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GUN VIOLENCE AN INCURABLE PANDEMIC IN AMERICA

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

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un violence in the United States of America is part of a culture embedded with individualism and the relentless fear of tyranny from within the community nearby and from the state afar.
This staunch individual determinism responds to the many threats, including threats from foreign armies that operated inside the territory when the tracks of land and frontiers first began forming into a new nation.
The Thirteen Colonies declared independence at Philadelphia in 1776, but the war for independence from the old empires would last another seven years. When the violence stopped and the empirical soldiers were sent back to Europe, the nation’s Founding Fathers began drafting a constitution to govern the new nation.
France went through a similar revolution against the monarchy and the aristocracy just a few years later from 1789 until 1799, but the talk of change began before the Americans joined the conversation. General Napoleon Bonaparte eventually launched a successful coupe against a rotting French revolutionary committee to become one of the greatest Emperors of much of Europe.
America would form out of rebellion, war and constitutionalism, eventually creating a legal document that enshrined the governing principles of the new nation. The Founding Fathers, some of whom had made several trips to Europe to share ideas with the Avant Garde political elite, drafted the guiding principles on behalf of the victorious people victorious.
Constitutions further enshrine laws that reflect the ideals and guiding principles of the people who are to be governed. Future generations subsequently connect reactions to changing circumstances to those founding principals in the constitution.
The formation of the new nation was not without controversy. The governing terms were so hard fought for over more than a year that just a few months after ratification the Founding Fathers began discussions about a Bill of Rights, otherwise known as the 10 Amendments to the US Constitution.
Gun laws are liberated or limited by the interpretation of the Second Amendment of ten amendments to the United States Constitution introduced by Congress on March 4, 1789, and ratified by the required two-third majority of state legislatures on December 15, 1791.

SECOND AMENDMENT

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
 

Two Hundred and twenty-six years later, 270 million guns are in circulation in the United States, with 35 – 42 % of households having at least one gun within the four walls of the residence, times a ceiling and floor making 8.
The 10 Amendments were drafted to create individual rights to counterbalance the centrifugal rights of the central government embedded in the Constitution. The gun debate reflects this dialectic between individual rights and collective rights to such an extent that the United States Supreme Court remains divided on the application of the meaning of the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment represent this imperfect balance between the collective rights of the state and the individual rights of the people, with some legal scholars suggesting that the amendment contains two rights, while other legal scholars suggest only one right.
The Amendment debate highlights the precariously balance between the two rights. The debate over the meaning of the Amendment reflects the developing nation more often than not in conflict with forces from within.
One of the leading US Supreme Court cases on the right to store and pack guns is: District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 Supreme Court 2008.
Madame Justice Ginsburg is among the dissenting Justices who believe that the right to pack hand guns is limited to the use of guns in the formation of militias, and that right not being an individual right as much as a practical alternative to a standing federal army.
The Second Amendment is but one right given to individuals ultimately determined by the prefatory clause, “A well regulated militia”.
Gun rights in the United States depends on the good judgment of the Founding Fathers to have understood the importance of what they were writing and that the people trusted them to not purposely create ambiguity for the lawyers to hash tag about for two centuries.
The Dissenters on the Supreme Court believe that if the Second Amendment were to give individuals the right to pack guns for self defence then the text would have explicitly stated as such by using the phrase, ‘in self defence’ to broaden the right to keep and bare arms outside of the use of guns in militias.
The First Amendment, which enshrines a number of freedoms for individuals, such as freedom of religion, speech and the press, grammatically lists those rights under the greater right of ‘freedom’ with grammatical construction of the phrase by using conjunctions, such as “and”, to list rights within the right to freedom. The Second Amendment does not use conjunctions.
Justice Ginsburg argues that the Second Amendment does not create two rights: the right to form militias and the right to pack guns. The Second Amendment creates one right: the right to pack guns so as to one day be able to form militias when called upon by the state to do so.
Even the right to form a militia has been subject to misinterpretation.
Several right-wing groups in the United States began organizing as private militias in the 1990s. Three events led to the passage of legislation that characterized the formation of private militias as domestic terrorist activity whose participants would be subject to execution upon conviction.
An 11-day siege at Ruby Ridge in Naples, Idaho by an individual charged with illegal firearms possession led six months later to a 51 day stand off between a private militia and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Texas State Police and the United States Military.
The ATF sent in 76 officers in a convey of vehicles one mile long to execute a court ordered search warrant on February 28, 1993. The courts were informed that members of the right-wing sect, Branch Davidians, just a short stretch from the Brazos River, in Waco, Texas, were violating gun laws by stock piling weapons.
The Federal law enforcement authorities began a final assault on the camp that resulted in a fire that killed 76 Branch Davidians on April 19, 1993.
Former US military soldier Timothy McVeigh attended the siege, and he also attended the aftermath of the siege. McVeigh formed the resolve to bomb a federal building in retaliation for what he believed was the government’s responsibility for the Waco incident.
Two years to the day later, McVeigh and Terry Nichols, another former military soldier who McVeigh had met while in military service together, killed 168 people, including 15 children, with a truck bomb filled with fertilizer. McVeigh parked the truck bomb outside the federal building in Oklahoma City before escaping on April 19, 1995.

