Supreme Court on the (Right) Wing

I'll make this quick, because I actually have no personal interest in the issue at hand.

Today, the Supreme Court has, in its latest ruling (McDonald v. City of Chicago), basically declared that the Second Amendment "right" to "keep and bear arms" is an individual right, meaning it cannot be abridged by state or local government. (Not that anyone, even the authors of the amendment themselves, actually knows/knew how the [redacted] they meant it to apply.) Thus handgun bans of any sort, like the one in D.C. which the SCOTUS directly overturned, may well be on the way out. Supposedly, the ruling "does not imperil every law regulating firearms," but there isn't any sense of clarity (from the news reports I've read) indicating just what it does say. I couldn't be bothered to read the court opinion or dissent, and in this one case I'm not particularly sorry for that.

You see, I don't have anything against firearms in particular. I know that most of the left-wing arguments against guns are fairly stupid, since (in America and Australia, if not certain West European nations) crime tends to go down in - generally rural - areas with high rates of personal gun ownership, whereas in - generally urban - areas with bans on personal firearm possession, it tends to go up. That's just the simple trend, though undoubtedly multiple factors have to be taken into account (which I won't do here) to explain why this happens. The point, however, is that it does.

On the other hand, I also know that the right-wing anti-government lunacy is equally invalid. The right to own a few handguns or hunting rifles is not going to do anything at all to provide a civilian populace with the tools it would actually need to resist a totalitarian-directed modern military force. Even if we discount robot drones and the entire air force, you still have to contend with explosives, artillery, and the armored corps.

My complaint, then, is not with the decision as such. My complaint is with how stereotypically it fits in with the string of major right-wing decisions that are coming down from the court. Can't the SCOTUS at least pretend not to be comprised of party hacks? I think it would be very decent of the Court if it would do that. We could even have a special day where the right-wing Court hands down a couple of token rational decisions and call it "Fantasy Day."

For more information, check out the ever-popular SCOTUS Wiki.

God bless and arm the Increasingly Conservative States of America.