Why does the SECOND AMENDMENT get NO LOVE from our current Supreme Court? This week, the Supreme Court had the chance to take up a defense of our fundamental right to keep and bear arms. Yet the court denied ten requests to protect our beloved Second Amendment. These are our fellow citizens who are asking the Court to protect their right to defend themselves, their families, and other vulnerable members of their communities. It has been ten years since the Supreme Court has protected our Second Amendment. They have crafted avoidance of this issue into a high art.

SCOTUS undercuts the very definition of the word “right”, since rights are unassailable by the state – that’s the point. https://www.mrctv.org/blog/roberts-an...

Roberts and The Left Lead Supreme Court Against Gun Rights

BY P. GARDNER GOLDSMITH

SEE: https://www.mrctv.org/blog/roberts-and-left-lead-supreme-court-against-gun-rights;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Since 2008, and the now infamous “District of Columbia v. Heller” majority opinion penned by Antonin Scalia, many Americans who understand the nature of rights and the Second Amendment have lamented Scalia’s wording, because at the close of the opinion in which he said the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right (easy to figure out), he added that… er, rights can be attenuated.

Which undercuts the very definition of the word “right”, since rights are unassailable by the state – that’s the point.

It turns out that Scalia’s error has caused all kinds of problems, now compounded by Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal majority on the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS)as they just rebuffed numerous cases brought by folks defending their gun rights, and made more frustrating by how some report on the story.

So, for example, we have Richard Wolf, of USA Today, whose first line speaks volumes:

The Supreme Court wasted little time Monday making clear its reluctance to wade back into the national battle over gun rights.

The very fact that he can express a sentence saying there’s a “national battle over gun rights” is problematic. If people have an inherent, individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense – which they DO – then how can there be a “national battle” over them? Wouldn’t it be a given that others can’t infringe on one’s right to self-defense, that doing so -- whether it be alone or with a gang called “government” -- is improper and aggressive? One doesn’t need the wording of the Second Amendment to know this as manifestly true. It’s simply based on logic.

But Wolf goes on:

After refusing to rule on a challenge to New York City gun restrictions because they were rescinded while the case was pending, the court turned away all potential replacements that would have given its conservative justices a chance to strengthen the Second Amendment.

Why should the Second Amendment need “strengthening?” After all, it’s a simple statement prohibiting ALL forms of government from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms.

Perhaps 19th Century philosopher Lysander Spooner was right when, in his treatise, “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority”, he pointed out that the Constitution has not stopped politicians from expanding the purview of the state and increasing their attacks on individual rights…?

Sure seems to be the case, because Wolf added:

The justices had a long list of challenges to choose from, including several testing the threshold issue of whether guns can be carried in public nationwide, as they currently are in some 40 states. Other issues included bans on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and handgun sales.

There were ten gun-rights cases, total, that the SCOTUS could have heard, many of which object to similar infringements in different states, but it’s productive to highlight a few major points…

First, the earlier case in which the Court refused to hear a challenge brought by New York City residents against a city statute making it virtually impossible for them to take firearms outside the Big Apple (where most of the gun training facilities are located) saw Roberts and the lefties turn a blind eye because the city authoritarians argued that they had changed the statute (they changed it after the challenge was brought to lower court), to allow for easier movement. But the fact remains that the city government has the gall to create such a statute, and they can revise it again. The point is that the suit was brought before the revision, and the injustice was DONE, harming people and attacking their rights.

Roberts and his pals, Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, Kavanaugh, and Ginsberg, all voted to allow the injustice to stand, thus allowing the precedent and practice of the city “controls” to stand. And their majority opinion in refusing the case was merely two pages, while the dissent, written by Sam Alito, was 31. In it, he included this, as noted in an excellent piece on the topic by Ammoland:

By incorrectly dismissing this case as moot, the Court permits our docket to be manipulated in a way that should not be countenanced.

And he added:

Since then (“Heller” and the McDonald V Chicago case of 2010), the lower courts have decided numerous cases involving Second Amendment challenges to a variety of federal, state, and local laws. Most have failed. We have been asked to review many of these decisions, but until this case, we denied all such requests. On January 22, 2019, we granted review to consider the constitutionality of a New York City ordinance that burdened the right recognized in Heller.

And his final point is extremely important:

In sum, the City’s travel restriction burdened the very right recognized in Heller. History provides no support for a restriction of this type. The City’s public safety arguments were weak on their face, were not substantiated in any way, and were accepted below with no serious probing. And once we granted review in this case, the City’s public safety concerns evaporated. We are told that the mode of review in this case is representative of the way Heller has been treated in the lower courts. If that is true, there is cause for concern. This case is not moot. The City violated petitioners’ Second Amendment right, and we should so hold.

