Dale Carpenter on the gay rights case for the Individual Right interpretation of the Second Amendment.  Carpenter is counsel for a number of gay civil rights groups (or, more accurately, civil rights groups comprising gay people), who is involved in one of the amicus curiae briefs supporting the Individual Rights interpretation of the Heller case.

He makes the usual points…:

It’s true that gun possession does not guarantee protection from violent crime. The gun may be incompetently used, for example. But where the Constitution itself protects an individual right, it is not for the government to say the citizen may not enjoy the right simply because she may not make effective use of it. 

…as well as one I’d not heard before (emphasis added):

Second, the gay gun-rights brief points out that unless the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms, gay Americans are effectively disqualified from any exercise of the right. That’s because under the current prevailing interpretation of the Constitution, the government may entirely exclude gays and lesbians from military service (“the militia”).

If the Second Amendment protects only the collective right of a state’s citizens to possess arms within a militia, and if gays may be excluded from that militia, then the Second Amendment is a dead letter for gay Americans. They have no rights on the subject the government is bound to respect.

Of course, to a genuine libertarian, or even a stolid construtionist, the notion that the “militia” is the regular military is noxious…

…but it is an inevitable result of the “Collective Right” interpretation that Heller seeks to scupper.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 5:05 am and is filed under Victim Disarmament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.