The liberal wing of the US Supreme Court upheld the right to keep and bear arms today, against the dissents of conservative judges who sided with the Bush administration in its attempt to restrict firearms ownership. And the entire case revolved around the question of whether or not a statute should be read literally.

In a 5-3 decision, the court ruled in favor of Gary Sherwood Small of Pennsylvania. The court reasoned that U.S. law, which prohibits felons who have been convicted in "any court" from owning guns, applies only to domestic crimes.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, said interpreting the law broadly to apply to foreign convictions would be unfair to defendants because procedural protections are often less in international courts. If Congress intended foreign convictions to apply, they can rewrite the law to specifically say so, he said.

"We have no reason to believe that Congress considered the added enforcement advantages flowing from inclusion of foreign crimes, weighing them against, say, the potential unfairness of preventing those with inapt foreign convictions from possessing guns," Breyer wrote.

He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that Congress intended for foreign convictions to apply. "Any" court literally means any court, he wrote.

"Read naturally, the word 'any' has an expansive meaning, that is, 'one or some indiscriminately of whatever kind,'" Thomas said.

He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

Small had answered "no" to the felony conviction question on a federal form when he bought a handgun in 1998, a few days after he was paroled from a Japanese prison for violating weapons laws in that country.

Small was indicted in 2000 for lying on the form and for illegally owning two pistols and 335 rounds of ammunition. He later entered a conditional guilty plea pending the outcome of this case.

The Bush administration had asked the court to apply the statute to foreign convictions.

It seems somewhat ironic here that the conservative reading of the statute brought the dissenting justices into support for one more liberal gun-grabbing scheme, and that the liberals supported gun ownership. After all, these folks would usually line up the other way on Second Amendment issues. However, Thomas has the matter right in noting that the plain language of the statute does not exclude foreign convictions. Breyer’s disregard for the plain meaning of the word “any” is one more example of the tendency of liberal judges to make the law say what they want it to say, not what it actually says.

On the other hand, I would have preferred that the entire statute be tossed as a violation of the right to keep and bear arms.