![]() Texas recently passed a law allowing background checks to omit records of minors' mental health records, essentially opening the door to at least some people who had a record of mental illness to own guns. With Scalia's radical re-interpretation of the Second Amendment, Thomas and other right-wing federal judges and state legislatures were off and running. Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course. Heller, which held that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to own handguns in his own home for self-defense. See where this is going? Using his Supreme Court robes to cloak his irrational and yes, insane reasoning, Thomas came up with a whole new interpretation of the Second Amendment even more extreme than the one written by his pal Antonin Scalia in District of Columbia v. That right, as Justice Thomas said in his Bruen decision, is not "a second class right," and is more important, according to the Fifth Circuit, than the safety of the woman and child the man threatened. This time when the man appealed his ban on owning guns, the Fifth Circuit said that the federal law which was cited in the restraining order was "an outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted," and was thus unconstitutional, trumped (as it were) by the man's Second Amendment right to own firearms. Heller,Īnd then came Clarence Thomas and his "historical tradition of firearms regulation" gibberish. Using his Supreme Court robes to cloak his irrational and yes, insane reasoning, Thomas came up with a whole new interpretation of the Second Amendment even more extreme than the one written by his pal Antonin Scalia in District of Columbia v. A previous appeals court had held that the state had an interest in banning people accused of domestic violence from owning guns because it was more important to protect the safety of those he was threatening than it was to protect his rights under the Second Amendment. Because the girlfriend had established the man's previous threats and told the court issuing the restraining order that her former partner owned guns and might use them against her or the child, the restraining order included a ban on the man from owning guns. The case involved a man who had a restraining order against him for threatening and harassing his ex-girlfriend and their child. In February of this year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's most conservative appeals court by about a factor of two, threw out a Texas law that banned people who had domestic violence restraining orders against them from buying or owning guns. ![]() Soon after the Bruen decision, federal judges and courts of appeals around the country began to use Thomas' logic to throw out gun regulations that had existed for decades. Before the Thomas decision, if a state wanted to limit gun purchases to those over 21 years of age or forbid the ownership of firearms by people who had been convicted of domestic abuse or those who had a restraining order against them because they had threatened a domestic partner, then the state could pass those laws.īut not after Justice Thomas had his say, backed up by members of the same Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority that threw out Roe v Wade with its decision to allegedly return regulation of abortion to the states in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization. With one decision, Clarence Thomas threw out about 200 years of jurisprudence and laws that had been passed regulating guns in this country for reasons of, for example, public safety. The Bruen decision, handed down last year, overturned the law, saying essentially that because at the time of the writing of the Second Amendment there were no laws requiring the licensing of firearms, no law could require such a license now. Bruen, New York state held that a citizen must show a need to carry a firearm in order to obtain a firearms license. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that automobiles were not invented until the late 1800s and did not come into regular use in this country until the early 20th Century, otherwise the Supreme Court would be busy doing away with requirements for driver's licenses, auto registrations, and environmental regulations on exhaust emissions and gas mileage.Īt least that would be true if the reasoning used by Justice Clarence Thomas in his decision in a landmark Second Amendment case was applied to cars, that any regulations of guns in this country must be "consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." In the case, N ew York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc.
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