Since when did Justice Anthony Kennedy become such an important ‘swing’ vote on guns?  You would think that his demise on the Supreme Court was going to usher in a free-fall of regulations preventing at least a few nuts, child molesters and incorrigible bad guys from getting their hands on guns. At least this is how the narrative being promoted by Gun-control Nation seems to be playing out.

             The latest rallying-cry warning from Gun-control Nation about the pro-gun deluge was posted by Eric Segall, who teaches law at Georgia State University and has lately become a 2^nd-Amendment expert from a liberal point of view: “Whether the issue is the validity of bans on so-called assault rifles, the length of waiting periods before people can buy guns or requirements for people to receive concealed-carry permits, our nation’s highest court may well start imposing its will on the gun measures of all 50 states and many cities and towns.”

Let’s give Segall some credit and admit that he’s hedging his bets somewhat by referring to Kennedy  as ‘uncertain’ when it came to how he swung on the issue of guns. But that cautionary statement has completely disappeared from the post-Kennedy narrative coming from the noisemakers employed by Gun-nut Nation, all of whom seem to believe that any replacement nominated by Trump to fill the vacant seat can only make matters worse when it comes to regulating guns.  Here’s an example from the Giffords Law Center that hit my Inbox last week: “An ideologically-motivated nominee, like several on the rumored shortlist, could negatively impact firearms policy at this critical moment for the gun safety movement—and for many years to come.”

Following the Court’s Heller and Macdonald rulings in 2008, which were gifts to Gun-nut Nation, the gift-givers including an Associate Justice named Kennedy, the only other SCOTUS vote that has been recorded on a gun regulation was the 2015 opinion denying certiorari for the 2013 AR-15 ban passed by the city of Highland Park.  Now let’s get one thing clear: the Highland Park law didn’t just say you couldn’t buy an AR, which is what the so-called New York and Connecticut AR ‘bans’ said.  The Highland Park ban is an all-or-nothing deal; in other words, if you want to own an AR-15, you can’t live in Highland Park.

This law is the most direct challenge to the whole nonsense about gun ‘rights’ peddled by Gun-nut Nation since 2008. It not only goes way beyond the assault weapons ban that ran from 1995 through 2004, but is much more comprehensive than the proposed AWB floating around Congress right now.

The Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of Highland Park’s AWB by a vote of 7 – 2, with the two dissenting votes coming from Scalia and Thomas, the latter actually writing the dissenting opinion which said this: “Because the Second Amendment confers rights upon individual citizens—not state governments—it was doubly wrong for the Seventh Circuit to delegate to States and localities the power to decide which firearms people may possess.”

With all due respect to Professor Segall’s concerns about who will succeed Kennedy, here’s how the Supreme Court ‘imposed its will’ on state gun laws – it let a total and complete gun ban stand. And who were the three, not one ‘swing’ votes? Roberts and Alito also joined Kennedy and the four liberals in refusing to hear this case.

The only reason that anyone thinks that Gun-control Nation might have lost an important ‘swing’ vote on guns is because Kennedy authored the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges which gave Constitutional protection to gay marriage in 2015.  And even though there are still plenty of folks who can’t believe that a SCOTUS with a 5-4 conservative majority would come out in favor of gay rights, Kennedy’s stance on this issue shouldn’t be taken as necessarily saying anything about how he felt about guns. All we do know is that he signed off on Heller, which as far as I’m concerned means good riddance to Kennedy, he deserves nothing more.