“I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment,” Hillary Clinton promised at the Democratic National Convention last week. “I’m not here to take away your guns.”
Those disavowals were necessary because Clinton has made gun control a centerpiece of her presidential campaign, contrary to the conventional wisdom about the political risks that entails. But Clinton’s assurances ring hollow, writes Jacob Sullum, since it’s pretty clear she not only does not value the individual right to keep and bear arms but does not believe it is guaranteed by the Constitution. This year Democrats erased the Second Amendment from their platform, reverting to the approach they took in 2000 and earlier. The 2016 platform mentions “the rights of responsible gun owners” but says nothing about the extent of those rights or the legal basis for them.
The Second Amendment’s excision from the Democratic platform is consistent with Clinton’s opinion about District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 case in which the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to armed self-defense. Clinton said the case was “wrongly decided.” At the very least, writes Sullum, that position means Clinton thinks the Second Amendment does not guarantee the right to use guns for self-defense in the home, since the law overturned in Heller made it impossible to exercise that right.
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