Scalia says hand-held rocket launchers are probably constitutional

By Michael J.W. Stickings

First of all, what's a Supreme Court justice doing on a Sunday political talk show, particularly one on a partisan pro-Republican network like Fox News? Well, that's Antonin Scalia for you. He may claim to be an originalist, ruling based (in his view) on what the Founders (supposedly) intended, but really he's just a partisan conservative, an activist who seeks to enact a right-wing agenda.

Second of all, Scalia's nuts. When asked by Chris Wallace, in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado massacre, about the Second Amendment constitutionality of "a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute," he responded with the extremism that is essentially the reductio ad absurdum of conservative thought on guns:

Obviously the Amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried — it's to keep and "bear," so it doesn't apply to cannons — but I suppose here are hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes, that will have to be decided.

So basically, as long as you can carry it, it's fine. No matter that what you can carry these days isn't just a musket, or some other 18th-century weapon, but something far more lethal. Indeed, along with rocket launchers and the like, you can pretty much carry a weapon of mass destruction, a weapon far beyond the imaginings of the Founders, far beyond what "[a] well regulated Militia... necessary to the security of a free State" requires (not that such militias are needed in an age of modern armed forces).

But Scalia isn't an originalist so much as an ideological extremist, an absolutist. And like conservatives pretty much across the board these days, and certainly like the Republican Party, he takes a position on guns that defies common sense, common decency, law and order, and, yes, the far more reasonable -- and, given the time, understandable -- intent of the Founders.