But, critically, judges shouldn't be in charge of stripping disfavored rights from the Constitution. If the courts can simply make gun rights disappear, what happens when the First Amendment becomes embarrassing or inconvenient? It corrodes the very idea of a written Constitution becomes, in practice, the opposite of what its text says. The great beauty of the Constitution is that, unlike, say, the treaties that form the European Union, you can actually read it. You can see how its language embodies principles that still animate the day-to-day operation of American political life. When that is no longer the case, American democracy suffers; it gets unmoored from its source of legitimacy.
Most interestingly, Wittes is writing an article in response to the Federal Appeals Court striking down a D.C. law stridently restricting gun rights where he agrees with the original gun-control law being struck down. However, unlike what has become standard in liberal elite circles these days where courts imagine things into the Constitution which aren't there or imagine things out of the constitution which are there, he flatly agrees that legal precedent and the text of the Constitution both provide for a right for the citizenry to bear arms - a right he feels the citizens should not have, incidentally. He feels, however, that the correct way to go about this is to amend the Constitution and appeal the 2nd Amendment, not to have courts imagine provisions out of the Constitution that are there. Another interesting quote, although taken so ridiculously out of context that I cannot be sure that this was the actual meaning of the author or an ironic means to get another's point across: "the people's right to 'keep and bear arms' may actually include an individual right to, well, keep or bear a gun."
Either way, it's nice to see people have a different view on a topic but not try to imagine things that aren't there.
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