VIOLENCE MORE COMMON THAN PUBLIC REALIZES

Private militias formed in several states numbering as many as 60,000 people in response to the federal law enforcement action at Waco. These private militias formed in stated opposition to tyrannical governments, believing in insurrection as a legal way of opposing overreaching federal government agencies.
Americans can buy rifles and shotguns at Walmart, but the federal agencies prohibit the stockpiling of weapons. The Google dictionary defines stockpiling as a large accumulated stock of goods or materials, especially one held in reserve for use at a time of shortage or other emergency.
A second definition suggests more of a criminal intent. Using the street term “salt away” instead of stockpile implies a slightly more sinister behaviour, although when “salt away” was in common usage on the street is unknown.
What is clear though is that 33,594 Americans died as a result of gun violence during 2014: 21,386 suicides and 11,008 homicides, with 1,200 more for some unexplained reasons such as accidents.
What is also clear is that gun manufacturers made $13.5 billion in gross sales with $1.5 billion in net profit.
The Founding Fathers gave guns to the people. People was often defined as white male property owners in 1789, with property meaning real estate.
Certain members of the US Supreme Court, such as the Honourable Mr. Justice Scalia, use originalism to interpret the Constitution.
Justice Scalia would determine the original meaning of the Second Amendment and then apply that meaning to the particular facts of each case, thus possibly subtly changing the meaning of the Amendment depending on the circumstances in which the plaintiffs and the defendants found themselves.
This method of legal analyses makes the intent of the Founding Fathers irrelevant. Even if the Second Amendment was restricted to the formation of militia, the ability of government to call up militia was dependent on the ability of people to keep and bare arms. Militia men owned their own guns and kept those guns at home.
This fixed semantic meaning would then be applied to the case to simultaneously also create a contemporary meaning. In Heller, the District of Columbia had restricted hand guns from being kept in the home.
The Honourable Justice Scalia for the majority in Heller agreed with the plaintiff. The Court restored the right of the individual to keep and bare handguns in Washington. The majority of the court ruled that the Second Amendment applied to individual rights outside the formation of the militia, for use in traditional lawful purposes such as self defence.
The Founding Fathers drafted the Amendments to protect individual rights against government overreach. The Second Amendment was drafted so as to prevent the government from disarming individuals since individuals needed to be armed in order to form a militia when called upon by the government.
Gun rights were not new rights in 1789. The Second Amendment merely codified the gun rights that had been entrenched by practical use in a frontier environment, as well as already codified by state legislatures in nine states at the time of independence from Britain.
Justice Ginsberg and Justice Scalia are well respected members of the US Supreme Court, yet the courts interpretation of the Second Amendment is divided, making fodder for lawyers to argue for the broadening of the meaning and yet more lawyers to argue for the narrowing of the meaning of the Second Amendment.
The right of individuals to form militias was of primary importance. This right of the people to defend their own country by forming militias could be limited by the government by restricting personal possession of firearms. If the white male property owners did not possess and own guns readily available at their homes, then they could not form militias in opposition to tyrannical governments.
The Amendment therefore makes a second right enveloped within the first right, which is a slightly different grammatical construction than listing consecutive rights as sub categories within one main right with the use of conjunctions.
Perhaps because only one sub category of rights is enveloped in the right to form militias that the meaning relies on a different grammatical construction.
Forming militias is a positive right the state allows the people to do. The right to bare arms is a negative right that prevents the government from restricting possession of firearms from those same people.
The Second Amendment, thereby, codifies both rights as a singular right, which has been applied to limit the ability of governments to restrict gun ownership. Gun ownership is not an unlimited right, though.
The Government passed The Gun Control Act in 1968, which requires the licensing of gun manufacturers, gun dealers and gun importers involved in interstate commerce of firearms. The lack of licensing prior to 1968 seems incomprehensible now.
The Government also passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, 1993, which requires background checks and prohibits gun ownership for certain people such as convicted felons, drug addicts, the mentally ill, and perpetrators of domestic violence. The lack of background checks for gun registration prior to 1993 seems incomprehensible now. Gun sellers also have to create a five-day waiting period for the background check to be processed before selling the gun to the purchaser. The ability to walk into a store and buy a gun on impulse seems incomprehensible now.

