Two rights I care deeply about are gun rights and property rights. These have been ingrained in me for quite some time, but property rights were the first I came to care about. Learning about eminent domain in school sort of radicalized me to believe that a person’s property should be sacrosanct. Gun rights came later for me, but were no less important.
For Salon, though, it seems that all they care about is how little they understand either.
I mean, that’s the only take I can have when they, like so many others, have a beef with the Wolford decision and claim crap like this:
Historically, the Supreme Court has been all about property rights. You might even say it is a SCOTUS tradition. But I guess not so much when the rights of gun owners are involved.
In his majority decision in the case, Alito wrote that Hawaii’s law violated the constitutional right to keep and bear arms in that it “hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”
The author went on to reuse a title to describe the Second Amendment that also appears in the piece’s title: “antiquated.”
Yes, because a right is antiquated when you personally dislike it, not when it’s no longer useful. It’s funny how the people who think Donald Trump is a tyrant, a fascist, and a “king” are also fine with making sure the government has a monopoly on firearms.
But let’s get back to the idea of property rights and Wolford, because that’s the meat of what I have an issue with at the moment. The whole piece is trash, of course, but this irks me specifically because so many people claim to think Wolford is an affront to property rights.
That argument might actually hold water if Justice Alito had prohibited businesses from having a say in excluding those carrying guns. He didn’t. The entire decision isn’t that businesses don’t have the right to make that determination. It’s that the state has no authority to declare guns prohibited by default, thus putting the onus on businesses to decide otherwise.
This might not make a lot of sense to some, but that’s because they’re used to thinking of gun rights as not being real rights.
I’m able to lawfully walk into a coffee shop or restaurant and discuss politics with a friend. It’s assumed that, unless we are unruly while doing so, we’re free to use our First Amendment rights in that business. If the owner doesn’t like our discussion, they have the right to ask us to leave, but the default is that free speech is permitted.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett used an example of forcing businesses to expressly permit a hijab within the confines of the business. The natural assumption as of now is that the hijab is allowed because freedom of religious expression is the default in all businesses. The same kind of example is a prayer over a meal. It’s assumed your rights are respected until and unless the owner says otherwise.
Saying that the state can’t just make a blanket decision where the default is that a right doesn’t exist isn’t an infringement of property rights. Not when they can still make that determination for themselves.
I’d like to say that this is a misunderstanding, and I tried to give the writer the benefit of the doubt, but nah. I’m not going to. Not anymore. Anyone with enough brain capacity to form semi-coherent words–the upper end of Salon’s writer stable’s capabilities, admittedly–can look at the decision and recognize that property rights weren’t impacted in the least.
They’re just hoping you’re too stupid to see what they’re doing.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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