What Anti-Gun Attorneys Get Wrong About The Second Amendment

By Cam Edwards

Law professors Vikram D. Amar and Alan E. Brownstein have a column in the Los Angeles Times today entitled What The Gun Lobby Gets Wrong About The Second Amendment. A title like that is clickbait candy to me, so of course I took a look at their arguments. What I found was this: Yes, the Second Amendment may be an individual right, they say, but we should still be able to pass almost any gun control law we want.

Of course, a constitutional right does carry with it a strong presumption against government interference with that particular activity, even though the exercise of the right involves a societal cost. We protect freedom of religion, for example, even though we know that some religious practices — like pulling children out of school after the eighth grade — might be considered problematic or harmful.

But there is a critical difference between assigning a high value to a constitutional right when balancing it against social concerns, and arguing that the right necessarily overrides the public’s ability to regulate that activity in ways that may be needed to protect the community.

The problem with that argument is that under the standard articulated by Amar …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms