Artice by Lindsay Kornick for Fox News
MSNBC column argues there is no constitutional right to own a gun
Some gun control proponents debate repealing the Second Amendment after Texas shooting
Comedian Dean Obeidallah wrote a column for MSNBC on Saturday that argued the right to own a gun was decided by a "cravenly political" Supreme Court rather than the U.S. Constitution.
As several media outlets attacked supporters of the Second Amendment as "barbarians" in the wake of a mass shooting in Texas, Obeidallah insisted that it was the 2008 Heller case that decided that owning guns was a "constitutionally guaranteed right."
"But even if such laws were to be enacted — on either the federal or state level — there’s one big problem: the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court, in a 5-4 decision, essentially rewrote the Second Amendment to create a constitutionally guaranteed right for an individual to possess a gun," Obeidallah wrote.
Obeidallah argued while the Second Amendment referenced the right to "bear arms," it wasn’t until the 2008 court decision that the nation decided to codify "an individual’s constitutional right to have a gun."
"James Madison drafted the Second Amendment, and in his notes from the 1789 Constitutional Convention, there’s not a single mention of an individual’s right to possess a gun for self-defense or recreational use. If the framers wanted to create a constitutional right to gun ownership, then they would have made the Second Amendment a mirror of the First Amendment," Obeidallah wrote.
To counter what he sees as a "political decision," Obeidallah called for the overturning of the Heller decision, similar to the possiblility of the Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade.
"That’s why we need to make overturning the Heller decision a rallying cry the same way the right made overturning Roe v. Wade its mission. Even though there are some who say the Second Amendment should be repealed, the amendment itself is not the issue," Obeidallah wrote. "The issue is the GOP-controlled Supreme Court’s rewriting of that amendment in Heller. You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand that the Second Amendment was never intended to provide an individual a constitutional right to possess a gun. The language of this one sentence amendment could not be more clear."
"Why didn’t they? Simple. They were expressly tying the right to bear arms to militia service," Obeidallah argued. "It's time to be blunt: Heller was a political decision, not one based on a good-faith reading of the Constitution."
While Congress has yet to take action on the issue of guns, some media outlets and figures have blamed all Second Amendment supporters after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Some liberal activists like filmmaker Michael Moore called for the repeal of the Second Amendment.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbc-column-no-constitutional-right-own-gun
