List of Amendments to the U.S. Constitution

Attorney General William Barr just attempted a “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” power play in an ongoing government lawsuit with Twitter. The move pits national security directly against the First Amendment, and the impending drama promises to be high.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that the Constitution’s ban on excessive fines applies to the states, an outcome that could help efforts to rein in police seizure of property from criminal suspects. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the court’s opinion in favor of Tyson Timbs, of Marion, Indiana. Police seized Timbs’ $40,000 Land Rover when they arrested him for selling about $400 worth of heroin.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that the Constitution’s ban on excessive fines applies to the states, an outcome that could help efforts to rein in police seizure of property from criminal suspects. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the court’s opinion in favor of Tyson Timbs, of Marion, Indiana. Police seized Timbs’ $40,000 Land Rover when they arrested him for selling about $400 worth of heroin.

We are the only country in which guns outnumber people — a fact that came true in 2009. Yet, we keep manufacturing more and more guns.

“If every private citizen had the right to carry a musket, a thousand people would've shot Patrick Henry by now, am I right?”

President Obama said a lot about guns in his teary press conference Tuesday, but the one thing that he is not saying, despite all the howling from the right, is that he intends to take away Americans’ guns. Yet equally significant is the realization that individual citizens are unwilling to free themselves of the destructive weapons that are wreaking havoc on our society. Numerous Americans care more about their individual freedoms than our collective freedoms, and they are unable to see how these individualistic desires undermine the essential fabric of a democracy.

For most of the last two centuries, Europeans have been puzzling over their American cousins’ totemic obsession with guns and their passion for concealed weapons. And back in the decades before the American Civil War, several British visitors to American shores thought they’d discerned an important connection: people who owned slaves or lived among them wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile, but often shot each other, too.

Everyone knows Bernie Sanders is a liberal. But there's one issue the self-described "democratic socialist" isn't so liberal on: guns. Now, Sanders isn't — as some people have described him — a "gun nut," but he does have a mixed voting record on gun policy. As a former representative and now senator of the very liberal Vermont, Sanders has swung to the left on many issues, particularly the economy and health care. But guns are one issue his rural state, with its relatively high levels of gun ownership, is moderate on — since so many residents use firearms for hunting and sport.