The Supreme Court, supreme only in sheer arrogance, ruled yesterday that "there is a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense." (NYT, 6/26/2008).
The United States Declaration of Independence says that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. " These apparently do not matter to the above justices.
Last week I had written a piece in my blog called "What a tragedy!" that listed some of the deadly shootings in Chicago. Here are some more..
Off-duty cop wounded in shooting
Woman fatally shot at YMCA center in New Jersey
Man fatally shot in West Englewood
6 dead after plant rampageThese are just a few of the many shootings that have occurred in recent days.
When one person's right to bear arms infringes on another person's right to life, the Supreme Court is asserting that the right to life does not matter. It is tragic and abysmal that for all the 'Right-to-Life' advocates, supporting the right of a fetus is a far more worthy cause rather than trying to save the lives of people already outside the womb and living on the planet.
I personally cannot fathom why a person should not give up his or her right to own fire-arms even if it saves just ONE life. And at a minimum, fewer guns would mean a decrease in unintentional shootings. As far as owning a gun for hunting is concerned, no civilized person would have a need to shoot an animal for fun. There are plenty of other sports for a person to engage in that does not involve taking a life. Or is that the whole point- that some people should have the right to take the lives of others?
Mayor Daley of Chicago had a proper response to this Supreme Court ruling. Daley called the ruling "very frightening" and vowed to vigorously fight any attempt to invalidate the city's ban.
"Does this lead to everyone having a gun in our society?" Daley asked while speaking at a Navy Pier event. "If [the justices] think that's the answer, then they're greatly mistaken. Then why don't we do away with the court system and go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we'll settle it in the streets?" (Chicago Tribune, 6/26/2008).
The final word on this comes from Keith Olbermann of MSNBC who hosts the show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." Yesterday, on his show he named Justice Scalia the "worst person in the world" and had this to say...
"And our winner, Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court. You‘ve got around 30,000 gun deaths in this country per year, another 75,000 non-fatal gun wounds, half the suicides are by gun; and this clown and his four colleagues decided that the 32-year-old ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and the demand that firearms kept in the home be locked or disassembled was unconstitutional based on the Second Amendment. You remember the Second Amendment, “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Despite years of fog created by the NRA and right-wing organizations, that isn‘t very complicated; for the purposes of forming a state militia, you‘re entitled to keep and bear arms. Obviously, those would have to be the kind of use in arms since 1791, when the Bill of Rights was passed, the musket, the wheel-lock, the flint lock, the 13th century Chinese hand canon. Stuff like that.
Scalia, of course, simply decided that the militia part of the Second Amendment is some sort of quaint anachronism that he could happily ignore. There‘s the beautiful thing about our country, they say anybody can grow up to be a Supreme Court justice. And in Antonin Scalia, there‘s your proof, and tonight‘s worst person in the world." (Italics mine).
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