BuckeyeBlog

Glenn Reynolds thinks the collective rights view is dead .

Sorry, professor, but you’re too credulous. While it might be true that no one put forth an explicit statement saying “collective rights is the wave of the future,” that’s precisely what this case is about. Even in a collective rights society, lip service will be paid to your individual dignity. Probably even more so than in an individual rights society; the need will be greater, since there won’t be any actual individual rights.

Indeed.

Whew. That was a close one.

Four justices of the United States Supreme Court are prepared to rule that there is such a thing as a collective right.

Good lord.

So proponents of individual freedom won out, by the thinnest of margins. Good on Justice Kennedy, the unreliable justice.

Good on the strategists who rolled the dice under tough circumstances and won (let’s forget how easily it could have gone the other way, and what a disaster that would have been, for gun rights and all rights).

An amusing footnote on reporter editorializing: These two paragraphs just don’t belong in the story.

The ruling came the day after a worker at a plastics plant in Henderson, Kentucky, used a handgun to shoot and kill five people inside the factory before killing himself, the latest in a series of deadly shooting sprees across the country.

The United States is estimated to have the world’s highest civilian gun ownership rate. Gun deaths average 80 a day in the United States, 34 of them homicides, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

Really, they ought to know better. If they want to argue for liberal concealed carry laws, so that victims such as these could protect themselves from assaults, they should write a column saying so. Sheesh.

A lot of excitement on the gun rights side of the aisle today, as everyone who is invested in the issue expects the Supreme Court to rule on Heller. A mix of blogs, press reports and gossip suggests that Scalia will write an opinion that holds the Second Amendment protects an individual right rather than a collective right.

That’s a scary concept. There’s no such thing as a collective right. You have to go to the Soviet constitution or the United Nations for such a thing. A collective right is no right. Put it this way: If Ted Strickland or Bob Taft publishes a newspaper, does that satisfy your First Amendment right of free speech? Of course not. The idea is absurd, and it does not become less so by moving the concept from the First to the Second. Once allow that idea to take root in the Constitution on a right you don’t like, and sure as the sun you’ll find it applies to the rights you do like.

(I quizzed one “expert,” a professor and author of a book on the topic, to name another collective right in the Constitution, and he said “jury,” on the grounds that it takes a group of people to compose it. Talk about not clear on the concept. Another expert, also an author, one who knew what he was talking about, was stumped, for the valid reason that there isn’t any such thing.)