Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t plan for his 14-page dissent over a cert denial in a gun case to come out less than a week after one of the deadliest school shootings in American history. It’s just a… happy coincidence that today is the first day the Supreme Court is back in session since the Parkland school shooting, and that Thomas consistently makes some of the most vile and murderous defenses of gun rights in the industrialized world. The confluence of America’s mass shooting problems and Thomas’s mass shooting permissiveness were bound to co-mingle in a news cycle, sooner or later.
The case is Silvester v. Becerra. At issue: gun owners argue that they should be exempt from the 10-day waiting period to buy more guns in California, because they already own guns. The 10-day “cooling off” period is there so you can’t just impulsively run out and shoot innocent children “deer,” but the gun owners argue that since they can use their other guns to shoot anything they want anyway, the cooling off period shouldn’t apply to them.
The Ninth Circuit disagreed. Even though we can’t outlaw owning an arsenal (for reasons passing understanding), we can at least still impose a cooling off period before you add to your armory.
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the case, but Thomas unleashed a 14-page dissent to the denial of cert, which was published today. ThinkProgress’s Ian Millhiser takes it from there:
“Common sense suggests that subsequent purchasers contemplating violence or self-harm would use the gun they already own,” the justice claims, “instead of taking all the steps to legally buy a new one in California.”…
Thomas’ primary grievance with the lower court’s decision in Silvester is he thinks that the court of appeals should have started with a stronger presumption against gun regulation.
Silvester, however, is also part of a larger crusade by Thomas to convince his colleagues to hear more gun cases. He claims that “the lower courts are resisting this Court’s decisions in Heller and McDonald and are failing to protect the Second Amendment to the same extent that they protect other constitutional rights,” and that the Supreme Court exacerbated this trend by not hearing a major Second Amendment case in the past eight years.
It is just demonstrably untrue that people contemplating violence use the guns they already own. In mass shooting after mass shooting, we see that the guns used in the massacre were bought specifically FOR the massacre. What Thomas calls “common sense” is actually “willful ignorance” of the evidence we have about how mass shooters operate.
Which isn’t to say that a 10-day waiting period is actually an effective gun regulation. These mass murderers are not going off half-cocked. We see, time and again, a level of planning and patience that belies the notion that all of these mass shooters are mentally handicapped. They’re CRAZY, but they seem to have the restraint necessary to plan their attacks, acquire guns from any number of legal or illegal sources, and pick their targets far in advance.
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But as Millhiser points out, Thomas is not here for an evidence-based discussion on effective gun regulation. He just an ideologue who believes that the Constitution is so flawed and deadly that it PREVENTS us from keeping our children and communities safe from gun violence.
Thomas’s rhetorical flourish gives up the game that this is anything more than a culture war:
In a section of his opinion that will delight conservative cultural warriors, Thomas even compares the Court’s refusal to hear the Silvester case to his speculative belief that the Court would “review a 10-day waiting period for abortions, notwithstanding a State’s purported interest in creating a ‘cooling off’ period.”
I’m not going to swing at the knuckleball, but I’ll point out that Thomas doesn’t think the government can regulate weapons but can regulate women. It’s almost like he thinks both are mere tools to be used, but the former knows its place while the latter sometimes gets uppity and tries to take independent action.
Thomas says this kind of crap all the time. The conservative movement believes this crap. We have a gun problem in this country BECAUSE people like Clarence Thomas think that even a 10-day waiting period imposed on additional firearm purchases literally exceeds the bounds of state authority. We are the only wealthy nation in the world that has DEMOCRATIZED the power to wage war against school children. And the people most in favor of populist lethality defend their positions with the circular logic that lethality has already been democratized and therefore must continue, unabated, to counteract the democratization of lethality.
Even if this 14-page dissent is the only thing that survives of our early 21st century gun “debate,” future historians will have all the evidence they need for how gun culture contributed to the failure of the America experiment.
Justice Thomas delivers pro-gun rant just days after the Parkland shooting [Think Progress]
Earlier:
https://abovethelaw.com/2018/02/conservatives-have-won-the-argument-that-the-constitution-is-too-flawed-to-protect-children/
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.