The Second Amendment by Michael Waldman

Author:Michael Waldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ON THE ROAD

Students, neatly pressed; faculty; alumni; journalists: over seven hundred of them filled Princeton’s Neo-Gothic Richardson Auditorium the afternoon of December 11, 2012. Antonin Scalia looked out over the crowd. The Supreme Court justice, in his twenty-sixth year on the Court, had settled into his shtick: opinionated, jovial, garrulous, a hint of arrogance. It was a friendly audience, thrilled to be in the presence of a renowned jurist and not entirely unhappy with the contents of his talk, either. The James Madison Program sponsored the lecture. Its other public events the same academic year included “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind” and a panel on “Benghazi: What Do We Know? What Don’t We Know? What Do We Need to Know?”

Some applauded when a freshman asked the justice why he had compared homosexuality to bestiality and murder. Others applauded when Scalia pugnaciously replied, “I don’t apologize for the things I raised. I’m not comparing homosexuality to murder. I’m comparing the principle that a society may not adopt moral sanctions, moral views, against certain conduct. I’m comparing that with respect to murder and that with respect to homosexuality.”

Scalia was in his element. His greatest passion came when he propounded his jurisprudential vision. “I have classes of little kids who come to the court, and they recite very proudly what they’ve been taught, ‘The Constitution is a living document.’ It isn’t a living document! It’s dead,” Scalia declared. “Dead, dead, dead!” The crowd laughed.

The Princeton speech came four and a half years after the justice proudly announced Heller from the bench. It was also three days before a deranged young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered twenty children and six adults. The nation would begin to discuss gun control again—this time in the context of a newly articulated constitutional doctrine that might limit next steps.

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