And that’s just the earlier case.

If one looks at other the other ten cases, one sees a slasher-film’s worth of injustices, including, as Wolf notes, state attacks on magazine capacity and rapidity of fire, and one of the most important aspects of the supposed constitutional US system, the ability of people to open-carry nationwide.

And this doesn’t involve solely the right to keep and bear arms. It ties-in the important clause of the Constitution called “The Full Faith and Credit Clause”, found in Article Four, Section One, of the so-called rule book, and it’s important because the clause clearly mandates that any legal license in one state must be recognized with “full faith and credit” in all states. This means that marriages will be recognized from state to state, driver’s licenses will be recognized as valid from state to state, and, if the states are going to insult us and attack our rights by engaging in unconstitutional “gun licensing”, any gun license issued in one state must be recognized in all.

But, of course, the leftists aren’t interested in that, and neither is John Roberts. As Adam Winkler writes for The Atlantic:

So what explains the Court’s refusal to hear another Second Amendment case? Only the justices can be certain, but one thing we do know is that the Court’s decision to take a case requires the agreement of only four justices. And we also know that four justices (Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh) are all on record saying that the Court should take a Second Amendment case and address the very unanswered questions posed by the cases it turned away today. Those justices could have forced the Court to take one of them, but they didn’t—and one suspects that’s because of John Roberts.

Given the number of times Chief Justice Roberts has turned his back on fundamental rights and the wording of the very Constitution that created his seat, that seems to be the case.

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Chief Justice Roberts Afraid of Restoring the Second Amendment

BY DAVE WORKMAN

SEE: https://www.ammoland.com/2020/06/chief-justice-roberts-afraid-of-restoring-the-second-amendment/#axzz6PidqONzV

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- From the moment Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of 
the Second Amendment Foundation, said in a prepared statement following the Supreme Court’s 
rejection of ten pending gun rights cases, that responsibility for this high court two-step “falls 
squarely at the feet of Chief Justice John Roberts,” the question that must be answered is this:

“Is the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court afraid of restoring the Second Amendment to apply equally to all citizens?” It is beginning to appear that way.

The National Rifle Association issued a statement: “The Bill of Rights specifically includes the right to keep and bear arms because self-defense is fundamental to the liberty of a free society. Today’s inaction continues to allow so-called gun safety politicians to trample on the freedom and security of law-abiding citizens. This fight is not over for the NRA.”

Gottlieb was equally blunt, observing, “Given the fact that the Supreme Court had a cafeteria-style menu of cases from which to choose, there is no excuse why the court at this time chose to ignore the need to rule on any of these cases, and send a message to lower courts that they can no longer thumb their noses at the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court decisions affirming the individual right to keep and bear arms.”

Roberts’ appointment made the 5-4 Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010) Second Amendment opinions possible. His addition to the court enabled Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito to author opinions anyone can understand; the Second Amendment protects an individual fundamental right to keep and bear arms outside of any service in a militia.

But in the years since, lower courts have wrestled, incredulously as it might seem, with the question whether this right extends beyond the confines of one’s home. It is a question that needs to be answered sooner than later, especially considering a passage in Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in the court’s rejection of Rogers v. Grewal, one of the ten cases. This was a challenge to the New Jersey “justifiable need” requirement to obtain a carry permit in the Garden State.

“One of this Court’s primary functions is to resolve ‘important matter[s]’ on which the courts of appeals are ‘in conflict.”…The question whether a State can effectively ban most citizens from exercising their fundamental right to bear arms surely qualifies as such a matter. We should settle the conflict among the lower courts so that the fundamental protections set forth in our Constitution are applied equally to all citizens.”

The court’s reluctance to consider such a case that directly addresses the right “to bear arms” falls in Chief Justice Roberts’ lap, according to several observers, including SAF’s Gottlieb. At least one observer suggested to AmmoLand that Roberts does not care to take the Second Amendment beyond Heller. If that assessment is accurate, it’s an absurd position.

Could it be he doesn’t want to hear such a case because there can be but only one logical, and constitutionally correct, outcome; that such laws as now exist in New Jersey, New York and a handful of other states, would be nullified? It would throw those states’ regulatory schemes into chaos, which would delight gun rights activists living under those burdensome restrictions. But what other outcomes could there be, since the exercise of a fundamental, individual right requires no explanation or justification. A right is there to be exercised responsibly, regardless the misgivings of some bureaucrat or special interest group that thinks otherwise.

But by leaving intact, at least for the time being, such restrictions on an enumerated right, Roberts is relegating that right to the level of a regulated privilege.

