Sunday, July 29, 2012

Antonin Scalia Suggests "Hand-Held Rocket Launchers" Are Protected Under Second Amendment

As noted a number of times on this blog, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia strikes me as increasingly untethered from reality.  Indeed, the man seems to have lurched so far to the far right in his ideology that he makes some in the Tea Party seem sane and lucid.  Scalia's latest burst of insanity involves the renewed debate over gun control and the limits of the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.  In Scalia's bizarre world, apparently hand held rocket launchers are fine and dandy - as if the Founding Fathers ever anticipated a dim witted citizen ever having ready access to such a lethal weapon that surely isn't intended for defending one's home in the rational snse much less hunting game for sport or food.  Think Progress looks at Scalia's latest batshitery.  Here are highlights: 

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Justice Antonin Scalia reiterated just how extremely his Constitutional originalism can be applied. Referring to the recent shooting in Aurora, CO, host Chris Wallace asked the Supreme Court Justice about gun control, and whether the Second Amendment allows for any limitations to gun rights. Scalia admitted there could be, such as “frighting” (carrying a big ax just to scare people), but they would still have to be determined with an 18th-Century perspective in mind. According to his originalism, if a weapon can be hand-held, though, it probably still falls under the right o “bear arms”:
WALLACE: What about… a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute?

SCALIA: We’ll see. Obviously the Amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried — it’s to keep and “bear,” so it doesn’t apply to cannons — but I suppose here are hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes, that will have to be decided.

WALLACE: How do you decide that if you’re a textualist?

SCALIA: Very carefully.
Scalia - who clearly views himself as a Republican - is another example of why I walked away from the GOP.  Or more to the point, when the GOP lost its mind and wandered off into insanity. 

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