YESTERDAY on "Fox News Sunday", Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice, suggested that Americans may have a constitutional right to own and carry shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles.
CHRIS WALLACE: What about…a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute?
SCALIA: We’ll see. Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried—it’s to keep and “bear”, so it doesn’t apply to cannons—but I suppose there are hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes, that will have to be decided.
WALLACE: How do you decide that if you’re a textualist?
SCALIA: Very carefully.
Most gun-rights advocates will probably downplay Mr Scalia's remarks, but I applaud them. In fact, I think the only thing amiss here is Mr Scalia's weirdly literalist approach to the word "bear"; the first amendment's reference to "freedom of speech and of the press", for example, is generally held to apply to non-verbal communications as well. Besides, even though you can't carry an M1 Abrams battle tank, that shouldn't necessarily preclude you from "keeping" one. More important, though, Mr Scalia seems to be one of the few people in the judiciary who may be favourably disposed towards letting Americans own the only kinds of weapons that actually make sense, under the dominant justification that advocates currently provide for the importance of gun rights: the right to defend yourself against the government.
There are basically two ways of explaining why a right to own guns belongs in the Bill of Rights. The first is that it's part of the assumed natural right to self-defence against other citizens. The second, increasingly the main line of argument by gun-rights advocates, is that's it's necessary to prevent governments from arrogating tyrannical powers to themselves.
(See rest of article at link below--Badger)
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/07/gun-rights
