One of the more formidable politicians at the state level is Maura Healey, our attorney general here in the Commonwealth (God save it!). After the Pulse nightclub shooting in June of 2016, Healey took advantage of the escape hatch that the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote into the Supreme Court’s Heller decision in which the late Justice Scalia specifically stated that the individual right to bear arms that the Court endorsed in that decision was not unlimited.

“We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. ‘Miller’ said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those ‘in common use at the time.’ 307 U.S., at 179, 59 S.Ct. 816. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’”

So, after Omar Mateen killed 49 people in the Orlando nightclub with two different makes of semi-automatic firearms, Healey widened the scope of Massachusetts’s 1998 assault-weapons ban to include most of the AR-15 and AK-47 knockoffs that are so popular among the gun-love crowd. Almost immediately, Healey was sued by the Gun Owners Action League, the NRA’s wilder cousin.

The late Antonin Scalia Getty Images

On Friday, a federal district judge named William Young gave Healey and the Commonwealth (God save it!) a huge win, and he used Scalia’s opinion in Heller to do it. From Bloomberg:

"The AR-15 and its analogs, along with large capacity magazines, are simply not weapons within the original meaning of the individual constitutional rights to ‘bear arms,’" U.S. District Judge William Young wrote in a decision Thursday in Boston, dismissing a lawsuit over the state law…Young, nominated by former President Ronald Reagan, backed his decision by quoting the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in a landmark 2008 decision that overturned Washington’s ban on hand guns. The ruling expanded individual gun rights but said the right isn’t unlimited."Weapons that are most useful in military service -- M-16 rifles and the like" aren’t protected by the Second Amendment and "may be banned," Young quoted Scalia as saying.

A Reagan appointee upholds a gun law and uses a Scalia opinion to do it, and hands a victory to the Democratic attorney general of godless Taxachusetts. And they say there’s no humor to be found in the law.

Respond to this article on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.



Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io