ACLU on Heller
You’d think they would value a civil rights victory. Instead, they opt to prove they’re nothing but shills:
The Second Amendment has not been the subject of much Supreme Court discussion through the years. To the extent it has been discussed, the Court has described the Second Amendment as designed to protect the ability of the states to preserve their own sovereignty against a new and potentially overreaching national government. Based on that understanding, the Court has historically construed the Second Amendment as a collective right connected to the concept of a “well-regulated militia” rather than an individual right to possess guns for private purposes.
In Heller, the Court reinterpreted the Second Amendment as a source of individual rights. Washington D.C.’s gun control law, which bans the private possession of handguns and was widely considered the most restrictive such law in the country, became a victim of that reinterpretation.
The Court was careful to note that the right to bear arms is not absolute and can be subject to reasonable regulation. Yet, by concluding that D.C.’s gun control law was unreasonable and thus invalid, the Court placed a constitutional limit on gun control legislation that had not existed prior to its decision in Heller. It is too early to know how much of a constitutional straitjacket the new rule will create.
Let’s play spot the hysteria and spot the outright lies.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Per the ACLU release:
It is too early to know how much of a constitutional straitjacket the new rule will create.
Hell yes! Let’s hope it ultimately becomes the complete straightjacket on government it is intended to be!
….that’s what they meant, right?
June 26th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Least you missed it :
This is the ACLU that claims to never be anti-any civil right.
This is the ACLU that claims to be ‘neutral’ on the matter of gun control.
This is the ACLU that claims to protect American values.
This is the ACLU that claims to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Maybe it’s just a poorly chosen word. Maybe it’s some intern’s time to be thrown under the bus. But it’s damned telling exactly where the ACLU stands.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:14 am
Thank you for posting this.
I will never forget this. The ACLU just burned a bridge with me and hopefully many other gunners. To hell with them all.
June 27th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Hope springs eternal, but it’s not as though the ACLU ever pretended to be a friend of gun owners or the Second Amendment in the first place. Quite the contrary, they actively campaigned against it, and disingenuously pretended to “agree” with past Supreme Court rulings reducing it to a collective non-right. So at most, yesterday’s update was a missed opportunity to bury a hatchet they’ve never had any intention of burying in the first place.
I never understood why so many gunnies assumed Justice Ginsburg would get behind the individual rights view solely because she was once general counsel to this fundamentally anti-gun owner organization. It was reminsicent of the pro-gunners who happily convinced themselves that Claire McCaskill was pro-gun because … er … just because. I guess some people just can’t get passed an organization’s name. If a political party is called the Democratic Party, they must be into democracy. If a group is called the American Civil Liberties Union, then them must be a union of Americans who are big on civil liberties. And dammit, if they’re called the American Hunters and Shooters Association, well…
June 27th, 2008 at 8:42 am
depressing.
d’you know, i’d actually been hoping (very quietly, because i knew it was unlikely) they’d change their mind on the second amendment once it got upheld by the SCOTUS, and have the grace to say “oops, we’ve been wrong this whole time — oh well, we’ll change and try to make up for lost time”.
if they had, i might’ve joined them. now, it looks like i won’t be able to do that without also joining the NRA at the same time — and since i don’t much like that latter thought, i think i’ll keep my money away from both organizations.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:53 am
This reaction from the ACLU is pretty bad and very ignorant. I also disagree with their stance on Capital punishment. Otherwise I’m in agreement with them about 90% of the time. But the 10% where they’re wrong, they’re REALLY wrong. Makes me think one of these days soon I need to upgrade to Lifetime NRA membership. Just might do it if the Chicago case gains traction.
Reminds me I need to renew my GOA membership soon, too.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
The American Communist Litigation Unit was founded to get Reds off the hook by every legal means possible – which expanded the scope of their operations and the expanded scope provided cover, but little has changed philosophically since their initial inception.
June 29th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
ACLU, we support the civil rights we say you can have. Is this any different than the rest of the Marxists?
Time to break out the cash donations for the legal teams we are going to need to stake out our territory.
July 1st, 2008 at 1:08 am
Scroll to message # 10 on this page of the ACLU Blog.
http://blog.aclu.org/2008/06/26/mandatory-ultrasound-laws-are-about-political-interference-not-medical-information/
“The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller. While the decision is a significant and historic reinterpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, the decision leaves many important questions unanswered that will have to be resolved in future litigation, including what regulations are permissible, and which weapons are embraced by the Second Amendment right that the Court has now recognized.”
July 1st, 2008 at 5:28 pm
“D.C.’s gun control law… became a victim”
“It is too early to know how much of a constitutional straitjacket the new rule will create.”
“…the Court has described the Second Amendment as designed to protect the ability of the states to preserve their own sovereignty against a new and potentially overreaching national government.”
I think the first statement was somewhat more neutral, but the second spins hard. In the third statement “the Court” seems to mean all lesser courts stripping individual rights. I can’t imagine the SCOTUS ever recognized the ability of the states to be sovereign based on the second amendment.