The Way of the Gun

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

It seems that grievously ill-considered opinions are becoming the stock-in-trade of the United States Supreme Court.

Part of the problem may be that some of the justices seem to fancy themselves more historians than Constitutional experts. In two opinions issued last week, one overruling Roe and one striking down a New York law requiring a person to show “proper cause” to carry a concealed gun, “history” and “tradition” are cited two hundred sixty times.

The gun law though, I think, was rightly decided, if perhaps erroneously reasoned. If we have a right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, we should not have to prove, as that law required, a special need beyond self-defense.

But invalidating the law because its proponents could not identify an American tradition justifying it was just some kind of smokescreen hooey, likely just to set up future gun law targets.

It was a tradition in this country to keep slaves and count them as three-fifths of a person (only for the benefit of white men who could vote; elsewise, they weren’t counted as persons at all).

It was a tradition in this country to consider women as political zeroes: they couldn’t vote, couldn’t own property, couldn’t control their own money or bodies (the American tradition justifying the Court’s overruling of Roe?); couldn’t sign a simple legal document. They weren’t even mentioned in the Constitution.

We have shown in those cases we needn’t — shouldn’t — lean on historic traditions; we can give them up. We could also give up our tradition of being the slaughterhouse of the world, and refuse anymore to allow an individual to bear military arms intended for offense and not the defense to which we are entitled.

Though perhaps in a time when a president of the United States seeks to overthrow his own duly elected government, those who by historic tradition are considered members of “the left” ought not be hasty to give up too many of their guns. The security of our free State may depend on it.