SO MUCH FOR NON-ACTIVISTS: The Supreme Court Shows Its True Colors on the 2nd 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."

When I was in school, many, many years ago, before cell phones, or computers, or fancy remote controls, it was widely established as a rule of punctuation that commas, colons, semicolons, dashes and hyphens used in mid-sentence were meant to infer a continuation of the same chain of thought. In point of fact it had the same effect as implying an "and" statement, not an "or" statement. It would be over a decade before I was to find a practical application of such a rule.

"We admitted we were powerless - that our lives had become unmanageable."

Anyone who has ever attended a 12-step recovery group – be it Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Al-Anon, etc, knows full well that the words powerless and unmanageable are not mutually exclusive; they are meant to infer the same thing. Any addict not in denial will tell you it is impossible to accept the first part of that sentence without accepting the second part. They go hand in hand. To be powerless is the same as to be unmanageable.

Well, apparently Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t go to the same school I did, because when he read the 2nd Amendment, he evidently saw two distinct and separate points; one having to do with a well regulated Militia, which he ignored; the other having to do with the right of the people to keep and bear arms, which he cited. What is particularly striking is that in writing his decision for the majority, if we are to believe that he saw the last fourteen words as being sufficient to survive on their own merits, he evidently never saw that in so doing he rendered the first thirteen hopelessly out in left field. For only someone either ignorant of the use of proper grammar; i.e. a fragment sentence [A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…], or ideologically predisposed to a fixated opinion, could miss the obvious: that the framers of the Constitution never meant to address the "right" of its citizens to bear arms apart from the militia. Had they intended to address those rights, they most assuredly would’ve written specifically about it and kept it separate and apart from any mention of "a well regulated Militia". The fact that the words militia, people and arms are mentioned in one sentence can and must mean only one logical thing: that they are all lumped together to form one coherent thought.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a compelling dissent, the five justices in the majority found no new evidence that the 2nd Amendment was intended to limit the power of government to regulate the use of firearms. They found no new evidence to overturn decades of court precedent. They have claimed, Stevens wrote, "a far more active judicial role in making vitally important national policy decisions than was envisioned at any time in the 18th, 19th, or 20th Centuries."

And therein lies what’s really behind the decision of the majority. The five justices who overturned the Washington D.C. gun ban are not ignorant of common English grammar. As legal scholars, all of them know full well how to read a complete sentence, and also know full well what a comma stands for. The reason for this unprecedented ruling is obvious. The majority was looking to "interpret" to their own philosophical inclination what the founding fathers meant rather than what was actually written. In essence they were actively "interpreting" the law rather than enforcing it.

Ironically the "non-activists" justices have been, by far, the most activist in their rulings. As I have stated before, conservatives’ calls for the nomination of so-called non-activist judges to the bench are bogus, primarily because it is not non-activism that they seek; rather it is conservative activism that they are truly after. Today it was the NRA that won a huge decision. In the future other landmark decisions will be rendered by this court that will belie the supposed purpose of the so-called non-activist ideal. If this decision is to be any indicator, the Republic and years of jurisprudence are in deep trouble.