Why Is Dick Morris So Uninformed?
Jul 4, 2008 Political
A piece by Dick Morris appeared today at the Rasmussen Reports web site. In the piece Morris states that the Supreme Court handed Obama a gift by voting 5-4 in favor of individual rights to gun ownership (which is what every person who debated the Amendment stated when they were writing it). I won’t get into why Morris thinks it was a gift because it is not really important to his basic misunderstanding of the Second Amendment.
In the piece Morris claims the justices made a “sea change” in Constitutional law and he claims:
By demonstrating how willing they are to toss aside decades of jurisprudence in pursuit of a conservative agenda…
I would like Morris, Constitutional scholar that he is, to explain what decades of jurisprudence were tossed aside since the Court has NEVER ruled on this issue. As I pointed out in a previous post, the Court ruled on whether a person’s rights were violated when he used a sawed off shotgun. They ruled that since the weapon was not one commonly associated with a militia (though those weapons have been used by the military for years) the guy (Miller) had no standing and his rights were not violated. As I pointed out though, the Court acknowledged the individual right in Dred Scott v. Sandford when they said that freeing Scott would allow him to keep and bear arms. So the jurisprudence has been in place since 1857.
Dick Morris also claims that gun control laws have no doubt saved lives and lowered crime rates but the truth is places in this country with the most stringent gun control laws have higher crime rates and higher rates of murder. Places where people’s rights are not violated by the government have lower crime and lower murder rates. Look at states where they have must issue laws and compare them with places that have strict control and there is a stark difference. Professor John Lott researched this and his conclusions support this.
Regardless, Morris is usually more informed than this so I wonder what his motivation is.
Perhaps it is because he is hawking his new book and he wants to help with the sales. Morris is smarter than to actually believe what he wrote about gun laws and the Second Amendment so I can only conclude that he is manipulating an emotional issue to sell a book.
I usually like Morris’ insight on politics but in this case he is woefully uninformed.
Tags: dick morris, founding fathers, Second Amendment, supreme court