This is just another way the courts are watering down our American culture!
In the case of a Milwaukee man deported over a single .22-caliber cartridge, a federal appeals court ruled last week that even unlawful immigrants can be part of “the public” that enjoys a Second Amendment right to keep a gun for self-defense.
The U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said even undocumented immigrants can be part of “the people” protected by the Bill of Rights, though it upheld the man’s conviction on a specific law that prohibits most such people from having guns.
“It is now clear that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is no second-class entitlement, (and) we see no principled way to carve out the Second Amendment and say that the unauthorized (or maybe all noncitizens) are excluded,” Judge Diane Wood wrote for a panel that included Judges Frank Easterbrook and Joel Flaum.
“No language in the Amendment supports such a conclusion, nor, as we have said, does a broader consideration of the Bill of Rights.”
Because four other federal circuit courts have come to the opposite conclusion, legal commentators were quick to suggest the issue of whether undocumented immigrants have Second Amendment rights could now be headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.
While rejecting the idea that undocumented immigrants could never have any rights under the Second Amendment, Wood noted that even for citizens, those rights are not unlimited. She found that a federal law tailored to keep guns out of the hands of undocumented immigrants — like gun restrictions imposed on felons and those convicted of domestic violence — was constitutional, and upheld the conviction on those grounds.
Read more at Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/ Photo credit Flickr