In this week’s Acton Commentary, I explore the differing mainstream cultural views of gun rights and abortion in the United States and Europe. The point of departure is last month’s Supreme Court decision in DC v. Heller (07-290) striking down the District’s handgun ban (SCOTUSblog round-up on the decision here).

In “Guns, Foreign Courts, and the Moral Consensus of the International Community,” I write that the “tendency to invoke foreign jurisprudence is ing more troubling as it es clearer that the moral consensus that once united Western nations has almost entirely broken down.”

As Paul J. mented on a number of related stories at home and abroad, “We are only a tendentious opinion from one of the Liberal Usurpers on the Court, or their creature Kennedy, under the spell of the New York-DC elite adulation — one tendentious opinion citing foreign law, or sweet mystery of life, or mystical evolving standards, away from the same tyranny that would send the homeowner who defends his wife against thugs to jail, while showering the thugs with sympathy.”

At the same time the Court was deciding Heller, it ruled “that imposing the death penalty for child rape violates the Eight Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.” La Shawn Barber has details on the difficulties surrounding that decision, but in relation to the topic of mentary I want to point out that the EU Constitution in its original form as circulated for ratification in 2004, under Article II-62, titled “Right to life,” held in part, “No one shall be condemned to the death penalty, or executed.” At the same time this article made no explicit or special mention of abortion.

For more insight into the disconnect between the UN/EU on the one side and the US on the other over gun rights, see Kenneth Anderson’s illuminating post, “International Gun Control Efforts?” (HT: The Volokh Conspiracy).

As Mike Huckabee was wont to say, we wouldn’t have the First Amendment without the Second. And if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have knives (that explode?!).