Saul Cornell has always been a elitist political hack when it comes to gun control.
Preamble he says?
He’s trying to make people believe ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state’ somehow overrides ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed‘ and thus only the military & the national guard – the elistist/anti-civil rights, wanna-be gun controller’s current definition of ‘militia’ – have a right to have guns.
Of course common English sentence diagraming, taught in grade school, confirms he’s lying.
But – again – Preamble he says?
Well, I’ve got one for him. One that I think he believes he can evade through general ignorance due to the lack of civics education:
PREAMBLE TO THE BILL OF RIGHTS
“THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its (the Constitution’s) powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”
Bold & parenthesis are mine.
That preamble clearly states that the amendments are to declare certain things that are restricted from the government exerting its powers on them. The Bill of Rights is a list of restrictions on government, not the people, and Mr Saul Cornell knows this.
Cornell: Originalism Means Gorsuch and Barrett Should Rule in Favor of Strict Gun Control
In another of Heller’s odd intellectual moves, Scalia read the Second Amendment backwards, and in the process effectively erased the text’s preamble. To justify this unusual reading strategy, an interpretive approach that Stevens reminded his colleagues on the bench had never been done in the court’s history, Scalia cited legal treatises written decades after the adoption of the Second Amendment. Once again, to obtain his preferred result Scalia rummaged among sources written a half a century after the adoption of the Second Amendment to find evidence of the text’s original meaning.
Such a move only makes sense if one believes that nothing significant happened in American legal history between the adoption of the Second Amendment and the Civil War, a view most historians would find bizarre and erroneous. Curiously, Justice Scalia did not turn to a legal source more readily available that was written at the same time as the Second Amendment. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and co-author of The Federalist, had ruled on this issue in 1790s.
Jay wrote: “A preamble cannot annul enacting clauses; but when it evinces the intention of the legislature and the design of the act, it enables us, in cases of two constructions, to adopt the one most consonant to their intention and design.”
In essence, when two possible readings of a constitutional text are possible, the preamble ought to serve as the tie breaker. Scalia disregarded this Founding era rule and applied a different rule that gained prominence decades later so that he could advance his gun rights vision.
Justices Gorsuch and Barrett have staked their reputations on their commitment to apply originalist methods in a neutral manner and let the evidence dictate the outcome. Will they follow through on that promise in Corlett?
Research and scholarship published in the decade after Heller will force them to put their earlier promises to the test. It now seems clear that if they apply originalism in a neutral fashion they will have to choose between Heller’s methodology and Heller’s conclusions.
— Saul Cornell in Barrett and Gorsuch Have to Choose Between Originalism and Expanding Gun Rights