Freedomphobia

If a right winger made the same argument you just made replacing baby murder with the actual Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, you would be flipping your lid about how evil conservatives are for keeping guns and that conservatives have blood on their hands every time someone gets shot.

The “right to bear arms” has relatively few takers in the international constitutional law community. Most of the countries that had such a right at one point later got rid of it — the only other two that still have an analogous right impose explicit restrictions on its use. Our country is the only one in the world whose right to bear arms could be seen as unlimited if you jettison the “well-regulated militia” clause, which most proponents of 2A appear very happy to do.

In our own history, the Supreme Court never one used the 2nd Amendment as a basis to strike down any state or local gun law or regulation until 2008. It’s been dormant otherwise, until quite recently. Whatever power 2A has to trump state and local laws is less a product of history requiring it, and more a product of 21st-century FOX News viewers demanding it. Retrofitted Originalism.

It’s quite reasonable to chalk the gun thing up to one of those few issues the Founders may have gotten wrong, like failing to abolish slavery or failing to give women the vote.

"The “right to bear arms” has relatively few takers in the international constitutional law community."

I literally could not care less about what the "international constitutional law community" has to say. You clearly don't either when it happens to be Ukrainians shooting at Russians because you have the consistency of a goldfish saying that Russia stole the 2016 election but 2020 was the "most secure, free, and fair" election in the history of elections and any investigation of 2020 is a threat to democracy or some other bullshit claim.

"Our country is the only one in the world whose right to bear arms could be seen as unlimited if you jettison the “well-regulated militia” clause, which most proponents of 2A appear very happy to do."

The "well regulated militia" clause doesn't negate the "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" clause. This has already been settled, no matter how many times you try and claim it actually means the government can regulate the people out of their Second Amendment rights.

"Whatever power 2A has to trump state and local laws is less a product of history requiring it, and more a product of 21st-century FOX News viewers demanding it. Retrofitted Originalism."

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. A state law mandating Christianity as the official state religion would be in violation of the First Amendment and struck down. As someone who claims to be a lawyer, the fact that you fail to understand this basic fact of how our hierarchy of laws works shows your utter ineptitude and incompetance at your job.

"It’s quite reasonable to chalk the gun thing up to one of those few issues the Founders may have gotten wrong, like failing to abolish slavery or failing to give women the vote."

My rights are not up for negotiation. You want to have baby murder as a right alongside the Second Amendment, then add that Amendment to the Constitution. But you won't because you all know that if the topic of abortion were properly discussed and debated thoroughly and then put to a vote, you would lose instantly, so you resort to talking about extremely fringe cases of rape which most states that have passed abortion bans still provide exceptions for to try and pull at heartstrings to gain support from misinformed people to try and push for the extremely unpopular position of unlimited baby murder on demand.

I can’t make you care about the fact the U.S. is a total outlier in the international community on the gun issue, particularly among rich-world peers, and has the body count to prove it.

But some people do! Sensible designers of public policy might note charts like these!

That said, I concede that the mounting and unconscionable body count of innocent elementary schoolers and July 4th parade-goers is constitutionally irrelevant.

But even in our own history, 2A sat dormant and wasn’t enforced for well over 200 years. It is a right much like the 10th Amendment — a curious Amendment which if enforced in a maximalist sense, would effectively dismantle the entire federal government — and by all rights 2A should have remained in the 10A dustbin, a classic example of a wrong answer on any law-related multiple-choice test.

The fact SCOTUS took up this fledgling, redheaded stepchild of a right to strike down a New York gun law that’s been on the books for 100 years is a clue as to whose “Constitutional Originalism” is on the wrong side of actual long-standing constitutional practice.

It would be one thing if that were a one-off decision. Not an existential crisis, either for our country or for the Supreme Court’s own legitimacy.

But SCOTUS is elevating 2A even as they’re systematically undermining and dismantling other rights with a longer Constitutional pedigree. The right to vote, the right of states to self-govern (particularly on core issues of public safety), the right to control your own body’s reproductive functions.

What you call “unlimited baby murder on demand” will of course continue unabated in states with a modern outlook on women’s rights — where care will continue to be provided to 10-year-old rape victims unlucky enough to be born in a red state — until Republicans come into power once again and try their luck with a national abortion ban.

But!

Will Republicans ever get near the White House again, now that “pro-life” has graduated from megachurch talking point to actual policy — while all these other tremendously unpopular decisions are also being enforced by SCOTUS fiat without a whiff of a democratic mandate?

We’ll see!

I just got off the phone with Canada. They said they don't want you guys either.

Meanwhile in reality:

They had to drive 60 minutes to get it done? The horror! The freaking horror! That hour long drive to Pittsburgh is time that little girl and her rapist will NEVER GET BACK!