I’m catching up on my reading of Slate, and came across this piece by Timothy Noah on the Heller case. It’s an odd swipe at Justice Scalia for his majority opinion.

Scalia argued that the right to bear arms had to include the right to own the “quintessential self-defense weapon,” the handgun. The government violated its residents’ rights by banning handguns even if it allowed them to own other kinds of guns. Scalia goes on to explain that “[t]here are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense”: “It is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker”; etc. Noah concludes that Scalia “has discovered a constitutional right to convenience,” which is perhaps not the most precise way of describing Scalia’s point. (It would be closer to the mark, though not perfect, to say that Scalia ruled that constitutional rights should be defined in a way that made them meaningful, but that doesn’t make for quite as stinging an indictment, does it?)

Noah goes on to say that “a handgun’s convenience when put to good uses is heavily outweighed by its convenience when put to bad ones.” For example, it can be concealed easily after a crime. “It’s this second set of conveniences that led the District of Columbia to ban handguns.” This might begin to be a cogent criticism of Scalia’s decision if the Constitution were neutral with respect to gun policy. It isn’t. Noah’s view of the balance of risks involved in liberalizing gun laws is pretty much irrelevant to the constitutional question.

But Noah’s little squib did give him another opportunity to demonstrate his vileness: “More legal guns . . . mean more illegal guns. More illegal guns mean more people get killed. The inconvenience this poses to the dead and their families, and to society at large, does not concern Scalia.”