Editorial Roundup: Missouri
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. November 12, 2023.
Editorial: Supreme Court might be edging toward sanity on guns. But not Missouri’s leaders.
Like a hung-over reveler after an especially reckless night of excess, most of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears ready to somewhat dial back its recent overindulgence in gun-rights extremism.
Analysts say the justices’ questions and comments in a hearing on a Second Amendment case last week indicate the court will likely soften an earlier stance that, on its face, would seem to require that the government must let people under domestic-violence restraining orders keep their guns.
If the court ultimately does rule that, no, Mr. Wife Beater, you don’t get to keep that AR-15 around to settle the next marital argument, it will be a small victory for common sense on this otherwise deranged bench — and a big victory for domestic abuse victims who, statistically, are five times more likely to be killed if their partners have access to firearms.
Not that it will matter in Missouri. Here, where the political gun-obsession orgy continues unabated, even people who have been convicted of domestic abuse can still keep their sidearms. Not until the legal process finally, inevitably overturns the insane state law that presumes to nullify federal firearms restrictions here will this recent glimmer of sanity on the high court filter down to St. Louis.
The current case before the Supreme Court regarding domestic abusers stems from last year’s landmark case New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which the court’s conservative majority enshrined the relatively new concept of “originalism.”
It goes like this: For a modern law to be considered constitutionally valid, it must have some correlation to the law and culture at the time the Constitution was written.
This new standard — created out of whole cloth by the court’s right-wing majority, just because they could — effectively decrees that Americans’ rights today must be defined based on what would have been legally and socially conceivable in the front-loading-musket era.
Does that mean states today could repeal women’s suffrage and reinstate slavery? No, goes the theory, because subsequent constitutional amendments addressed those issues.
But, alas, there’s no constitutional amendment that recognizes the special circumstances of domestic abuse that should limit the gun rights of alleged abusers. That’s a modern concept. No one in the late 1700s was pondering whether wives were anything other than the property of their husbands.
Thus was it consistent, in a twisted way, that the 5th District U.S. Court of Appeals this year ruled in favor of a Texas drug dealer who argued the state had no authority to convict him for violating a restraining order that required he give up his guns.
All he had done, after all, was to beat his girlfriend in a parking lot, fire a gun to ward off bystanders, threaten to shoot his girlfriend in the face if she reported the assault, and then later engage in multiple shooting sprees after the court ordered his guns taken away.
The appeals court admitted that the defendant is “hardly a model citizen” (you think?), yet found he is “part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees” as confirmed by Bruen.
Please pause here and re-read the preceding sentence. It says, essentially, that credibly threatening to kill your girlfriend doesn’t deprive you of the right to weaponry today because that kind of precaution wasn’t common when the Second Amendment was ratified 232 years ago.
This is where America is today, thanks to this Supreme Court.
As bonkers as the appeals court assessment was, it was arguably in keeping with the Supreme Court’s originalist doctrine in the Bruen ruling. There was, after all, no such thing in colonial times as a “domestic abuse restraining order” to keep guns away from sociopaths who might be inclined to kill their partners.
Yet today’s Supreme Court is, as the saying goes, crazy but not stupid. Analyses by multiple mainstream media outlets suggest that even most of the conservative justices’ questions and comments in last week’s hearing appeared to be casting around for ways to reverse the appeals court and let the government continue confiscating guns from alleged abusers, without overtly challenging their own bizarre logic in Bruen.
They can’t, really, but it’s clear why they want to. It’s one thing to rule in concept that today’s Americans must be restricted to whatever rights and legal protections were recognized by men in powdered wigs. It’s quite another to confront the unacceptable real-world implications of that standard in the 21st century.
Does a single member of this court really want to look America in the eye and declare that, no, you can’t disarm someone who has overtly demonstrated that he poses a threat to the very lives of those close to him?
Whatever the court decides, the issue will remain murky in Missouri for now, because the state’s Republican leadership still claims — surreally — that the state is outside the reach of federal gun laws.
Missouri’s Second Amendment Preservation Act of 2021 has been rejected by every court that has considered it. That includes the U.S. Supreme Court, which last month declined to intervene on behalf of the state to allow the law to go into effect while the lower-court battles play out. Yet Missouri’s leading Republicans insist on continuing to defend it in court.
The state law declares that federal gun restrictions aren’t enforceable in Missouri if there isn’t a correlating state gun law on the books.
In addition to challenging the very concept of federalism as laid out by the Framers and confirmed by the outcome of the Civil War, the Missouri law leaves domestic abuse victims vulnerable to their abusers. That’s because not only do current Missouri state statutes not specifically allow for disarming those under orders of protection, they don’t even allow for disarming those convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence.
And the Legislature remains stubbornly opposed to red-flag laws of the kind that could have saved the lives of the student and teacher murdered last year’s rampage at the Central Visual Arts and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis by a mentally ill former student.
If the Supreme Court edges toward rationality on guns in the domestic-abuse case, it will be because, as unaccountable as the justices generally are, they perhaps aren’t completely blind to the human implications of their ideological extremism. If only the same could be said of Missouri’s leaders.
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