Liberal Talk Radio

My friends keep telling me that the gun control debate is over, and that the guns won. Most leading Democrats have dropped gun control because it was costing them too many votes. Well, I’m not happy about, but I’ve resigned myself to it.

Now comes this recent D.C. decision:

The panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit became the nation’s first federal appeals court to overturn a gun-control law by declaring that the Second Amendment grants a person the right to possess firearms. One other circuit shares that viewpoint on individual rights, but others across the country say the protection that the Second Amendment offers relates to states being able to maintain a militia. Legal experts said the conflict could lead to the first Supreme Court review of the issue in nearly 70 years.

Cass Sunstein argues in The New Republic that this could be the canary in the coal mine. After writing convincingly that the issue has been settled amongst the federal courts since the 1930s, he notes:

Well over 200 years since the Founding, does it make any sense for courts to decide, for the first time, that they will start to oversee the legitimacy of gun control laws? If federal courts are now going to invoke the Second Amendment to evaluate the reasonableness of such laws, we will soon witness a series of rulings that will make Roe v. Wade look like a pretty modest exercise.

In other words, there are reasons for concern here that go way beyond gun control laws. Conservative presidents have been stocking federal bench with conservatives for 25 years (Clinton’s ability to counter this was limited by Congress being in Republican control), so it’s no surprise that we’re going to see more and more of these types of rulings, potentially overturning everything from environmental laws to worker protections.