An article appearing at the Heritage Foundation’s website offers perhaps the clearest explanation of what confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court could mean for restoring the Second Amendment, and explains why the gun prohibition lobby and Capitol Hill Democrats are so terrified.
Written by Amy Swearer, a legal fellow at the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, this piece explains Judge Barrett’s “originalist” brand, and how such a judge understands “the words of the Second Amendment had a specific meaning at the time they were ratified, and that meaning doesn’t change according to a judge’s arbitrary whims.”
An article in Seventeen underscores the terror now being felt by anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action. They have labeled Judge Barrett as “a gun rights extremist.”
That article, published prior to this week’s Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings—during which the always poised and visibly intelligent Barrett aced it, according to many observers—is underscored by a quote from anti-gun Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal. He had vowed during a press call, “I will make this issue front and center during next week’s hearing to show how Judge Barrett’s extremist, hard-right view of the Second Amendment will do real harm to real lives in real ways.
“Judge Barrett’s jurisprudence,” Blumenthal continued during the Oct. 8 presser, “would undercut and even block efforts to achieve universal background checks, emergency risk protection orders, safe storage laws, an end to the immunity from liability that gun manufactures have and other commonsense measures to reduce gun violence. That is a real danger, clear and urgent, to millions of Americans across the country who want gun violence protections.”
Quite possibly, the lowest point of the hearings came when Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI)—reading from what appeared to be a list of prepared questions—asked Judge Barrett, as her family sat silently behind her, “Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors, or committed any physical or verbal harassment or assault of a sexual nature?”\
As noted by Swearer, “So yes, if Judge Barrett’s dissent in Kanter is an accurate foretaste of what we can expect from her, then gun-control advocates are right to fear her confirmation, while Second Amendment advocates have reason to celebrate.
“We have long known that there are at least four current Justices willing to finally break the Court’s decade-long silent acquiescence to the erosion of a fundamental right,” Swearer’s article concluded. “A Justice Amy Coney Barrett would likely mean, at long last, that there is a fifth Justice willing to heed the dictates of the U.S. Constitution over the whims of gun-control advocates.”
A confirmation vote by the Judiciary Committee is scheduled Oct. 22, and it will likely split along party lines. From there, the nomination will move to the full Senate.
