When John Paul Stevens Eviscerated Antonin Scalia | The New Republic

As we come out of Covid 19 lockdowns mass shootings return.

When John Paul Stevens Eviscerated Antonin Scalia | The New Republic

By Matt Ford  July 17, 2019

John Paul Stevens, who died on Tuesday, served on the Supreme Court for 35 years. His tenure, the second-longest in the court’s history, placed him in the middle of the great legal controversies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: on abortion and gay rights, Bush v. Gore and campaign finance, federalism and the death penalty. To Stevens, however, one of the court’s rulings stood out beyond all others.

“District of Columbia v. Heller, which recognized an individual right to possess a firearm under the Constitution, is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench,” he wrote in The Atlantic in May. In 2008, Stevens wrote the principal dissent in the 5–4 decision, strongly arguing that the Second Amendment only protected a collective right to bear arms as part of militia service. The majority, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, concluded otherwise.