If Roberts is satisfied with the status quo, and some observers believe he is, millions of law-abiding gun owners are not. They want to enjoy the same rights as citizens living in Indiana or Florida, Texas or Idaho, or any of the dozens of other states where one doesn’t need to provide a reason for exercising a constitutionally delineated right.

Justice Thomas is no stranger to this dilemma. In his 19-page dissent he wrote, “as I have noted before, many courts have resisted our decisions in Heller and McDonald… Instead of following the guidance provided in Heller, these courts minimized that decision’s framework…(concluding that our decisions “did not provide much clarity as to how Second Amendment claims should be analyzed in future cases”). They then “filled” the self-created “analytical vacuum” with a “two-step inquiry” that incorporates tiers of scrutiny on a sliding scale…) (compiling Circuit opinions adopting some form of the sliding-scale framework).

“Under this test,” Thomas continued, “courts first ask ‘whether the challenged law burdens conduct protected by the Second Amendment.'…If so, courts proceed to the second step—determining the appropriate level of scrutiny…To do so, courts generally consider “how close the law comes to the core of the Second Amendment right” and “the severity of the law’s burden on the right.”

“Depending on their analysis of those two factors, courts then apply what purports to be either intermediate or strict scrutiny— at least recognizing that Heller barred the application of rational basis review…

“This approach raises numerous concerns,” Thomas observed. “For one, the courts of appeals’ test appears to be entirely made up. The Second Amendment provides no hierarchy of “core” and peripheral rights. And “[t]he Constitution does not prescribe tiers of scrutiny.”

But the description of what has occurred correlates with Justice Thomas’ 2018 dissent in the high court’s refusal to hear the appeal in another Second Amendment case, Silvester v. Becerra. In that 14-page dissent, Justice Thomas observed, “If a lower court treated another right so cavalierly, I have little doubt that this Court would intervene. But as evidenced by our continued inaction in this area, the Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this Court.”

This brings Second Amendment activists back around to the appearance, the perception, that Chief Justice Roberts is fearful of advancing a rights case to the point that a high court ruling will be issued.

The question then becomes “Why?”

The nation’s gun owners, an estimated 100 million-plus citizens, are waiting for an answer.

About Dave Workman

Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.

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SCOTUS Rejection of 2A Cases Moves Up

Likelihood of a Forced Choice for Gun Owners

BY DAVID CODREA

SEE: https://www.ammoland.com/2020/06/scotus-rejection-of-2a-cases-moves-up-likelihood-of-a-forced-choice-for-gun-owners/#axzz6PopB4585;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Opponents of gun safety laws have again failed in their efforts to get the Supreme Court to adopt their extreme and dangerous approach,” Eric Tirschwell, managing director for Everytown Law crowed Monday, following the high court's refusal to consider any of the 10 gun owner rights appeals petitioning to be heard. “In each of the cases, the lower courts correctly determined the Second Amendment is not a barrier to the reasonable, life-saving gun safety policies being challenged. The Supreme Court recognized there is no need to revisit these thorough rulings.”

They were pretty moderate cases, really, some challenging “special needs justifications” used to turn “may issue” into “don’t hold your breath,” bans on “commonly owned” standard capacity magazines and firearms, a challenge to interstate prohibitions on handguns sales, a challenge to a ban on handguns that do not employ microstamping and a challenge to the denial of rights to non-residents.

It’s not like anybody was asking them to admit the Founder’s mandate that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Or recognize the core purpose of the Second Amendment, and how state infringements undermine “the security of a free State” and of the Republic as a whole to the benefit of “enemies foreign and domestic.”

And that makes it fair for gun owners to ask what the hell is going on with the Supreme Court, and particularly with its top turncoat.

“The Supreme Court’s refusal to take a Second Amendment Foundation case falls squarely at the feet of Chief Justice John Roberts,” Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation asserted in a press release condemning the high court’s deliberate indifference. “He owes every gun owner in the United States an explanation about why the high court declined to hear a number of important Second Amendment cases.”

For those of us who have been watching Roberts for some time, his dereliction from fidelity to the Constitution comes as no surprise, particularly after his Obamacare betrayal. Speculation about who’s got what on the guy seems more than warranted.  Some of us questioned why gun owners were overwhelmingly supportive of him before he was confirmed, noting there was plenty of Republican establishment rah-rah, but no real basis from which to make an informed judgment.

