Justice John Paul Stevens is back at work

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens weighs in on the Second Amendment:

Following the massacre of grammar-school children in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, high-powered weapons have been used to kill innocent victims in more senseless public incidents. Those killings, however, are only a fragment of the total harm caused by the misuse of firearms. Each year, more than 30,000 people die in the United States in firearm-related incidents. Many of those deaths involve handguns. 

The adoption of rules that will lessen the number of those incidents should be a matter of primary concern to both federal and state legislators. Legislatures are in a far better position than judges to assess the wisdom of such rules and to evaluate the costs and benefits that rule changes can be expected to produce. It is those legislators, rather than federal judges, who should make the decisions that will determine what kinds of firearms should be available to private citizens, and when and how they may be used. Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good.

Stevens goes on with the usual liberal gun-grabber twaddle, a mix of fact-free and logic-free moral preening that would be risible if it weren't so lethal. Stevens argues, bizarrely, that the heavily-armed colonial delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who just finished fighting and defeating the most powerful government on earth with their personal weapons, really intended the "right to keep and bear arms" to apply only to government-approved organizations. They merely forgot a few words that would have made their real intention (coincidently exactly the same as Stevens' personal opinion) clear.

Stevens goes on to quote Chief Justice Warren Burger on Burger's hatred of the NRA (which, one presumes, Stevens hates also, but couldn't find any impressive-sounding quotes of himself saying so).

Burger himself remarked that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Chief Justice Burger had to include the modal 'one of the greatest pieces of fraud' no doubt because he had in mind his own vote in 1973 for Roe vrs. Wade, which was the actual greatest piece of fraud ever promulgated by the Court. Actually, literal fraud-- McCovey lied about her "rape", and the seven justice majority that overturned the abortion laws of fifty states lied about the Constitution.

The NRA, an organization of law-abiding citizens who are intent on defending our Second Amendment Rights, are labeled "frauds" because they make the argument (invited by the Court) that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention meant what they said about keeping and bearing arms, which Chief Justice Burger, who was protected by armed security at no cost to himself, personally finds distasteful.

Anyway, back to Stevens. Stevens insists that federal judges have no Constitutional authority whatsoever to be telling states and localities what guns they may ban or not ban. It should be left up to the states! One presumes that Stevens' newfound solicitude for federal judges' valuable time is because federal judges are too busy telling states and localities that they can't pass laws about abortion or pray in schools or question Darwin in biology classes and that they must use racially discriminatory schemes in state college admissions, stuff that Justice Sevens believes the states should have no say in at all. With all of those Constitutionally-mandated responsibilities (none of which can be found in the Constitution), federal judges just don't have the time to enforce the Second Amendment!

So here's Stevens' five-word correction for the Second Amendment:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

No doubt the delegates of the Constitutional Convention, fresh from risking their lives to win our freedom with their personal arms they kept and bore, would have ratified a better Second Amendment if they had input from a sinecured pencil-pushing veteran of the Washington cocktail party circuit. But at least it's inspiring to see Stevens, retired from the Court for a couple of years now, back on the job doing what he did on the Court for three decades-- rewriting the Constitution.