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Comment by lvspiff | Hacker News Reader

Thats the abortion ruling in a nutshell - return it to the states and let the voters decide. However at the same time we have rulings saying gun rights are a federal issue and a state cannot regulate how permits are given out the way they want (although there are many nuances there), essentially making it a constitutional issue due to the 2nd amendment.

So in other words if it's the will of the country we need to pass an amendment, and if not then move to a state where your ideals are embraced. I know I've heard this story somewhere before...i think back in 1860's...

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> essentially making it a constitutional issue due to the 2nd amendment.

Yes, because that's how the American constitution works. If you think something else should have similar protections - or if you don't like the second amendment and think it should be repealed - lobby for a new amendment.

Until then, it's the highest law in the land and is on equal footing with any constitutional protection, regardless of your personal policy preferences.

Oh to live in such a world... Unfortunately the Supreme Court is not a compiler that returns rulings from some objective process. The justices have massive leeway to decide how to interpret every part of the constitution, and they do so to align their rulings with their own personal and political goals. If we swapped this court with 9 other judges they would return very different rulings on the exact same cases.

In this instance though, the majority's 'political goals' are textualism and originalism- where the intent of the written words is paramount. This at least has the virtue of limiting the power of their unelected personal policy outcomes- which we see much more often with the putative conservatives voting with the liberals against their presumed personal opinions on what they'd like the outcome to be.

You see that quite often from Gorsuch and Alito- you'll not once see that from Sotomayor.

Thomas is consistent, though conveniently for him his policy and political preference's and how he reads the Constitution seem to align nearly perfectly.

Gorsuch I'll give you as, while intensely conservative, probably pretty honest about it, but Alito is a whole-cloth mythmaker on his own in the vein of a Scalia. He's about as much of a "textualist" as Thomas is, and both will search for any wild port in a storm (see Dobbs itself for plenty of them) to get to the point he wanted to get to.

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