“For those who care about preserving Americans’ individual rights, Amy Barrett will provide the strongest defense.”
The Second Amendment is hanging in the balance, and Trump’s Supreme Court nomination this Saturday will determine its fate. All of Trump’s likely nominees – 7th Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, 11th Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa and 4th Circuit Judge Allison Jones Rushing – would likely be strong on this issue. But Barrett has the clearest record, having actually ruled on such cases. Barrett is also the most feared by liberals, some of whom concede that she has “a topnotch legal mind.”
By a narrow 5-to-4 majority, the Supreme Court has now twice ruled that there is an individual right to self-defense. Democrats, however, steadfastly promise to overturn those decisions. They claim the Second Amendment only guarantees the government the right to own guns.
Few issues divide Democrat and Republican-appointed judges more consistently and completely than gun control. The remaining Democratic appointments — Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan — have all noted their intentions to vote to overturn the court’s 2008 Heller and 2010 McDonald decisions, which merely ensured that the government could not completely ban guns. The Democratic justices on the Supreme Court dissented from the McDonald case by arguing that the U.S. Constitution does “not include a general right to keep and bear firearms for purposes of private self-defense. . . . the use of arms for private self-defense does not warrant federal constitutional protection from state regulation.”
