Supreme Court’s Dueling Gun Opinions: ‘Thwap, Thwap, Thwap'
Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens took aim at each other in dueling majority and dissenting opinions in yesterday’s 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling finding a right to own handguns in the home.
The Washington Post notes gibes on both sides of the ideological divide. Scalia’s majority opinion, which found the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own guns, took Stevens to task for “faulty” analysis in his dissent and reasoning “worthy of a mad hatter.”
For his part, Stevens said the majority’s holding was based “on a strained and unpersuasive reading” of the Second Amendment that “fundamentally fails to grasp the point” of sentence analysis.
The Post reacts to the dialogue this way: “One envisions a kid glove being struck repeatedly about the face. Thwap, thwap, thwap. In the time before gun bans, this sort of dialogue might have devolved into a pair of single-shot pistols in a velvet-lined case.”
