Thanks, Supremes

Boy, did the Supreme Court do Barack Obama a solid today. Never mind gay marriage amendments. Can you imagine the furor among conservatives had the court ruled 5-4 that the Second Amendment does not allow for individuals to own guns? They would have forgetten real quick whatever beef they have with John McCain as he fell all over himself promising to appoint gun-loving judges to the high court.

Besides, the court's ruling leaves plenty of wriggle room for sensible restrictions on gun ownership:

But the court held that the individual right to possess a gun “for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home” is not unlimited. “It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” Justice Scalia wrote.

The ruling does not mean, for instance, that laws against carrying concealed weapons are to be swept aside. Furthermore, Justice Scalia wrote, “The court’s opinion should not 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 and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” (link)

In other words, the Second Amendment is no more absolute than any of our other constitutional protections, just about all of which have had some kind of Supreme Court-approved sanctions imposed on them throughout the history of the republic. Somehow, I doubt that little nuance will merit much attention by those who praise the wisdom of today's ruling.

Guns and butter

That liberal rag the New York Times has some good stuff on its op-ed pages today, one about our nation's gun laws -- or lack thereof -- and the other about its back-asswards farm policies.

From the former:

A short, smart public safety agenda would include:

¶ Requiring background checks for every gun purchase. That means closing the egregious loophole that permits unlicensed dealers to sell firearms at gun shows without conducting any background check.

¶ Limiting purchases to one gun a month in order to defeat traffickers who use straw purchasers to buy weapons in bulk and then resell them on the street.

¶ Once again banning the sale of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines like those used by the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University killers. These magazines would have been outlawed under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, but President Bush and the Republican Congress recklessly let it expire in 2004 to please the gun lobby.

And from the latter:

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)