Anytime a court rules in favor of Second Amendment rights, you can be sure there will be a naysayer out there somewhere convinced the judges were wrong, and the guns in question should, indeed, be banned.
Such was the case last week in Barnett v. Raoul, in which the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois found that two provisions of the Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA), which ban many semi-automatic firearms and so-called “high-capacity” magazines, are unconstitutional under both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.
In an Op-Ed posted at abovethelaw.com, author Joe Patrice took issue with the ruling, trying to make Judge Stephen McGlynn, who wrote the opinion, out to be some kind of whacko and referring to him as a “jackass.” Just consider the headline: “Trump Judge Rules Guns Are Sort Of Like Airbags. Nice, Murderous Airbags.”
Patrice bases his entire criticism of the decision on one short segment of the opinion where Judge McGlynn wrote: “Why are there small lifeboats on gigantic steel ocean liners? Why do we spend thousands equipping our vehicles with airbags? Why do we wear seatbelts and place our infants in safety seats? Why do we build storm shelters under our homes? Why do we install ground-fault interrupter outlets by sinks and bathtubs? Why do we get painful inoculations? Why do we voluntarily undergo sickening chemotherapy? And why do we protect ourselves with firearms?”
To a thinking person, that statement makes a lot of sense. After all, the tools mentioned, including firearms, are all used to head off some kind of danger or disaster that we might sometimes face. But apparently, to Patrice, guns have no such use as potential defensive tools for law-abiding American citizens.
Equally disturbing, Patrice led the piece off with what he probably thought was clever but was actually an asinine assessment of two of the most critical Second Amendment Supreme Court rulings in decades.
“It’s not surprising that a Trump judge would strike down a gun regulation,” Patrice wrote. “Republican judges do that all the time. Between Heller and Bruen, there’s now a collection of boilerplate, ahistorical gibberish that judges can cite so they can hem and haw about the ‘grave seriousness’ of the threat but then strike down the law as overbroad anyway, no matter how narrowly tailored it might be. You might think it should be illegal to have that, but the original public meaning says the Founding Fathers EXPECTED your neighbor to own a rocket-propelled grenade launcher!”
When writers use such hyperbole as the “grenade launcher” argument, it’s an indication they don’t have a more reasonable leg to stand on. That’s the case with this Op-Ed—it completely ignores many very important points made in the 168-page ruling.
Since abovethelaw.com chose not to share that information, we’ll gladly make our argument against their Op-Ed by doing just that. In fact, Judge McGlynn pointed toward people like author Patrice in the ruling.
“Sadly, there are those who seek to usher in a sort of post-Constitution era where the citizens’ individual rights are only as important as they are convenient to a ruling class,” the opinion stated. “Seeking ancient laws that may partner well with a present-day infringement on a right proclaimed in the Bill of Rights without reading it in conjunction with the aforementioned history is nonsense
“The oft-quoted phrase that ‘no right is absolute’ does not mean that fundamental rights precariously subsist subject to the whims, caprice, or appetite of government officials or judges.”
Judge McGlynn also stated in the opinion: “What is particularly disturbing is that the prohibition of weapons that are commonly owned and used by citizens are now banned, depriving citizens of a principal means to defend themselves and their property in situations where a handgun or shotgun alone would not be the citizen’s preferred arm.
“Therefore, the Court must take action as justice demands. PICA is an unconstitutional affront to the Second Amendment and must be enjoined.”
In the end, Judge McGlynn concluded that the two provisions of the law in question violate protections found within the Bill of Rights and cannot stand.
“… considering all of the evidence presented, the Court holds that the provisions of PICA criminalizing the knowing possession of specific semiautomatic rifles, shotguns, magazines, and attachments are unconstitutional under the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution as applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment,” the opinion stated. “As the prohibition of firearms is unconstitutional, so is the registration scheme for assault weapons, attachments, and large-capacity magazines.”
In the end, the ruling was well-reasoned, based on the precedent set by both Heller and Bruen. Just because some don’t like the outcome of the case doesn’t mean the court didn’t do its homework and make a legitimate ruling based on the facts presented.
