Seventy-seven days into his administration, President Donald J. Trump delivered on his most important campaign promise to gun owners: nominating a Supreme Court justice who respects the Second Amendment.
The appointment of 49-year-old Neil M. Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court on April 6, 2017 did more than just preserve the narrow five-vote majority that recognized a fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms beginning with the landmark Heller case in 2008. It meant that the Framers’ vision of constitutional freedom will have a voice on the court for decades to come.
Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation was the culmination of a dramatic series of events that began with Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden, unexpected death on Feb. 13, 2016. Scalia’s opinion in Heller was a triumph of the judicial philosophy known as originalism. He meticulously mustered historical sources to interpret the actual text of the Second Amendment as it would have been publicly understood at the time of its enactment.
This not only resulted in the end of Washington, D.C.’s draconian handgun ban and the requirement that residents store all other guns in an unusable state, it built a solid foundation for future consideration of the Second Amendment by directing courts to look to the provision’s origins to discern its meaning. Lower courts could not simply claim, “That was then. This is now. Things have changed.”
Not that they haven’t tried to do exactly that in the years since Heller was decided.
by nraila.org
