By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
ANALYSIS – In the 24 hours following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Wolford v. Lopez—striking down Hawaii’s unconstitutional ban on licensed concealed carry on private property open to the public—many media reports incorrectly declared the 6-3 decision to be a “new expansion of the Second Amendment.”
That’s how a headline at Slate described the high court’s ruling in an article written by Mark Joseph Stern, and it was not complimentary of the decision.
Reuters joined the misrepresentation, noting in its lead paragraph, that the Court’s two pro-Second Amendment rulings in June—the other being United States v. Hemani, the case which declared the government’s prosecution of a man convicted of casual marijuana use while owning a firearm “is inconsistent with the Second Amendment”—had “further expanded the Constitution’s Second Amendment right ‘to keep and bear arms.’”
But, according to one of the nation’s leading gun rights advocates—Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms—the media have it all wrong. He said so recently in a widely-circulated reaction to the Wolford ruling.
“The Court isn’t expanding gun rights,” he maintained, “it is fully restoring rights which decades of unconstitutional gun control have eroded.”
Contrary to Stern, whose 1,149-word sour grapes essay echoed the concurring opinion authored by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in the Hemani decision in which she argued the 2022 Bruen ruling had been wrong, and that the judiciary should return to analyzing Second Amendment cases via the roundly rejected “means-end” scrutiny, Gottlieb says people taking sides against a string of Second Amendment victories are “losers.”
In its reaction to Wolford, CCRKBA stated, “Supreme Court decisions restoring the Second Amendment to its rightful place as the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights started with Heller and continued with the 2010 ruling in McDonald v. City of Chicago, striking down that city’s handgun ban. In 2022, the Court nullified so-called ‘may issue’ gun permit regulations in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. And this year, the Court yet again reinforced the individual rights of gun ownership in United States v. Hemani, striking the federal ban on gun possession by habitual marijuana users, without any evidence they are dangerous. Now the Wolford decision has protected gun rights even more.”
For generations, anti-gun politicians—not always Democrats—have gradually chipped away at the right of the people to keep and bear arms, arguing their new laws and regulations did not amount to infringements forbidden by the Second Amendment.
With each new court victory, it looks alarmingly like gun control proponents were mistaken, if not outright lying.
Prior to this week’s Wolford decision, Gottlieb noted in a prepared statement that “Supreme Court decisions have invalidated 78 restrictive gun control laws and policies around the country.”
“Now,” he said, “the score has risen to 79, and could go as high as 83 as it applies to similar restrictive laws in California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York. That record amounts to a monumental legal smack down.”
At the time the Second Amendment was ratified, along with the rest of the U.S. Constitution, there was no such thing as a concealed carry permit, since people typically carried their rifles, muskets, fowling pieces or pistols openly.
There were no background checks, waiting periods, permit-to-purchase requirements, registration requirements, bans of certain types of guns, or purchase and possession limits (i.e. “one-gun-a-month”). All of those things came along well after the Constitution was adopted, probably within the last hundred years, and if the courts continue the reverse-erosion process, these things may ultimately be considered unconstitutional infringements.
Today’s media obviously has no perspective about Second Amendment rights at the time of the founding, or even today. The notion of someone traveling to the nearest town with a rifle or musket in hand or in their wagon, cart or on their horse simply doesn’t register. It is why PBS, reacting to Tuesday’s announcement that the Court will consider a pair of cases involving state-level bans on the possession of modern semiautomatic sporting rifles such as the AR-15, reported, “A Supreme Court that has expanded gun rights will consider whether bans on semiautomatic rifles, often called assault weapons, violate the Second Amendment.” It is the case millions of gun owners have been waiting for, and they are energized.
An affirmative Supreme Court ruling which declares semiautomatic rifles are protected by the Second Amendment—and therefore cannot be banned—will greatly cripple the gun prohibition movement, if not completely shatter it.
Gottlieb summed it up as only someone who has been on the front lines of the gun rights battle for decades could:
“And here’s the good news,” he said. “This is obviously just the beginning as we continue the fight to unravel the web of unconstitutional gun control laws which have been adopted over the past several generations, constantly chipping away at our fundamental right to keep and bear arms…In the process, these court decisions have been proving we’ve been right all along about what the Founders intended.”
And that means the anti-gunners have been wrong.
