U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court’s Dueling Gun Opinions: ‘Thwap, Thwap, Thwap’
Posted Jun 27, 2008, 07:30 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
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.”
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Comments
Posted by What's the big deal - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 2 hours, 34 minutes ago
While I agree that everyone has a right to protect themselves but there’s a slight problem with that...everyone who owns a gun doesn’t have it for “protection” and I belive that is what DC was trying to prevent because it was known as the murder capital of the world. People were being killed in the streets not in their homes (except for the occasional stray bullet). I think that there should be restrictions on guns because they keep falling into the hands of the criminals.
Posted by Grant - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 1 hour, 26 minutes ago
Restrictions on guns don’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals. They just keep guns out of the hands of honest citizens who obey the gun restriction laws. How that creates a net-gain for civility or public safety, I’ve never understood.
Posted by sb - 2 months, 1 week, 3 days, 22 hours, 51 minutes ago
The big deal is that DC is known as the murder capital of the world DESPITE, and indeed, BECAUSE OF its 30+ year ban on gun ownership. Yet criminals still have guns, while the innocent are disarmed. The anti-gun crowd can’t fathom the fact that out of the 260 million guns in the country, only a few are in the hands of criminals, and that the areas with the highest crime rates are the same areas where the victims have been disarmed by the government for several years: Chicago, NYC, DC, Detroit. What about San Antonio, or Houston, or Dallas? You never hear about the high crime rates there, because, well, they’re not. Every law-abiding citizen has the right to carry a concealed weapon, and that fact is known by the criminals.