IF YOU TAKE AWAY THE GUN, THEY PICK UP A KNIFE

The Government also passed legislation that restricted guns in the possession of violent gangs during the gangland wars of the 1930s.
Essentially the right to pack guns existed for people living in difficult circumstances a century prior to the drafting of the Second Amendment, including in England, but gun rights like other individual rights and collective rights can be broadened or narrowed by the courts depending on the circumstances at the time of the court hearing arguments on those rights.
Liberty for example was restricted at one time to white male property owners, and then eventually broadened to include men of colour after the Civil War. Liberty was not extended to women until 1920.
The right to possess and pack guns, therefore, has mustered Americans through the frontier, the colonial wars, the Indian wars, the civil war and then more Indian wars, but now that right has somewhat become stymied by the Inner City gang wars and mass shootings uniquely American.
The people have endured over 90 mass shootings since 1982. One of the most recent mass shooting was at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland Florida on February 14, 2018. Another mass shooting occurred in Orlando in 2016, and of course the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, and Virginia Tech in 2007, and everyone seems to have forgotten Columbine in 1999.
A mass shooting occurred at a US post office once and at a MacDonald’s Restaurant another time, and then once again at another post office, a few presidents over the years and then Arizona Congress Woman Gabrielle Giffords while campaigning outside a grocery store on January 8, 2011.
These violent episodes in American history are more common than the public realizes. Ninety plus occurrences on record when many people seem shocked about the last mass shooting let alone the possibility that 89 more have gone by, perhaps 80 unnoticed, slipping under the collective consciousness. Gun violence has become even more common than that previously reported by national news agencies in America. Many incidences of gun violence never become common knowledge.
Washington had 162 murders in a population of 672,228 in 2015. Detroit had 295 murders in a population of 673,225. Chicago had 476 murders in a population of 2,2728.695 during 2015, and then 762 in 2016.
Violent crime so regularly occurs in the United States that prime time news agencies need a ticker to keep a tally of the dead like the broadcasters did during the Vietnam war when newsrooms kept check on the military casualty count between 1955 and 1975 when 58,318 American soldiers were killed in action, with 153,303 wounded in action and 30 % of those wounded in action dying of their injuries.
Ultimately, whether or not the right exists to keep a gun in the home and pack a gun outside the home becomes irrelevant when civilians own 270 million guns in America. Even if the US Supreme Court brought down heavy restrictions on gun ownership, enforcement officials would not be able to offer meaningful enforcement of those new restrictions within an existing lifetime.
The majority and the minority ruling in Heller could be interpreted to enforce restrictions on use with all nine justices supporting restricted use of guns to self defence, thereby eliminating offensive uses and offensive weapons. Victims of mass shooting only wish the weapon was limited to a hand gun as opposed to the automatic assault rifles in use at the incidences of horrific American violence.
Guns can also be restricted from certain places, such as airplanes, airports and other modes of transportation, schools and hospitals. Realistically, public schools must take the same precautions as airports, restricting access to the area for those with intended use, and prohibiting weapons of all kinds even if access has been granted. People did not stop using airplanes as a method of transportation, because government authorities ensured that airlines secured the planes, and made air travel safe again. If you take away the gun, they pick up a knife. London is rife with knife stabbings and acid splash attacks. The problem of 270 million guns in circulation must be approached holistically. If you need to take a gun to the grocery store, then the neighbourhood has a major systemic problem that can only be resolved through a multifaceted approach more complicated than any US Supreme Court decision.
The people must batten down the hatches to ensure the continued enjoyment of the freedoms and individual rights and the collective rights for which the Founding Fathers fought so dearly. Public places are only safe if made so by the community in good faith balancing collective rights with individual rights.
The culture of violence must be addressed. The Hollywood glorification of gun violence influences young children who grow up wanting to irrationally lash out at the world with a gun for reasons unconnected to the many victims.
Communities also get stuck in a cycle of revenge in which the death of one associate somehow justifies a retaliatory killing – like a reprisal raid on the housing project providing shelter to rival drug gang members. The police are lost in these places. The police are even more powerless against drive by shootings and mass killings too unpredictable to prevent in a nation stretching hundreds of miles coast to coast through varied landscapes.
The gun debate has become so polarized that nothing changes. The people have become entrenched in argument rather than action.
America should show leadership by relying on the founding ideals of the US Constitution in which the collective will to live together balances the individual right to be free from an overreaching government. Once upon a time, the people drew together to live in peace against the many threats from the violent and unwelcoming outside world.

