Like athlete’s foot and shower farts, John Paul Stevens just won’t go away.
The former Associate Supreme Court Justice is back in the saddle, peddling a new memoir and rehashing the same failed arguments he’s been making since the historic D.C. v. Heller decision affirmed the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Stevens claims in a new op-ed published in The Atlantic that Heller represents “the worst self-inflicted wound in the Court’s history” and is “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench.”
The Second Amendment, Stevens argues, guarantees the right to keep and bear arms only to state militias. As evidence, Stevens cites the “unambiguous” text of the Second Amendment along with the 1939 SCOTUS decision United States v. Miller.
In that decision, the Court upheld the indictment of a man who possessed a short-barreled shotgun, writing, “In the absence of any evidence that the possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.”
by Jordan Michaels
