Famed Law Professor, Defense Attorney Latest to Suggest Second Amendment Needs to Go
Friday, July 31, 2015
The legal profession is full of blowhards,
egomaniacs, hypocrites, and elitists, but even so, rarely are all those
qualities present in a single individual to the same degree as in Alan
Dershowitz. At age 28, Dershowitz became the youngest full professor of
law in history with his appointment at Harvard. And, yes, it went to his
head. He has written that he “does not hide behind the distorting
shield of false humility” and has even suggested things might have gone
differently for Jesus if he had been there to represent him.
When not busy indoctrinating impressionable law students in his own
particular brand of politics, Prof. Dershowitz has advocated on behalf
of various celebrity clients, including in highly-publicized cases
involving allegations of murderous domestic violence.
Despite his reputation in some circles as a civil rights
champion, Dershowitz is no fan of the Second Amendment. He has advocated
for a variety of gun controls, including banning all semi-automatic
firearms. As he said on the (since cancelled)
Piers Morgan show, “If I could ban 100 percent of guns without
violating the Constitution, I would do that ….” In the same appearance,
he called the idea that guns have a role in protecting liberty “a myth.”
Nevertheless, at least at one point,
he was willing to go on record as admitting the Second Amendment
protects an “individual right to ownership of guns,” although subject to
regulation.
Nevertheless, Dershowitz (who admitted in 2003 that he's never held a pistol) on Monday claimed America’s “experiment” with private ownership of firearms “has failed miserably.” During an appearance on Newsmax TV,
he went on to say, “If I could write the Bill of Rights over again, I
would skip amendment number two. We’re the only country in the world
that puts in our Constitution the right to bear arms.”
Even though Dershowitz is famed for his expansive readings
of other provisions of the Bill of Rights, he would have no problem
regulating the Second Amendment into oblivion. “What
is needed,” he said, “is some very tough legislation on both the
federal and state level to make it much, much harder to get guns and to
create a presumption against gun ownership instead of a presumption in
favor of gun ownership ….”
Although perhaps the most obnoxious, Dershowitz is by no
means the first legal prima donna to suggest rewriting the Bill of
Rights to eliminate the Second Amendment. Supreme Court Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg has publicly suggested that a “future, wiser court” could
revisit the landmark Heller decision, which recognized a private right
to arms under the Second Amendment. Later, in a televised appearance
from Cairo, Egypt, Justice Ginsburg remarked that she “would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.”
More recently, another dissenter from the Heller case, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote an entire book
about how he would refashion the U.S. Constitution to his liking. Among
his suggestions is limiting “the right of the people to keep and bear
Arms” in the Second Amendment with the phrase, “when serving in the
militia.”
While we at the NRA don’t think much of their
constitutional scholarship, we can at least credit these influential
legal thinkers for their candor and for illustrating the true
philosophical underpinnings of the gun control movement. No matter how
else they may couch their rhetoric – most recently as “gun safety”
proponents, gun control advocates simply hate guns and do not trust the
American people to have them. It
should surprise no one that the legal elites among them are perfectly
willing to repeal or judicially nullify the Second Amendment entirely.
The next U.S. president could appoint perhaps three or
even four Supreme Court justices to a bench where the Heller and
McDonald decisions currently survive by one vote. The importance of who
makes those appointments should not be lost on those who value the right
to keep and bear arms. Whatever else can be said of his tendency
towards incessant bloviation, that’s one lesson from Prof. Dershowitz we
all should heed.