COURT RESETS RIGHTS BY ERASING JUDICIAL HISTORY

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

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he Supreme Court of the United States distinguishes the right to abortion from other rights the court concedes may be protected by the Constitution when the 9 Justices overturned Roe v Wade (1973). The right of a woman to have an abortion is separate and apart from the rights that have been defined under liberty because of the risk to potential life, the highest court in the land states.

Law is often an organic instrument of social engineering. America wants a robust free market economy defined by unbridled capitalism. Federal and state governments therefore only intervene in the vibrant free market economy when absolutely necessary such as the tax levy to reimburse the community for amenities the corporations rely upon in manufacturing, and also to a lesser extent, to redistribute wealth. But who wins and loses within the marketplace is more often than not left to competition to decide.

The opposite can also occur whereby rules and regulations and law are instituted to affect a desired outcome.

The original law may stay on the books over the decades but then become defined differently as time passes if the circumstances in which those laws are brought into effect change markedly from when the law was originally contemplated.

Women’s rights for example began at a clear position of inequality to those rights enjoyed by men. Initially, women were not allowed to own property. And women did not enjoy the right to vote in democratically held elections. Only property owners voted and only men owned property. Women were so unequally treated that black male slaves, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, were given the right to vote before white women.

Overtime, in part due to various challenges to the system made by women, women gained in law equality with men. The problem continued to be though that the implementation of that equality encountered various systemic barriers, just as the blacks suffered continued hardship despite their legislated emancipation from slavery.

The abortion debate serves as a good example of this equality and voter rights dilemma since women are now equal in law, but a law can still determine what a woman can do with her own body.

The same organic development occurs with other legal concepts and rights. Liberty for example initially only meant freedom from arbitrary state incursions. Liberty though gradually became defined over time more dynamically to include individual freedoms and greater rights of the individual over the state, such as from the actions of police.

The police have a job to do in protecting the community and individuals, but individuals have certain rights the police must respect. The police nevertheless often breach the rights of the citizens the police are meant to protect even though law enforcement officers know about the existence of liberty.

