“With a dubious chance of prevailing on the merits, anti-gunners have adopted a tactic of not-so-thinly-veiled threats to delegitimize and even dismantle the U.S. Supreme Court itself if they don’t get their way.”
Threats. The way of the Left.
For many decades, gun control proponents who saw their fortunes wane in legislatures from coast to coast and who were unable to get traction with Congress could at least console themselves with the thought that activist courts had their backs. The Second Amendment, after all, had been all but written out of the U.S. Bill of Rights by law professors and politically-minded judges, as cities and even the U.S. Congress increasingly adopted gun control in the Twentieth Century.
But none of that could change the text, history, or tradition of the Second Amendment, which led to an unbroken and uniquely American embrace of private gun ownership as a defense against crime and tyranny and also gave rise to the popular understanding of bearing arms as a birthright of U.S. citizenship.
Those facts and that understanding were formally recognized as constitutional doctrine by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Heller case in 2008.
