"Make Mine a Short Stack"
President Obama's Attempt to Stack the Supreme Court with Anti-Gun Zealots
By John C. Sigler, President
Fifty Caliber Institute (FCI)

John C. Sigler

We, of the "Fifty Caliber Community", are acutely sensitive to the fact that the rifles, ammunition and the sports we so dearly cherish are on the front lines in the fight to protect and defend the right to keep and bear arms, and that our rifles, our ammunition and our sports are firmly in the crosshairs of the gun-ban crowd. For that reason, if no other, the Fifty Caliber Community continues to be keenly interested in who sits on the Supreme Court.

On June 28, 2010, the United States Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, held in the case known as McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment is a fundamental right that applies to the several states through operation of the "Due Process Clause" of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. This decision, therefore, extends the lessons taught by the Court in its 2008 decision known as District of Columbia v. Heller (another 5-4 decision) to all jurisdictions within the United States.

One of the more interesting and disturbing aspects of the McDonald decision was that the Court's newest Justice, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, voted against the concept of a fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms after repeatedly stating during last year's confirmation hearings that the Supreme Court's historic Heller decision was "settled law". You may also remember her response to a question posed by Senate Judiciary Chairman Leahy, wherein she stated: "I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller."

Despite her assurances to the Senate that she understood and supported the Court's majority decision in Heller, Justice Sotomayor showed her true colors when she joined a dissenting opinion in McDonald which stated "I can find nothing in the Second Amendment's text, history, or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as 'fundamental' insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes" - So much for the concept of candid and forthright testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Now we have another of President Obama's nominees before the Senate in the person of Solicitor General Elena Kagan; and again we have Senator Leahy acting in his role as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee throwing more softball questions to a woman whose history and background indicate a pronounced and profound hostility toward our Second Amendment freedoms. And once again we have the nominee responding to the Chairman's softball questions in a manner that might make you believe that she would honor Supreme Court precedents in Second Amendment cases. But Justice Sotomayor's actions in McDonald stand as stark evidence that you can't trust what they tell the Senate, you can only trust what their actions have shown in the past.

Ms. Kagan worked as a clerk for one of the Supreme Court's most renowned liberals, Justice Thurgood Marshall. During that time she wrote that she was 'not sympathetic" to a challenge to Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban and oppressive registration requirements. Kagan also served as a domestic policy advisor to the Clinton White House and was intimately involved in its efforts to ban semi-auto rifles and where she described her efforts to a colleague as follows: "We're taking the law and bending it as far as we can to capture a whole new class of guns".

Kagan is obviously no friend to the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, or to the American traditions enjoyed by the Fifty Caliber Community. And, like the last Obama appointee to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of her own nomination to the Supreme Court, it would appear that Kagan - like Sotomayor - may be intentionally misleading the Senate in the hopes of gaining confirmation to the Court where she will be free to do a lifetime's worth of damage to America's gun rights.