At NRO, Charles C. W. Cooke: Pride of Ignorance on Firearms. With some provocative suggestions, including this one:
Scalia’s suggestion that rocket launchers may well be legally protected sits on equally solid ground. The two most recent Second Amendment decisions — D.C. v. Heller, which confirmed the obvious truth that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right that is not contingent upon a militia, and McDonald v. Chicago, which incorporated that right to the states — did not address in much detail the question of which weapons may be legitimately banned, leaving the bulk of that work for another day. Progressives think they are being inordinately clever when they ask advocates of the right to bear arms, “So, can you have a nuclear missile?!” They are being no such thing. Like all informed people, Justice Scalia himself concedes that the right to bear arms is not infinite. For the weapon to be protected by the federal constitution, citizens must to be able to “keep” it and to “bear” it — and also to discriminate with it. This is why a handgun is quite obviously protected while a cruise or nuclear missile is quite obviously not. The Heller decisions also included a poorly defined “common use” provision that has not yet been properly tested.
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Scalia is by no means outré when he contends that machine guns or rocket launchers may fall on the protected side.
Related: In the L.A. Times, There's No Unlimited Right to Bear Arms by Joseph J. Ellis:
And yet, no matter how prevalent or fervently held, the opinion that the Bill of Rights supports and the high court acknowledges an absolute right to gun ownership is just plain wrong…
…The intent of the founders needs to be heard and understood. The men who hammered out the Constitution, argued for its ratification and underlined our liberties with the Bill of Rights, would urge us to think about the issue this way: How do we balance the right to bear arms against the collective security of the American people?
Framed in this fashion, we can all come together as fellow citizens to discuss in a sensible rather than strident tone where the line needs to be drawn between our rights and our responsibilities.
All that's required is that we channel our inner James Madisons, and even our inner Scalias. There is no unlimited right to bear arms — on that these two men agree, and so should we.
Joseph Ellis is, of course, one of the nation's leading historians of the founding era. I note that in this situation, at least, this particular historian seems to have great confidence that we can determine what the founders thought about a particular issue of constitutional meaning.
Posted at 6:08 AM