Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg on the Second Amendment (and Heller a bit)

[NNadir]

109. I did address what you wrote, but I think you didn't get it.

What my remarks were meant to state is that people living in the 18th century were not all knowing Gods. When you cited people living in the 18th century, I stated I couldn't care less about this conservative view of the Constitution. This is hardly a non sequitur. It rejects your basic premise, which you now repeat by citing the preamble to the bill of rights, a document written under 18th century conditions.

The people who wrote the Constitution knew very well that they were not Gods, even if clueless people who worship them as Gods today don't. That's why they put a mechanism in the Constitution for its amendment.

For one thing, many of them were laboring under the impression that a "right" implied in their constitution was to treat other human beings like farm animals. Obviously this 18th century thinking - although many people in the 18th century, even some among "the founders" like Adams and Franklin, were relatively advanced in their thinking compared to many other "founding fathers" on this score - was not inviolably correct.

The Constitution is not the Koran. It's not the Bible. It's not the Torah.

It's the Constitution of the United States, subject to revision whenever its clauses have outlived their time.

And again, if the Second Amendment means that two high school kids can load up with guns, burst into a high school, and shoot up their peers and teachers, killing many and paralyzing and otherwise wounding others, it's as odious as the slavery clauses put into the constitution by the "Founding Fathers;" it needs to be treated exactly like the 18th amendment, repealed. If the Second Amendment means that a single guy can roam around a Campus in Virginia shooting his fellow college students, killing 32 people, including three highly accomplished professors of engineering, I am spectacularly uninterested in what the people who wrote this amendment intended. It's a bad law that is morally reprehensible and unsuited to 21st century life.

Why should I give a rat's ass what the 18th century intent of the Bill of Rights was? I am interested in the Constitution as a living document, not as some fossil.

The document that they, the founders, put together was a brilliant document in the sense that it allowed for flexibility and change. However, it is not the case that one brilliant act on the part of an individual or a group of individuals means that all of their acts are brilliant. I think it's pretty clear in the 21st century that the Constitution has evolved. If it didn't evolve historically, it would have died, because, among other things, African Americans are decidedly not farm animals, and never were farm animals, even if many of the people who wrote the Constitution acted, in a completely self serving and reprehensible way, as if they were.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.