Article from Reason by Jacob Sullum.

This month’s mass shooting at a high school in Florida has predictably provoked demands for new restrictions on guns, most of which are dubious on practical grounds, constitutional grounds, or both. But while logic and experience can help us figure out which measures are likely to be effective, the debate about which ones are consistent with the Second Amendment occurs in a shadowland only partly illuminated by the Supreme Court.

In the decade since the Court officially recognized the individual right to armed self-defense, it has passed up one opportunity after another to clarify the boundaries of that right. “The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this Court’s constitutional orphan,” Justice Clarence Thomas observed last week as the Court declined to hear yet another Second Amendment case.

That case involved California’s 10-day waiting period for buying firearms, which applies even when state and federal background checks take less time and even when the buyer has previously been cleared and already owns a gun. In 2014 a federal judge ruled that the waiting period violates the Second Amendment rights of people who are buying additional firearms or who hold concealed-carry licenses.

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Thomas suggested that his colleagues would have been keen to correct such a blatant error if the case had implicated a different amendment. “Our continued refusal to hear Second Amendment cases only enables this kind of defiance,” he wrote.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By KAZ Vorpal (Flickr: Declaration of Independence, with Firearm) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons