In a word-salad-filled, fantastical ruling, the majority of Justices in the Supreme Court June 21 determined that it is perfectly consistent with their make-believe view of the Constitution for any level of government to prohibit a free individual from possessing a gun, despite that person not being in jail, not having had due process, and despite that person possessing a natural right to carry and use a firearm – a right that supposedly is explicitly protected by the Second Amendment.
Amy Howe notes for SCOTUSBlog:
“The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law that bars anyone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun. By a vote of 8-1, the court ruled that the law does not violate the Constitution’s Second Amendment, which protects the ‘right of the people to keep and bear Arms.’ The ruling in United States v. Rahimi was the court’s first Second Amendment case since it threw out New York’s handgun-licensing scheme nearly two years ago. In that case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the majority emphasized that courts should uphold gun restrictions only when there is a tradition of such regulation in U.S. history.”
For those curious about the background of the case, here is a quick review, but it should be noted that this specific case is being utilized to facilitate the SCOTUS majority’s abstract misreading of the Bill of Rights, and as inflammatory as the details of this particular case might appear, the man in question was not convicted of a crime, nor was he ever given due process prior to the “restraining order” placed on him that lies as the proverbial “trigger” for the gun ban.
Writes Howe:
“The challenge to the law came from a Texas man, Zackey Rahimi. In 2020, a court in Texas entered a civil protective order against him after Rahimi dragged his then-girlfriend back to his car when she tried to leave after an argument. He pushed her into the car, causing her to hit her head on the dashboard. Rahimi also fired a gun at a bystander who witnessed the incident. The protective order specifically barred Rahimi from having a gun.”
Like so-called “Red Flag Laws” – to which the new court ruling clearly offers a knowing nod of permissibility – in the case of the Rahimi order, the government breached nearly half of the Bill of Rights.
Texas did not give him due process, which is required by the Fifth Amendment.
Texas did not give him a “speedy and public trial” before an impartial jury, with a chance to call witnesses, as is required by the Sixth Amendment.
Texas followed the toweringly anti-constitutional provisions of the November, 1988 federal add-on to the 1968 Gun Control Act, known as the so-called “Undetectable Firearms Act,” which contained in it what is called “US Code Title 18, Sub-section 922(g)(8)”, claiming the power to seize Rahimi’s gun or punish him for having one, which is both property seizure without just compensation, prohibited by the Fifth Amendment, and is cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited by the Eighth Amendment (since he was given no trial, how could he be punished?)…
Related: Fed Appeals Court: Unconstitutional For Feds To Prohibit 18-Year-Olds From Buying Firearms | MRCTV
He was given no trial because this act of criminal malfeasance by Texas, under the auspices of the afore-mentioned “Sub-Section 922(g)(8)” code passed in ’88, was conducted under the guise of so-called “civil procedure”. It’s been a handy way for governments on every level of the US to skirt the Bill of Rights and engage in things like “Civil Asset Forfeiture” to take the property of drug users and keep it, rather than involve the actual rights that are supposed to be afforded under normal criminal proceedings, as the Founders envisioned.
Nifty, huh…
And, get this, in backing up their avoidance of the Bill of Rights, the majority on the bench this time did two more insulting things.
First, they utilized what I’ve been trying to warn people was coming ever since former Justice Scalia compromised the very notion of rights with his majority opinion in the 2007-2008 “DC v. Heller” case. At the end of the decision, Scalia added the phrase “rights are not unlimited,” which completely undercuts the very meaning of rights.
Rights are supposed to be untouchable by government. That’s the point. We can freely adjust how much we want to exercise our rights among voluntary associations with others, but the state – that INVOLUNTARY agency of force – cannot breach our rights.
Scalia’s one line destroyed the very meaning of the term, claiming an opening for political forces to invade our rights.
And on page 2 – just the syllabus -- of the ruling, and throughout his majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts referred to "Heller," indicating that, heck, Antonin Scalia said we can attack rights, so, yeah, it’s totally cool to overlook the concept and also the strict wording of the Second Amendment, which concludes with, “…shall not be infringed.”
What a surprise.
Also not surprising was the fact that the majority both utilized the so-called “two-tier” standard of the 2022 SCOTUS decision in “New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen” (commonly referred to as “Bruen”) and that when they used the “second tier” of analysis to see if the ban on guns for Rahimi was constitutional, they referred to gun-grabs OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES for their “historical analogues.”
Here's the way it played out.
The first level of the Bruen standard is simple, in it the SCOTUS hewed to the actual WORDING of the Second Amendment, which asks, essentially:
“Does a challenged statute adhere to the wording?”
Well, if it INFRINGES the right to keep and bear arms, it does not adhere. Simple.
But then, the 2022 SCOTUS Bruen majority offered its “Second Tier” of adjudication, which undercuts the first.
Indeed, don't bother with their first level and the actual WORDS of the 2A. The 2022 SCOTUS majority claimed that if a government could show an historical example of an INFRINGMENT from the early days of the US, then that might lead to the contemporary statute being judged as perfectly fine. In other words, their invention of the "SECOND" level negates the Second Amendment.
It's infuriating.
Yet Roberts, Kavanaugh, Brown-Jackson, Barrett, Sotomayor, Kagan, Alito, and Gorsuch all agreed, to various levels, that such an absurd bipolar position on the right to keep and bear arms, and that such an overtly obvious attack on the other Amendments noted above also is fine.
In Amy Howe’s report and the Roberts text, we also discover that Roberts included not just references to BRITISH bans on firearms in the 17th and 18th Centuries, but also that Roberts claimed that at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the musket was the most powerful privately owned weapon.
As I've noted for MRCTV, and someone might want to mention that High Lord Roberts, Paul Revere and his son made CANNONS for people, and the founders never put a "technology prohibition" clause on the right to keep and bear arms.
The majority decision is a mess, and utterly inimical to both the Bill of Rights and to the deeper, eternal natural rights we possess.
And the only dissenter was Clarence Thomas, whose words were stark and blunt, and end with this:
“Thus, the question before us is not whether Rahimi and others like him can be disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment. Instead, the question is whether the Government can strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order—even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime. It cannot. The Court and Government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence. The Government has not borne its burden to prove that §922(g)(8) is consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding. The Framers and ratifying public understood 'that the right to keep and bear arms was essential to the preservation of liberty.’ McDonald, 561 U. S., at 858 (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Yet, in the interest of ensuring the Government can regulate one subset of society, today’s decision puts at risk the Second Amendment rights of many more. I respectfully dissent.”
Well said.
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