Abortion has been an issue for centuries. Prior to Roe v Wade, abortion was under the jurisdiction of the state legislatures, many of whom criminalized abortion.

Roe v Wade decriminalized abortion and established or reaffirmed the right of a women to have autonomy regarding their body and reproductive rights.

But the court did not make a blanket declaration in favor of legalized abortion. The debate was and still continues to be at what point does abortion become a crime – and the parties seem to agree a bit more that abortion is no longer an option when the fetus develops into a viable human being. However, interested parties cannot agree when that moment occurs.

Under the Due Process Clause of the 14^th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which protects a person’s right to privacy from state incursions, the court established a trimester test in Roe v. Wade, which soon became deconstructed by opponents and advocates of abortion alike.

People call that point of life for the fetus different labels, such as the heartbeat law or the quickening or the viability line. The court defined the stages of pregnancy along trimesters, with the first trimester ending between week 12 and week 15 of the pregnancy while the viability of the fetus was determined to occur at 28 weeks. The decriminalized of abortion was almost immediately challenged from the state level by a Missouri statute that wended a path to the Supreme Court of the United States in Planned Parenthood v. Danforth (1976).

By 1992, culture, society and notions of individuality had changed, and the Supreme Court then clothed the abortion debate in a broader right to liberty that included individual rights to autonomous decisions concerning family life, gender roles, child rearing and education, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

The Mississippi law under judicial scrutiny by the Supreme Court of the United States, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), states that point of viability to be at 15 weeks gestation. When that time that life is established in the womb, the state can intervene to balance the rights of the unborn child with the rights of the pregnant woman and deny a woman a right to abortion, according to the court.

In the United States of America, the power to make decisions on behalf of autonomous individuals is divided up into independent autonomous parts that include the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judiciary. The military is not an independent body, but the armed forces instead fall under the sway of Congress and the President.

In a practical sense, though, once war has started and the Generals have taken to the battlefield, the independence of the military increases substantially.

In three decisions by the newly constituted conservative court overturning precedence, the Justices writing in affirmation refer to the profound problems of present day America in which law may become an instrument for healing and problem solving.

Justice Alito, writing for the majority of the court, states that Roe v. Wade did not resolve the issue of abortion to the satisfaction of interested parties, but instead the court decision ‘inflamed’ a national debate that has continued on ever since.

The new court overturned the 50 year case because the decision was wrongly decided, according to the 5-4 majority ruling. Justice Alito refers to the court’s decision in Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), which overturned the segregation laws, as precedent for the court overturning law the court itself made.

Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). And Plessy was wrongly decided by codifying the reactionary principle developed against emancipation of blacks during the Reconstruction period following the American Civil War. Plessy followed the social backlash by codifying the position of whites that blacks may be free and equal by law, but that blacks shall be kept separate and apart from the white population, in practice.

Plessy led to the separation of blacks from whites in the public school system and in regard to public services like public transportation, washrooms and drinking fountains. Blacks had to go to all black schools, sit in the back of the bus and restaurants, have their own public washrooms and drinking fountains.

Justice Alito rules that in overturning Roe, the court returns jurisdiction of abortion, like other health related issues, to the states where the legislature is better able to determine what the people want. This decision however will result in a fragmented body of law with 50 plus versions of abortion rules ranging from an outright abortion ban in deeply religious states where people consider the fetus to be God’s creation from the moment of conception to abortion up to the point of quickening when the fetus becomes an independent being and begins to move around inside the womb.

In dissent, Justice Breyer characterizes the abortion issue as a women’s rights issue. Pregnancy and choosing to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term has substantial consequences on a woman’s future that she alone should be able to decide.

The Supreme Court of the United States has also turned back the clock on two other legal instruments of social engineering by applying the original Constitutional meaning to the individual rights prescribed by the nation’s Founding Fathers.

The new conservative composition of the court at least is being consistent in the approach of revisiting the original Constitutional intent of the Founding Fathers when striking down federal abortion rights, affirmative action programs and equal access to public services.

