![]() (Ronald Reagan wrote an article praising individual gun ownership in Guns & Ammo magazine in 1975.) Now, being pro-gun, like being anti-abortion, became a pillar of the New Right ideology.Īfter all, it ticked all the boxes, tapping into white fears of “crime” and “the inner cities,” populist resentment of “big government,” and male fears of losing power in the age of women’s liberation. As legal scholar Reva Siegel and others have demonstrated, (white) conservatives’ opposition to gun regulation began in the wake of the civil rights movement and the rise in the 1970s of the ‘New Right,’ made up of former segregationists, cultural conservatives (the ‘moral majority’), and white politicians demanding ‘law and order.’ While the 1972 Republican party platform had actually supported gun control, the Reagan Revolution transformed the party. (Yes, the Second Amendment is mostly about slavery in fact, it was added to win support for the new constitution among slave-holding states, who feared that the new federal government would disband their slave-hunting militias.) Why? Because of the obvious language of the amendment, which reads, in full, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”įor nearly two hundred years, there was widespread agreement that the Second Amendment meant what it said: that the right “of the people” meant the right to bear arms in well-regulated militias, which was how the nation protected itself prior to standing armed forces and police, and which slave-owners maintained to protect against possible uprisings. On the contrary, the Supreme Court clearly said that it didn’t. The lie at the heart of all of this insanity is the Right’s ludicrous perversion of the Second Amendment.Ĭontrary to what you may have been led to believe, until 2008, no federal court had held that the Second Amendment conveyed a right to own a gun. ![]() All Republicans can do is send thoughts and prayers. Any common-sense gun safety measure is seen as heresy. Yet Republicans in Congress have voted down all these proposals (or, when they were in power, blocked votes on them from even happening), because to win a Republican primary, you have to cater to the rabid, nearly-all-white, right-wing populist base. (Check out Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, whose father was murdered by gunmen in Beirut in 1984, fight back tears as he talked about the shooting, and the background checks bill in particular. 63 percent want to ban assault-style weapons. 81 percent want to expand background checks. In fact, 87 percent of us want to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Obviously, because of our insane gun culture, propped up by a preposterous misreading of the Second Amendment, funded largely by gun manufacturers, and now, like so much else, yet another identity-marker of the populist Right. Every country has murderous lunatics, yet only ours has so many mass shootings. I think of that headline after every mass shooting, including today’s horrifying one at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. He brought intellect, good judgment, and wit to the bench, and he will be missed by his colleagues and our country."ĬBS News Justice Department Producer Paula Reid contributed to this story.In 2014, after a mass shooting in California, The Onion ran a story headlined “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” He attended at Georgetown University and Harvard Law School.įormer President Bush said in a statement that Scalia was a "towering figure and important judge on our Nation's highest court. ![]() Scalia, the son of Italian immigrants, was born in Trenton, New Jersey and raised in the Queens neighborhood of New York City. "The Senate has a constitutional responsibility here that it cannot abdicate for partisan political reasons." "The Republicans in the Senate and on the campaign trail who are calling for Justice Scalia's seat to remain vacant dishonor our Constitution," she said in a statement. Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate's most essential Constitutional responsibilities."ĭemocratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton added her own admonishment for those calling to keep Scalia's seat vacant. ![]() "It would be unprecedented in recent history for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacant seat. "With so many important issues pending before the Supreme Court, the Senate has a responsibility to fill vacancies as soon as possible," Reid said in a statement Saturday.
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