I’d much rather have someone with a ruling on 2A in their background, as I see it as a good test of a person’s views of individual and Constitutional rights. I don’t want Trump to take chances on this.
In his most recent successful run for Texas’s elected Supreme Court, Willett won an endorsement from Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, a group more strident than the NRA. In a summer editorial in the Tyler Morning Telegraph that blasted an appeals court ruling that Americans don’t have the right to carry concealed guns, the newspaper said Willett would be an “excellent choice” to decide such questions on the Supreme Court.
Don Willett, even. I keep spelling his last name wrong.
I couldn’t agree more. You find somebody who is an originalist on the issue of the Second Amendment, and you will find somebody who is an originalist on every other issue out there.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that there’s another clause, this time in the body of the Constitution, which completely backs up a very expansive view of the Second Amendment. This is the clause in Article 1, Section 8 that speaks of the power of Congress to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Most people have never heard of this, but what it is essentially means is that Congress can issue authorization for private individuals to undertake hostile actions against any enemy. This originated during the Revolutionary War itself, during which the Continental Congress issued such Letters. Private individuals, very wealthy ones to be sure, got these Letters and attacked British commercial and naval ships. Now, how do you attack the British Navy, then the strongest force on the Waters of this planet? Certainly not with muskets. They had cannons, lots of them. Privately owned cannons. I would like to know how it is that someone opposed to an expansive view of the Second Amendment can possibly square that reality with their viewpoint. It should be noted that the 2nd Amendment speaks of “arms,” not firearms, not muskets, but arms. Arms refer to every single weapon able to be utilized as part of the militia (and there was no equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction, so this does not include poison gas or nuclear weapons). The Founders were also quite well aware of technological progress, and the Second Amendment is as capable of being brought into the 21st century as are the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of the press. Anyone making the argument that only Revolutionary War-era muskets are protected, has just written out of the First Amendment radio, television and the internet, at a minimum. It is a fallacious argument.
Get us a Justice who understands this, and we will be just fine on every single issue out there.