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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: SCOTUS Sets Terrifying New Precedent on Gun Rights SCOTUS Sets Terrifying New Precedent on Gun Rights By: Nate Madden | June 27, 2016 A family enjoys the outdoors and practices their aim. Loren Kerns | Flickr The Supreme Court passed some potentially sweeping gun control legislation Monday (misnomer intended), and carelessness could now cost you your Second Amendment rights, according to the ruling. In a 6-2 decision in the case of Voisine v. United States, the court ruled that crimes of recklessness rise to the same level as “misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence” which preclude individuals convicted of such a crime from firearm ownership by federal law. The Second Amendment is under assault on all fronts. Both petitioners in the case, who had been convicted of crimes reckless in nature, claimed that their convictions shouldn’t have triggered the federal prohibition. Justice Kagan, on behalf of the majority, saw it quite differently. And anyway, we would not know how to resolve whether recklessness sufficed for a battery conviction at common law. Recklessness was not a word in the common law’s standard lexicon, nor an idea in its conceptual framework. The common law traditionally used a variety of overlapping and, frankly, confusing phrases to describe culpable mental states—among them, specific intent, general intent, presumed intent, willfulness, and malice. The federal ban on firearms possession applies to any person with a prior misdemeanor conviction for the “use . . . of physical force” against a domestic relation … That language, naturally read, encompasses acts of force undertaken recklessly—i.e., with conscious disregard of a substantial risk of harm. But while the decision may seem innocuous, it sets some troubling precedents for anyone who values the right to bear arms. Joining in dissent (in parts I and II), Justices Thomas and Sotomayor point out that reckless behavior does not necessarily rise to the level of the kind of malicious intent necessary to trigger the federal firearms prohibition, and has dangerous implications for anyone who is sometimes careless. “Today the majority expands [the federal ban]’s sweep into patently unconstitutional territory,” writes Thomas, dissenting alone. We treat no other constitutional right so cavalierly. At oral argument the Government could not identify any other fundamental constitutional right that a person could lose forever by a single conviction for an infraction punishable only by a fine. In enacting [the federal firearms law], Congress was not worried about a husband dropping a plate on his wife’s foot or a parent injuring her child by texting while driving. Congress was worried that family members were abusing other family members through acts of violence and keeping their guns by pleading down to misdemeanors … Instead, under the majority’s approach, a parent who has a car accident because he sent a text message while driving can lose his right to bear arms forever if his wife or child suffers the slightest injury from the crash. The Second Amendment is under assault on all fronts. Between a president willing to use “the pen and the phone” to the fullest extent possible, to congressmen either hostile to the Constitution itself or others simply too cowardly to fight for it, and a federal judiciary that seems content to erode and chip away at the founders’ intent for the right, one wonders: Isn’t government interference with the right to bear arms the reason it’s enumerated in the first place? - See more at: www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/scotus-sets-terrifying-new-precedent-on-gun-rights?AID=7236#sthash.UyonWNm1.dpuf Poster Comment: Don't beat on your woman, or get caught up in one of those other situations they can say you were being "reckless" or it could cost you a lot. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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