Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is starting to sound like a jilted suitor whose “promposal” was flatly rejected.
We get it. We’ve all been dumped. Most of us, though, learned and moved on. Not him. He’s making the rounds with sympathetic news outlets like Time and Washington Post to grumble of lost loves.
At 99, the third-longest serving Supreme Court justice is showing time isn’t healing old wounds when it comes to the landmark Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller. Justice Stevens continues to pine for the one that got away. In his new memoir, “The Making of a Justice,” he writes of Heller, “Unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my tenure on the bench.”
That’s not admitting you didn’t get to take the belle to the ball. That’s saying she also married the wrong guy, had 2.5 kids, a house with a white picket fence and tail-wagging dog that were all wrong for her, too.
Here’s a little recap on the landmark Heller decision. Dick Heller was a licensed special police officer in Washington D.C., where he also lived. He carried a gun in federal buildings by day, but was forbidden to keep his own handgun in his D.C. home under the District’s Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975.
That law banned the private ownership of handguns. It also held that any rifles or shotguns kept in a D.C. home must be unloaded, disassembled or locked up, and unavailable for self-defense. Heller sued. …
Larry Keane is Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.
This column was published in The Federalist and is reprinted here with permission.