by: Clive Edwards
Legal Corner
Canada and the Heller Decision
T
he Heller decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (decided June 26, 2008) struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban and mandatory storage laws as unconstitutional. Justice Scalia, in his majority decision stated, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as selfdefense within the home.”
A society that adopts a constitution, he says, “is skeptical... that societies always ‘mature,’ as opposed to rot.”[3] Scalia notes further that many important social advances, such as women’s suffrage, were achieved not by judicial fiat but constitutional amendments — whose adoption, Scalia adds, is slow and cumbersome by design. The idea is that amending of the Constitution allows for democratic change as opposed to top-down rule by judges.
Justice Scalia further states:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Scalia
“The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition—in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute—would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional.“
Would that we had a bench full of Scalias on our Supreme Court of Canada. Instead, we have the most flagrant interpreters of a “Living Constitution” in history. I am beginning to suspect that a degree in Social Engineering rather than an honest degree in Constitutional Law gets our Supreme Courtiers their jobs.
Antonin Gregory Scalia took his seat on September 26, 1986, appointed by Ronald Reagan, becoming the first Italian-American Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. Justice Scalia is a vigorous proponent of textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation, and a passionate critic of the idea of a Living Constitution. Scalia vigorously opposes the idea of a living constitution, which says that the judiciary has the power to modify the meaning of constitutional provisions to adapt to “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” For Scalia, this idea misunderstands and negates what he calls the “anti-evolutionary purpose” of a constitution.
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August / September 2008
Of course, the framers of the U.S. Constitution were all men of tested integrity; most had risked their lives and property in committing deeds to back up their words and beliefs. The gang of social engineers and fellow travelers who framed us with their mischief would not have risked missing dinner if the job at hand truly had been a Canadian Charter of Rights rather than an insincere seduction for the simple-minded. The citizens of Canada and the United States derive our right to firearms and self-defense from the very same source – our common British cradle. As Scalia noted: In a 1780 debate in the House of Lords, for example, Lord Richmond described an order to disarm private citizens (not militia members) as “a violation of the constitutional right of Protestant subjects to keep and bear arms for their own defense.” In response, another member of Parliament referred to “the right of bearing arms for personal defence,” making clear that no special military meaning for “keep
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