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The Supreme Court celebrated Independence Day a few days early by unshackling the Second Amendment, declaring the freedom of Americans to defend our lives, liberty, and property by keeping guns at home. Anyone who, like me, was viscerally dismayed by the 5-4 Roberts bloc (therefore doubly suspect) ruling, written by Justice Scalia (therefore triply suspect), could take comfort in critiques that emotionally dismissed it as “wrongheaded and dangerous” or coolly dissected it as ahistorically reasoned.
Like Chapman, but giddily, Balko bolstered his argument by invoking Jefferson. Wishing Scalia had taken the opportunity to plug the 2nd Amendment “as a bulwark against government tyranny,” Balko said the threat is real: “One needn’t be a modern-day mountain militiaman to observe that authoritarian regimes often become tyrannical after first disarming the citizenry. As Thomas Jefferson put it, ‘When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.’”
