Two influential conservative judges have criticized the Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess guns, says the New York Times. Federal appeals court judges J. Harvie Wilkinson of Richmond and Richard Posner of Chicago say that Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion is illegitimate, activist, poorly reasoned and fueled by politics rather than principle. The judges said the gun ruling was a right-wing version of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in the gun case, has said that Roe had no basis in the Constitution and amounted to a judicial imposition of a value judgment that should have been left to state legislatures.
Posner wrote that the high court’s failure to allow the political process to work out varying approaches to gun control that were suited to local conditions “was the mistake that the Supreme Court made when it nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade.” Robert Levy, a libertarian lawyer who was a principal architect of the victorious strategy in the gun case, rejected the comparison to Roe.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/washington/21guns.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin