Amy Coney Barrett Thinks the Second Amendment Prohibits Blanket Bans on Gun Possession by People With Felony Records
The SCOTUS contender's 2019 dissent will alarm gun control supporters but reassure people who want judges to take this constitutional provision as seriously as others.
Given the poor fit between the ban's scope and its ostensible purpose, Barrett said, it is not "substantially related to an important government interest"—the test under the "intermediate scrutiny" that the majority said it was applying in this case. "Neither Wisconsin nor the United States has introduced data sufficient to show that disarming all nonviolent felons substantially advances its interest in keeping the public safe," she wrote. "Nor have they otherwise demonstrated that Kanter himself shows a proclivity for violence. Absent evidence that he either belongs to a dangerous category or bears individual markers of risk, permanently disqualifying Kanter from possessing a gun violates the Second Amendment."
Barrett closed with a warning that will alarm gun control advocates but reassure people dismayed by the failure of federal courts to follow up on Heller and the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago (which made it clear that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments) by taking the right to arms as seriously as other constitutionally protected rights. "While both Wisconsin and the United States have an unquestionably strong interest in protecting the public from gun violence, they have failed to show, by either logic or data, that disarming Kanter substantially advances that interest," she wrote. "On this record, holding that the ban is constitutional as applied to Kanter does not 'put[] the government through its paces,' but instead treats the Second Amendment as a 'second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.'"
