In an otherwise unbiased article on Justice Anthony Kennedy, Washington Post staffer Robert Barnes seemed to dismiss the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in last June's District of Columbia v. Heller case as one in which the Court "found" gun rights in the text of the amendment, as though the notion that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to keep and bear arms was somehow novel revisionism ungrounded in the plain text of the document.:
Kennedy was the only justice in each majority as the divided court ruled out the death penalty for child-rapists, found in the Second Amendment the individual right to a firearm and provided constitutional protections to the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Barnes's language calls to mind how critics of Roe v. Wade and similar cases slam the Court for "finding" a right to an abortion in the Constitution where no such guarantee exists in plain English. Of course the Second Amendment itself is quite plain its its language:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Barnes would have done well to describe Heller as a case wherein the majority "held that the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to keep and bear firearms."
