Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- As reported in the leftist periodical Newsweek, on March 27, 2018 – “Young activists calling for more gun control legislation should be more ambitious in their nationwide effort and focus on repealing the Second Amendment, according to retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
“In an op-ed published Tuesday in The New York Times, Stevens praised the students and young people who rallied in Washington and around the country over the weekend as part of the March for Our Lives. The demonstration was sparked by the shooting last month at a Parkland, Florida, high school that left 17 people, including 14 students, dead.
Stevens wrote that he had ‘rarely’ seen such a wide scope of ‘civic engagement’ from young people in his lifetime and encouraged their efforts to go even further.
‘That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms,’ Stevens wrote. ‘But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.’”
Anti-Second Amendment Mainstream Media Rejoices Over Majority Decision In New York City Gun Transport Case.
The seditious Anti-Second Amendment Press breathed a collective sigh of relief when the U.S. Supreme Court Majority voted for Respondent, New York City, against the Petitioner, NYSRPA, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc., vs. Petitioners V. City Of New York, 590 U.S ____ (2020).* The New York City gun transport case was the first major Second Amendment case to be decided by the High Court since the McDonald case decision ten years earlier.
Although the legal issue, a very narrow one, only implicated the bizarre, abhorrent, draconian, multifaceted, bloated, fascistic, and constantly refined and engineered handgun licensing requirements of New York City, apropos of the City’s “premise handgun license,” the antigun, anti-Second Amendment mob exhibited marked hysteria that the high Court had dared to hear the case at all; concerned that a decision for the NYSRPA against the City would open the floodgates to renewed attacks against restrictive gun regulations across the Country.
The weblog “Bearing Arms,” said, at the time, just before oral argument: “Now, the Court is hearing arguments on the case. That’s more than enough to trigger anti-gunners to completely lose their crap.”
In its article, Bearing Arms cited an unconscionable, reprehensible story that appeared in the Radical Left weblog News One in which the weblog denounced and denigrated Associate Justice Clarence Thomas for having the audacity to exalt the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Unabashedly mocking the esteemed Associate Justice, the writer blurted out:
“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been one of the most destructive justices on the court. However, his foolishness is about to hit a new level with the Second Amendment being revisited for the first time on the court in over a decade.
In case you missed it, the Supreme Court is hearing a case to expand gun rights. Yep, you read that right. The majority conservative court might make it easier to have gun [sic] in a time when the majority of Americans are asking for more gun control.
Leave it up to Clarence Thomas to be on the wrong side of history.”
“Protect people from gun violence”— by removing the most effective means, i.e., a gun,’ with which the average, rational, law-abiding person might capably protect him or herself from a vicious predator? “Wrong side of history”— (i.e., revisionist history) because Justice Thomas defends our Nation’s cherished Bill of Rights?
And Fox19 now, noted, after the New York City gun transport case decision came down:
“The anti-climactic end to the Supreme Court case is a disappointment to gun rights advocates and relief to gun control groups who thought a conservative Supreme Court majority fortified by two appointees of President Donald Trump, Justices Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, might use the case to expand on landmark decisions from a decade ago that established a right under the Second Amendment to keep a gun at home for self-defense.
Lower courts upheld the regulation, but the Supreme Court’s decision early in 2019 to step into the case signaled a revived interest in gun rights from a court with two new justices.
Officials at both the city and state level scrambled to find a way to remove the case from the justices’ grasp. Not only did the city change its regulation to allow licensed gun owners to transport their weapons to locations outside New York’s five boroughs, but the state enacted a law barring cities from imposing the challenged restrictions.
Those moves failed to get the court to dismiss the case before arguments in December, and gun control advocates worried that the court might adopt the reasoning Kavanaugh used in a 2011 opinion in his former job as a Court of Appeals judge. There, he wrote, gun laws “that are not longstanding or sufficiently rooted in text, history, and tradition are not consistent with the Second Amendment individual right.”
Anti-Second Amendment foes need not have worried. But most Americans do need to worry about the future of Americans’ natural, fundamental, unalienable, immutable God-given right to keep and bear arms.
The New York City gun transport case provides Americans with a blueprint for assessing the predilections of U.S. Supreme Court Justices on matters pertaining to the Second Amendment.
First, the liberal wing of the High Court—comprising, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Steven Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—abhors the Second Amendment. The liberal wing will contort the law to find Government actions constitutional that are clearly unconstitutional and that tend to weaken our fundamental, natural rights and liberties. The liberal wing will continue to demonstrate little reluctance in subordinating the U.S. Constitution and U.S. case law precedent to the dictates of international norms and standards that stand in marked conflict to our system of laws and jurisprudence.
Second, the conservative wing of the High Court—comprising, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch—in the mold of the late, brilliant and esteemed Justice, Antonin Scalia, will continue to demonstrate great deference to our Constitution, and will, consistent with their Oath, always strive to preserve and strengthen our natural rights and liberties.
Third, Chief Justice Roberts cannot and should not be considered a Judicial conservative. He does not exemplify those Justices of the conservative wing of the Court. Even the expression, Judicial ‘moderate’ may not be an accurate descriptor for him. He does not exhibit the appropriate deference to the Second Amendment as now exemplified in having sided, sans a qualified concurring opinion, with the decision of the liberal—dare we say, increasingly, ‘radical’—wing of the High Court. Justice Roberts will continue to see-saw between the two wings of the Court. But do not expect the Chief Justice to treat our Bill of Rights with deep, abiding respect and reverence.
Fourth, prior to the decision in the New York gun transport case, one would have reasonably thought that Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the newest member of the Court—as of the posting of this article—would exhibit the same deference to the Bill of Rights as those Justices comprising the conservative wing of the Court. Certainly, given Justice Kavanaugh’s comprehensive, well-reasoned, and well-written dissent in Heller II, one would have expected Justice Kavanaugh to express the same desire for consistency and detail in his written opinions as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice that he had exhibited as a Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Sadly, that does not appear to be the case. Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring in the New York City gun transport case appears oddly dull, imprecise, even apologetic in tone. And the decision is not consistent with his dissent in Heller II.
Justice Kavanaugh’s jurisprudential philosophy remains at this point inscrutable and that is not a good thing. In the next several segments, we attempt to unpack Kavanaugh’s concurring, along with a review of past Second Amendment cases that the High Court denied cert, and a close look at the issue of mootness, as the majority decision in the New York City case wasn’t consistent with Supreme Court precedence; not even close.
*SCOTUSblog Holding and Judgment:
Holding: Petitioners’ claim for declaratory and injunctive relief with respect to the City’s old rule on transporting firearms is moot, and any claim for damages with respect to that rule may be addressed in the first instance by the court of appeals and the district court on remand.
Judgment: Vacated and remanded in a per curiam opinion on April 27, 2020. Justice Kavanaugh filed a concurring opinion. Justice Alito filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justice Gorsuch joined in full and Justice Thomas joined except for Part IV-B.
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