Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the Supreme Court’s most vocal and conservative justices, said on Sunday that the Second Amendment leaves room for U.S. legislatures to regulate guns, including menacing hand-held weapons.
“It will have to be decided in future cases,” Scalia said on Fox News Sunday. But there were legal precedents from the days of the Founding Fathers that banned frightening weapons which a constitutional originalist like himself must recognize. There were also “locational limitations” on where weapons could be carried, the justice noted.
When asked if that kind of precedent would apply to assault weapons, or 100-round ammunition magazines like those used in the recent Colorado movie theater massacre, Scalia declined to speculate. “We’ll see,” he said. ‘”It will have to be decided.”
As an originalist scholar, Scalia looks to the text of the Constitution—which confirms the right to bear arms—but also the context of 18th-century history. “They had some limitations on the nature of arms that could be borne,” he told host Chris Wallace.
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
4 Responses
This guy suddenly fell on his left side or what?
Watch how the media will take this out of context and run with it.
Guns may be regulated just like speech and religion, and no more. Speech, for instance, may be regulated as to time and manner, but only in a content-neutral way; e.g. if you want to use a megaphone to give a political speech on a residential street at 2 in the morning, the law may prevent you. I’d be interested to know what precedents he’s talking about, though. What weapons were restricted in the 18th century? I’m not aware of any such restrictions. People had private cannons, after all!
Talk is cheap. Let’s see how he rules on the next gun case that comes before the court.