By Stu Tarlowe
Thursday night’s news programs were dominated by the story of President Biden’s speech earlier in the evening, in which he pressed for more stringent gun control measures. If I were to pick apart his remarks—and, believe me, there is fertile ground on which to do so!—I might zero in on his claim that “…the Second Amendment…is not absolute. It was Justice Scalia who wrote, and I quote: ‘Like most rights, the right Second Amendment — the rights granted by the Second Amendment are not unlimited.’ Not unlimited. It never has been.”
Really? “The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” sounds pretty absolute to me. But that’s just me. What matters more is that Biden’s supposed quote from the late Antonin Scalia isn’t quite accurate. Indeed, it changes a word that is critical to understanding the nature of the rights that the Founders enumerated in our Bill of Rights.
It’s true that, in the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia v. Heller decision, the learned Justice Scalia did raise questions of limitations to the nature of weaponry covered. What Scalia wrote contrasts with remarks from Tench Coxe (1755-1824), a political economist and a delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress, who emphatically stated that the weaponry referred to by the Second Amendment comprised “every terrible implement of the soldier.” Nevertheless, on the core issue, Scalia got it right and Biden misquoted him. Thus, Scalia did not refer to the rights “granted” by the Second Amendment; rather, he referred to “the right secured by the Second Amendment….”