The established affirmative action law was overturned by the court based on the commonly known legal principle that the court should not remedy an injustice by creating another injustice. The colleges, the court decided, were treating people unequally by considering race, and giving a preference to black candidates over white candidates and Asian candidates, despite lower entrance rankings in other categories such as grade point averages and Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) scores.

The court again consistently did not abolish the right to process college admission applications with an affirmative action program. Race may continue to be a component in admission programs, but instead of looking specifically at a candidate’s race, the programs must be a bit more qualified with race more covertly becoming a logical extension of life experience. And that life experience would be a valuable component in assessing the overall caliber of the applicant’s character for admission.

Chief Justice Roberts refers to the equality guarantees in the Constitution when he states that the use of race in college admissions creates an inequality.

The court also underscored the right to religion which is protected within the right to free speech in the Constitution. Free speech includes thought and the right not to be told what to say and think by the government. Equality legislation that protects LGBTQ rights was trumped by the freedom of religion and the speech and free thoughts that devotion to religion inspires.

Chief Justice Roberts states that when a legislature requires a person to develop expressive content, they are telling the person what to think. The petitioner was not required to create gay images that would go against her religious beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman.

If you consider these laws as three instruments of social engineering, what will occur is a trickledown effect by which laws will change and programs will change by people enforcing the changes and by people challenging the changes. This legalistic impact will evolve differently in the 50 states that act independently of each other and the federal government in terms of health care services and the right to abortion.

And then, a further dynamic involves people often just refusing to cooperate regardless of the justice involved.

The United States Supreme Court has reset the values of society believing that the original founding values have been at best misinterpreted and likely misused and misapplied. In the abortion case, the court chastises the decision of their own predecessors. In the affirmative action case, the court declares the college admission programs sloppy and inept – too slow to bring about the positive effects in society that the affirmative action programs were meant to bring about. America has changed and those old mutations of the Constitutional Amendments are no longer relevant and effective, according to the conservative majority on the highest court in the land.

The wedding website case is slightly different in that the decision establishing a priority of rights. Freedom of thought is more important to America than gay rights and gay access to public services, according to Chief Justice Roberts. Thought is protected over and above gender protection. People can enter into same sex marriages, but the LGBTQ community cannot force other people to think the same way as themselves and compromise their religious beliefs.

The court decision turned on the case really involving expressive content that requires deeply personal intellectual creativity.

The court also considers the practical application of the law in all three cases. The commonly followed legal standard is that no legislature and no court should create and/or enforce a law that has no practical value or is impossible to implement in the real world other than to generate legal fees for large law firms who would argue with the politicians over the shades of gray if paid to do so.

Ideals become confused over time. The first two hundred years on the continent were filled with slow grinding days consumed with thoughts of how to survive in the rugged wilderness of the new world. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were based on core values that had developed organically over two millennium. The Amendments to the Constitution were quickly added almost as epiphanies based on how the originating documents had affected the engineering of society.

The law cannot force change. People must still be willing to follow the general direction given to them by the legislature. And partly for this reason, the nation born of revolution quickly disintegrated into civil war. And when the nation was unified, black people were still treated different through negationist policies.

Women were still not treated equally to men in the gender wars. And this struggle for autonomy continued through the liberation movement that culminated in more freedom and greater sense of practical equality about 50 years ago.

In the abortion case, Dobbs and the State of Mississippi Department of Health v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Justice Breyer in dissent relies on the carefully nurtured rights of women to individual autonomy by stating: “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”

In the affirmative action case, Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard and University of North Carolina (2023), Justice Sotomayor in dissent states that the abandonment of affirmative action sets back the equality guarantees because of the slow grinding reality of blacks and Latinos living in poverty, blacks and Latinos living in poor communities with substandard public schools, with blacks and Latinos being denied opportunities because of race along the way to the college admission process.

With political chaos on Capitol Hill, the court has more power because the legislature cannot make laws that change the outcome of the court’s decisions. Legislation puts laws in the context of the times when the court does not. If the court does nothing in these circumstances, the social chaos around certain issue will never end.

