Agree with Clarence

Lynette Dufton
2 min readJun 24, 2022

I can’t believe that I actually agree with Clarence Thomas.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling struck down New York’s 105 (!) year old law requiring citizens to demonstrate a “special need” in order to carry firearms in public. Police and security personnel automatically qualify as do hunters during season. That crazy-eyed guy pissing on the floor of the subway does not. For 105 years, that law made sense. That subway guy really shouldn’t be carrying an AR-15. He’s scary enough without it. Then the Republicans packed the Supreme Court and the New York law somehow didn’t make sense any more.

In his 66 page majority opinion on the case, Clarence wrote, “The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right’, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees. We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”

When you put it like that, I agree, Clancy.

Of course, Clancy and his GOP pals on the Supreme Court would support a requirement for a government-issued photo ID in order to exercise my constitutional right to vote even if I was too old to have a driver’s license and even if I couldn’t easily get to the DMV for that free voter ID card. Apparently, voting is a “second class” right unlike that oh-so-precious right to bear arms.

How about some consistency, Clarence?

In his dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer pointed to the more than 275 mass shootings since January and to data showing that gun violence has surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of death among children and teens. What a wet blanket on this banner day for law-abiding (Is there any other kind?) gun owners everywhere.

Justice Samuel Alito (Remember him? He’s the guy who wrote the “leaked” opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade. Guess what side he’s on in this?) wrote a counter-argument to Breyer. “Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities? How does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.”

Actually, Sam, the New York law might have stopped Buffalo. If a cop saw that wacko walking across the supermarket parking lot brandishing his AR-15 and loads of extra ammo, the cop could have legally stopped him. Thanks to Clancy, Sam and their Supreme pals, it’s perfectly legal for a band of “patriots” armed to the teeth to march on a supermarket in a Black neighborhood now.

Oh, that’s right. All gun owners are “law-abiding”.

Clarence talked a good game. He was wrong. Alito was really wrong. I guess that I don’t agree with Clarence after all.

By Ed Dufton

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Lynette Dufton

These posts are written by my father, Ed Dufton, who has an incredible knack of condensing the day’s news into a witty and insightful commentary on society.