing and ax attack appear to have been inspired by ISIS, while the machete and shooting incidents are currently thought to be unrelated. The shooter from the Friday attack was a German citizen of Iranian heritage, while the other perpetrators were refugees from either Syria or Afghanistan.

Following the attacks on Monday and Sunday, the German government made no new proposals on how to stop more such incidents. But after the Friday shooting, high-ranking officials wasted no time naming the true perpetrator, and identifying exactly how similar scenarios could be avoided. Liberals being the same the world over, the answer should already be obvious: Stricter gun control laws would obviously have prevented the tragedy.

Never mind that Germany already has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, taking full advantage of the fact that there is no inherent right of German citizens to bear arms. Never mind the fact that the Friday shooter obtained his weapon illegally to begin with. For some in the German government, there can never be too much gun control, and a crisis must never be allowed to go to waste.

It should also go without saying that there was no similar attempt to draw broad policy lessons from the other three attacks. No calls to ban axes or machetes, just as there was no call to ban trucks following the terrorist attack in Nice. And there was a noticeable resistance by many in the German government to comment on the single variable the ax, machete, and bombing attacks all had in common—namely, the national origins of the perpetrators.