That holds true for other nominations, where the name of the game is partisan rubberstamping instead of finding out what really makes the justices tick. A report by Congressional Research Service explains:

“In recent decades a recurring Senate issue has been what kinds of questions are appropriate for Senators to pose to a Supreme Court nominee appearing at hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Particularly at issue has been whether, or to what extent, questions by committee members should seek out a nominee’s personal views on current legal or constitutional issues or on past Supreme Court decisions that have involved those issues. Usually, when Senators at confirmation hearings have asked Supreme Court nominees to comment on topical legal and constitutional issues, the nominees have firmly declined to do so. In those situations, the nominees typically have taken the position that answers to questions that convey their personal views would conflict with their obligation to avoid appearing to make commitments or provide signals, as to how they would vote as a Justice on future cases.”

Think of one job you’ve ever applied for where you’d have gotten it if you decided to play coy with the hiring managers.  While it may be “inappropriate” for a judge to weigh in on a specific case before confirmation — for legitimate reasons, including not having studied and evaluated all the particulars, evidence and precedents against the “supreme Law of the Land,” — there’s no reason why general principles of understanding should be off-limits. Such hearings are supposed to be, among other things, high-level employment interviews, not pre-coronation ceremonies.

As such, here are questions gun owner rights advocates should expect the representatives they enable and support to ask that any qualified candidate shouldn't have any trouble answering:

• What did the Founders mean by “A well regulated militia”?
• What did the Founder mean by “being necessary to the security of a free State”?
• What did the Founders mean by “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”?
• What did the Founders mean by “shall not be infringed”?
• How can past Supreme Court opinion specifying protected arms as those being “in common use at the time” not apply to the types of firearms needed for militia service?

Hell, correctly answering these should be required to graduate high school. But it won’t happen even with Republicans nominally in control of things, let alone if there’s a blue wave in November. So what “legal” recourse is available?

You can’t hoist them on their own petard. Judicial immunity means you can’t take them to court for the subversion of Founding intent. And good luck getting the current crop of interested/compromised/beholden Deep State Swamp denizens to even suggest impeachment, although allow a Democrat supermajority and don’t be surprised to see Clarence Thomas targeted anew.

There is one other legal alternative. Per the Hoover Institute:

“Congress should exercise its power to limit the jurisdiction of the courts. The Constitution provides that Congress is authorized to establish those federal courts subordinate to the Supreme Court and set forth their jurisdiction. Congress also has the power to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and regulate its activities. Accordingly, Congress should exercise this authority to restrain an activist judiciary.”

Again, don’t hold your breath. Too many string-pulling special interests like things the way they are and are counting on legislation coming from the bench when they know they don’t have the votes to advance their agendas the Constitutional way – yet.

That too is changing. And with Thursday's 5 – 4 ruling, with John Roberts once more siding with the “liberals” writing the majority opinion on DACA “undocumented immigrants,” expect Democrats to renew their push to transform the “pathway to citizenship” to an open borders superhighway. If they take all in November, get ready for the electoral, legislative, and judicial evisceration of the Second Amendment, especially after another high-profile exploitation of “gun-free zones,” their very existence guaranteeing more coming.

Do you think “legal” semiautos won’t be next on the ban list, and that in-your-face legal abominations like ruling they are the same as machineguns won’t be upheld? (And to think there are still some ignoramus gun owners out there bloviating the “bump stock” ban was about stupid toys, and who ridicule those warning of new dangers that will arise from the “precedent.”)

So – if “legal” doors are slammed in our faces, what choices will gun owners have, except to surrender or defy confiscation orders?

“[T]he liberties of the American people were dependent upon the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box; that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country,” civil and human rights pioneer and giant Frederick Douglass maintained in his classic Life and Times autobiography.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” Democrat President John F. Kennedy, an NRA  Member ostensibly shot to death by an ACLU member, observed.

And lest one think he did not understand the issue:

“By calling attention to ‘a well regulated militia,' the ‘security' of the nation, and the right of each citizen ‘to keep and bear arms,' our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fears of governmental tyranny which gave rise to the Second Amendment will ever be a major danger to our nation, the Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the Second Amendment will always be important.”

At this point, there are plenty of reasons for gun owners to be concerned, not the least being Donald Trump’s unique ability to alienate the core constituency that got him elected (and a new report of a potential ATF reversal on arm braces isn’t helping). What we know for certain is that if Joe Biden and the Democrats win “bigly,” the means of peaceful redress supposedly guaranteed by the First Amendment will be as closed off to us as “Second Amendment protections.”

None of us has a crystal ball to know what is coming next, but it does look like November could be our “last best hope” for such redress using the remarkable system bequeathed us by our Founders. After that, who knows what terrible choices each of us will be confronted with, and when?

The one thing we will come to know to our credit or our shame is how serious we each are when we declare “WE WILL NOT DISARM” and the only choices left by those who would claim our rights as theirs are surrender or resist.

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.