Key Points from Justice Thomas’ Brilliant Decision on the Right to Bear Arms

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck. This is Buck in solo for the day.

CNN’s Jessica Schneider claims SCOTUS striking down New York’s restrictive concealed carry law will lead to an explosion of mass shootings in Times Square.
“Several mass shootings in the last few months … And the concern [is] … handguns in populated places like Times Square” pic.twitter.com/FBvhPd8g3R

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) June 23, 2022

BUCK: The Second Amendment has become a second class right within the Bill of Rights, and that needs to change, and today’s 6-3 ruling — it’s an excellent ruling — is certainly is step in the right direction. The more you think about this — the more you dive into the arguments, the text, the history — you find that it’s stunning, really, that the libs were able to get away with this as long as they did. What purpose does it serve…? Just think about it in this context. I know we have so many listeners in New York and California specifically.

I’m a New Yorker. They wouldn’t let me… I was trained by the CIA. I was in the NYPD for a short period of time, about 18 months, as an intelligence analyst. I had federal government training with firearms. I am a law-abiding citizen. Everybody around me would be made safer, in my opinion, by my legal carrying of a gun. They would not let me have one, would not. It didn’t matter. I applied. I said, “Hey, here I am. I’ll do the fingerprinting. I’ll do the course. Just tell me what I have to do to get one.”

“No. Prove that you’re special. Prove that you’re important,” was the law in New York, particularly in New York City. It’s even worse in New York City than in New York State. This is obviously not the way the rule of law is supposed to work. But libs are terrified of law-abiding gun owners. That’s the fascinating part. Criminals, people who misuse guns, liberals have a soft spot for. But people who want to carry and defend themselves in their community and go shooting at the range on the weekends perhaps, that’s scary to libs.

“Guns make big bang noises and I hate it! Keep it away. I don’t want the scary gun noise.” So, that’s reflected, by the way, in the dissent here. But something as… You know, I do love history, and I want to get into the criminal component of this and how it ties in to what we’re seeing nationally in just a moment. But I mentioned to you there was some fascinating historical discussion in this Supreme Court case that came down today in New York Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

I just want to read to you. This is from the opinion, written by Justice Thomas, who is… I’ve said this before. If I can come up with a better, more specific phrase, but he is a national treasure. He really is. Justice Thomas is an amazing man who should be so much more… I mean, he’s celebrated by conservatives. He should be celebrated so much more nationally for what he is, being brilliant, having an incredible life story. But I digress.

“When we look to the latter half of the 17th century,” this decision says, respondents’ case only weakens. As in Heller, we consider this history ‘[b]etween the [Stuart] Restoration [in 1660] and the Glorious Revolution [in 1688]’ to be particularly instructive. During that time, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II ramped up efforts to disarm their political opponents, an experience that ‘caused Englishmen … to be jealous of their arms,’” and there’s other examples like this.

But this is the key point, friends. When you look at the history of these efforts to disarm the law-abiding, whether it’s in England, whether it’s in the medieval period, or it’s in the Revolutionary period in America, you look at these efforts to disarm, it’s always a means of the powerful asserting their control. Because they want to be able to do whatever they want to do. They don’t want anyone to be able to say, “No, you’re a tyrant. No, you’ve gone too far, and I can do something about it.”

And this really goes to the heart of the Second Amendment. When you read through the history, it’s fascinating. Those with the guns or the swords and the daggers and the halberds and those with those weapons, they don’t want others to be able to meet them with steel and gunpowder. They want to be the ones that get to call all the shots. They say, “You know what? We’re just gonna…” “No. You are not important. You don’t get a weapon,” and you could look all throughout history.

At different times, just the carrying of a sword unless you were connected to the nobility was something that could get you even executed. But then there are other times where there was an expectation that all gentlemen would be carrying. There are cultures, actually, where you have to carry a working blade. Cultures where carrying a knife for utility and for the protection of oneself and perhaps even one’s faith or one’s state, that was expected.

The libs ultimately… There’s the criminal justice component of this and the self-protection. But then there’s also the defense against tyranny aspect. And the left in this country, the anti-gun Democrat Party which now effectively is all the Democrat Party. There are some who will still pretend here and there to win some votes that they’re pro-Second Amendment. But the Democrat Party’s become the anti-gun party because they’re authoritarians.

You’ve seen this over the course of covid. You see this in your day-to-day lives. They want to control your speech. They want to control your property. They want to control every aspect of your life. They want to brainwash your children to gender identity theory. They want full and total control, and even if they may not have the eloquence and the constitutional understanding — which they certainly don’t — to put it in these terms, they do understand at some level that the individual ownership by citizens of this country, of firearms, is a personal act of rebellion against authoritarianism.

Or at least the possibility waiting in the wings, waiting on the sidelines to be that act of rebellion should it be called upon. And they hate that. They hate that because they know somewhere, deep down, hold on a second. We can’t just force them to do anything we want if we have full and total control of the apparatus. We can’t just start pulling people out of their homes and arresting them in front of their families because of climate denial. What do you mean? That would be a problem for us?

Ultimately, the true believers on the left, the real center of the Democrat Party finds that notion of an armed populace unacceptable, unacceptable to them, because they want… They’re always trying… They’re progressing, you see? Yeah, they’re always moving for the next thing, moving to the next issue. But their ultimate progression as progressives is to get to the utopia that is only possible when they are in total and complete control.

And so long as we have an armed population in this country that represents the final bulwark against that tyranny. And they know it; so, they hate it. And they also like all the virtue signaling, of course, from, if we could only pass more gun laws, we would stop all the gun violence out there. It’s not true, but people say that and they feel proud and brave and smart. If only we passed this gun law.

No matter how many times they fail, it feels good for them to say it. It feels good for the left to shout this out so they will keep doing it, they won’t look at the data. Doesn’t matter to them. They want you disarmed and double masked. That’s the point. That’s how they see this. And if we allow them, that’s where we’ll go. But today’s Supreme Court decision a huge victory, a huge move in the right direction.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: I gave a shout-out to Justice Thomas, who a lot of us know he’s amazing, but deserves even more praise than he gets from those of us who are fans of his jurisprudence, his sharp mind, and his courage. In this decision, he wrote, “A short prologue is in order. Even before the Civil War commenced in 1861, this Court indirectly affirmed the importance of the right to keep and bear arms in public. Writing for the Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford, (1857), Chief Justice Taney offered what he thought was a parade of horribles that would result from recognizing that free blacks were citizens of the United States.”

Again, this is a quote from the decision. “If blacks were citizens, Taney fretted, they would be entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, including the right ‘to keep and carry arms wherever they went.’ Id., at 417 (emphasis added). Thus, even Chief Justice Taney recognized (albeit unenthusiastically in the case of blacks) that public carry was a component of the right to keep and bear arms — a right free blacks were often denied in antebellum America,” and that’s the end of the quote there.

Just a reminder as well for everybody, it was the racist Democrat Party that worked so hard after the Civil War to make sure that black citizens of this country were disarmed. It was the racist Democrat Party during reconstruction and then leading all the way up into the era of the Ku Klux Klan that was doing everything it could to disarm our fellow Americans who were black. So there is a, as I said, long history of disarming in the name of oppression that stretches back for hundreds of years.

Not even just in America but hundreds of years. It stretches back all throughout history. The people in charge want you to shut up and do what you’re told. They get the guns; you get the orders. That’s the way they wanted it to be. Our Founding Fathers — the reason for the Second Amendment — realized, “No, that’s not gonna work. We’re not gonna have a free society, a truly free society of individuals with real liberty unless we change that dynamic.” So I think that’s essential to take away from all this.