Nevada ACLU Adopts Individual Gun-Rights Model

American Constitution Society:

Breaking with the national organization’s stance on a right to bear arms, the Nevada affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union supports individual gun ownership rights. In a statement posted on its Web site, the Nevada ACLU said it “respects the individual’s right to bear arms subject to constitutionally permissible regulations. The ACLU of Nevada will defend this right as it defends other constitutional rights.” The Nevada affiliate’s board of directors reached the decision following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in D.C. v. Heller, which found that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.

ACLU National's response to Heller:

The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller. While the decision is a significant and historic reinterpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, the decision leaves many important questions unanswered that will have to be resolved in future litigation, including what regulations are permissible, and which weapons are embraced by the Second Amendment right that the Court has now recognized.

They get justifiably pasted as hypocrites in comments.

This is the first time that I know of that ACLU National has taken a position that is less rights-protecting than that of the Supreme Court, indeed, than that of the right wing of the Supreme Court.

Comments

[zenpundit]

In ( I think) 1979, perhaps later, the ACLU sided with parents who wanted to forcibly bring back to the USSR a Soviet Ukranian teen-ager, Walter Polovchak, who requested and had received political asylum from the United States. A stance that was decidedly at odds with positions on the consitutional rights of minors that the ACLU was litigating at the time. Not a popular stance here in Chicago.

[Mithras]

A stance that was decidedly at odds with positions on the consitutional rights of minors that the ACLU was litigating at the time.

Think about that statement. Do you really believe that the ACLU had taken the position that a twelve year old, absent a showing of abuse or neglect, had a constitutional right to run away from home and live with a relative in a country different from his parents'? I would love to see conservatives howl if other countries chose to reach down and grant asylum to American children who wanted not to return to the United States with their parents. It would be ridiculous government overreaching.

In any case, unlike in Heller, there were clearly competing civil liberties issues in the Polovchak case: The rights of the parents to raise their child without undue interference from the government, and the right of Walter to have the maximum degree of legal autonomy given his age and maturity.

[zenpundit]

"Do you really believe that the ACLU had taken the position that a twelve year old, absent a showing of abuse or neglect, had a constitutional right to run away from home and live with a relative in a country different from his parents'? "

No, I recall that in the 1970's the ACLU generally took a legal stand that relied on a maximal interpretation of the rights of minors vis-a-vis those of their parents or the state authorities. The Polovchak case was unusual at the time precisely because they took the side of the parents rather than the teen.