Is the Tea Party planning a revolution?

Adam Winkler is a constitutional law professor at UCLA, and recently wrote about how the Tea Party movement plans to overturn gun control laws. Just what is needed in this country…an extension of the NRA. Winkler says the issue was “conspicuously absent” in the recent election, but an undercurrent running through the campaign rhetoric was that the Tea Party wants an “extreme roll back of the nation’s gun laws.”

This could be the result of the dilution of the D.C. v. Heller U.S. Supreme Court decision that said the Second Amendment does protect the right of an individual’s right to own guns for self-defense. In that decision SCOTUS added: “…nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions on the commercial sale of arms."

The lower courts have followed that interpretation to uphold laws re. the possession of firearms by “felons, drug addicts, illegal aliens, and individuals convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors.” Also “laws prohibiting particular types of weapons, including sawed-off shotguns and machine guns, and specific weapons attachments.” And “laws barring guns in school zones and post offices, and laws outlawing "straw" purchases, the carrying of concealed weapons, possession of an unregistered firearm, and particular types of ammunition.”
With these courts upholding every one of these laws, as Professor Winkler put it, “Since Heller, its Gun Control 60, Individual Right 0." See the Professor’s You Tube video, below, that concludes the major problem of gun control advocates is potential bills through state legislatures.



The CATO Institute financially backed the Heller legislation and thinks the above addendum added by Justice Scalia merely caused confusion in the ruling. The gun fanatics disagree—wouldn’t we be disappointed if they didn’t?—saying it just confirms that the Supreme Court “believes that almost all gun control measures on the books today are perfectly lawful.” With all these disappointments, amid the flag waving by the NRA of what they had accomplished on Heller, the Tea Party quietly made their plans.

On Monday, the Tea Party gun control revolution.

COMMENTS WELCOMED