As Ranjit noted on Tuesday, one of Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s bodyguards discharged his weapon in an effort to stop a carjacking. While it appears that Sotomayor wasn’t a target of anything, it’s still amusing that an anti-gun justice has armed bodyguards, one of whom was involved in a defensive gun use.
I won’t get into what happened because, as I said, Ranjit already covered that and he covered it quite well. There’s no reason to repeat those basic facts and I have nothing really to add.
However, a lot of other people had thoughts about it as well.
Several conservatives highlighted Sotomayor’s perspective on the Second Amendment in light of the arrest. The justice, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, has drawn scowls from gun rights activists in the past over her interpretation of the right to bear arms.
Some accounts on X, formerly Twitter, pointed out that Sotomayor joined the dissenting opinion in the 2010 ruling on McDonald v. Chicago, which ultimately found that the Second Amendment applied to state and local governments as well as those at the federal level. Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the dissent, “In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense. There has been, and is, no consensus that the right is, or was, ‘fundamental.'”
“In 2010, Justice Sotomayor joined a dissenting opinion in McDonald v. Chicago … Meanwhile, Sotomayor’s armed security team just sh*t a would-be carjacker outside her house,” posted conservative X account Libs of TikTok. “Yet, regular citizens don’t have the right to private armed self defense in her view. Rules for thee and not for me.”
School safety activist Ryan Petty—whose daughter was killed during the February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—also reacted to reports of the shooting near Sotomayor’s home, writing on X, “Defensive gun use.” Petty has spoken out against gun control measures while pushing to keep students safer from gun violence.
Another X user, who was responding to the New York Post’s report, wrote: “‘Guns for me, not for thee.’ – Sotomayor.”
“Thank God for the second amendment,” quipped a different X poster, also responding to the Post report.
Now, in fairness, the US marshal who serves as a bodyguard is a law enforcement officer and the Supreme Court has never held that police shouldn’t have guns, even in a dissenting opinion. Breyer’s dissent in McDonald was about you and me, not whether law enforcement officers should have firearms.
As such, it’s not quite as hypocritical as it looks.
But I also find it odd that Sotomayor has a bodyguard while siding with Breyer in a decision that would have ultimately left people like you and me–the common folks who don’t get protection from the US Marshals Service–unable to defend themselves. To me, that is the hypocrisy in this. A law enforcement officer acting in what is arguably a law enforcement capacity doesn’t faze me in the least. A justice who thinks you and I have no right to defend ourselves having armed bodyguards to defend her, however, is a different matter entirely.
Yeah, a lot of people are dunking on Sotomayor and they’re not without cause. It’s clear she thinks there are bad forces in this world who mean harm on others. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have bodyguards.
But she thinks that we peons are undeserving of that ability. That’s where we have a problem.