What seems odd is that the three Supreme Court decisions deny the organic growth of individual rights without really striking a compromise that effects results. The court sent the abortion issue back to the state legislatures. The court made blacks having to redefine themselves early enough in life to obtain college admission credentials. And gay people must shop about the free market for their wedding cake, I mean website.

In a way, the solution is an American solution of reducing government intervention in these issues and requiring individuals to define themselves with the democratic institutions that exist. If the court was a revolutionary court, the decisions might affect a political ground swell of change which may or may not be practical.

By striking down laws Carte Blanc, an entire history of ideas becomes swiped clean. The better result would be to continually move forward and participate in the organic development of ideas. The college admission process is a good example whereby the definition of affirmative action has changed and been modified over time.

Student racial quotas have not been permitted for quite some time in affirmative action programs. As a result, Harvard College and the University of North Carolina assess the entire student body as a result of the ‘no quota’ rule to determine the diversity of the freshman class and whether that racial composition benefits everyone including the institutions.

The court now has determined that even that approach is incorrect, and that race now can only be considered as part of the character of the candidate and what that character brings to the campus. But the court falls short of developing a test for the college admissions boards.

The petitioner had been denied admission for two consecutive years despite having higher entrance scores in all other categories than members of racial minorities that were admitted. The United States Supreme Court mustered the opinion that this result was an injustice, basically a new inequality of white college admission candidates had been manufactured by the admissions programs out of attempts to create equality for black candidates.

Justice Sotomayor in dissent argues that the practical application of the new college admission rules will be that racial minorities, disadvantaged by the racism and systemic inequalities in society, will arrive many years down the road on an unequal footing when seeking college admission.

Similarly, women must now reinvent the struggle for individual autonomy when seeking control over their own reproductive rights. The court stated that state legislatures were closest to the hearts and minds of the people and therefore more appropriately should be in charge of defining the terms of reproductive rights.

Women can protest and run for political office for changes to the abortion law at the state level, the court underscores.

The court though could have surveyed abortion law in each state and developed the penultimate abortion regulation. Regarding medical services of any sort, any deficiencies in a service may result in forum shopping, whereby a patient with financial resources space jumps to another state to obtain those preferred services.

So, what you may ask? Well, not everyone can afford to go elsewhere for health care services. Just as individuals belonging to racial minorities will just never obtain the necessary standard for admission to higher colleges because society has institutionalized many barriers to equality. And the LGBTQ couple may have to buy a substandard wedding cake readily available to the public from the supermarket bakery because all the other bakers and cakemakers have developed a newfound sense of religion.

Sure, life is difficult, but this isn’t 1791 when the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution were ratified. People expect better service from society, now. The law can also reach back to the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, but the meaning of “thou shalt not covet” would need a lot of definition in the context of today’s lesson by the United States Supreme Court.

On divisive issues, the federal legislature should be pressed to develop national standards that prevent the national fabric from devolving into a mish mash of values and ideas. The court is right in that regard when the Justices decline jurisdiction and instead send the decision making on certain issues back closer to the people for one on one debate with lawmakers. Health may be state jurisdiction, but abortion, the right to doctor assisted suicide and euthanasia are too divisive for individual action, based in part on religious beliefs in the sanctity of life, regardless of the suffering, because God is life and life is God, but also based on personal experiences and the context of where people live.

These complex issues of medical importance become confused in the political and economic quagmire of a capitalist-based democracy that does not have meaningful support for a public health care system. The court may be independent from the legislature and the executive, but the Justices have their position of power to serve the public good, and therefore, the Justice still have a duty to the people and the nation as a whole.

A patch work quilt of ideas on significant issues only reinforces fragmentation. The nation is representative of a diverse people, but people and the nation must still be brought together on core values and on how those values influence the implementation of heart felt day to day choices.

For the court to erase history, and send everyone back into an elliptical orbit creates a tremendous intellectual, religious and individual clawback, and is otherwise downright inefficient in regards to the social engineering of the nation.