For as long as I can remember (and I’m super old and knowledgeable), conservatives have always interpreted the language of the 2nd Amendment, “the right to keep and bear arms,” to mean that we as citizens have the right to own and carry weapons as we see fit. Liberals usually see this passage differently (or not at all), as is evidenced by stringent gun control laws in areas with progressives in power. Recently, the Supreme Court took on a landmark gun control case in McDonald vs City of Chicago, and while their decision did ultimately uphold the 2nd Amendment, it only did so at a 5-4 margin. Could 4 members of the highest court in the land really, knowingly rule against our basic right to keep and bear arms? This was a little disconcerting to me, so I decided to dig deeper.

I have just finished pouring through all of the legal documents involved in McDonald vs Chicago, and I’ve figured out the problem. It was a simple misinterpretation…and I don’t mean misinterpretation of the Constitution, like where liberals believe it allows for women to kill their babies in utero…I mean misinterpretation of the case itself. It’s actually quite silly, and we should all be thankful that Anthony Kennedy luckily got up on the right side (pun intended) of the bed the morning of the verdict, or we could have accidently gone down the road of completely banning guns across the country indefinitely…and no one wants that, right? Right liberals? Right???

Now, I wasn’t able to put my finger on exactly where the misunderstanding occurred, though, until I read the final sentence of Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent, but up until then I knew something was way off. Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito all wrote passionately about defending ourselves from tyrannical government, about personal protection, about the right of each America to carry, and if necessary, use guns…about freedom. Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Stevens, and Breyer each argued about cleanliness, restaurant codes, and animal rights. Kennedy only submitted a picture of a quarter, heads side up, brilliantly insinuating just how arbitrarily he reaches his conclusions.

So as I read through the case and each Justices remarks therein, I couldn’t help but think of just how different the conclusions were between the liberals and conservatives on the Court. Are we really this far apart, I thought? Often times, I could almost see the frustration on their faces as, for instance, Sam Alito would cite precedent for owning weapons only to get a response from Ruth Bader Ginsburg along the lines of, “What do guns have to do with anything?” It was all so confusing to me too, that is…as I previously mentioned…until I read the very last sentence of Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent.

“It is my opinion that neither the United States Constitution, nor any existing laws of our land, allow for the McDonald’s Restaurants located within the City of Chicago to stockpile bear arms.”

Did you catch that?

“To keep and bear arms” was interpreted by the left wing justices, who have never actually read the Constitution and thus are unfamiliar with the phrase, as “to keep bear arms.” Couple that with the assumption that the McDonald who was opposing the City of Chicago was McDonald’s Corporation, and you can see how this thing got all screwed up.

Now, as to whether or not restaurants should be able to literally keep the arms of bears or other wildlife in their stores is a topic for another day, and one that I’m sure will soon be front and center in the debate on which direction to take this country, but for now I’m just glad that we got the baffling results of this gun control case straightened out. It had me worried…honestly. I mean, to think, that 4 out of the 9 Supreme Court Justices of the United States of America, even the liberal ones, could actually believe that we as citizens don’t have the right to keep and bear arms when it so plainly says in the Constitution that we do…wow, just wow, because if they did, it…wait, that couldn’t really be possible, could it?