Justice Amy Coney Barrett is now a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. It’s an established fact and has been for a few weeks. This isn’t breaking news at this point.

Yet it seems the left still isn’t done freaking out about it. They’re absolutely convinced that Barrett will single-handedly repeal each and every law they hold dear. In fact, they’re being rather melodramatic about it, too.

With Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, the conservative majority is now 6-3. Before Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the conservative majority was only 5-4 which meant that the four liberal justices only had to convince one conservative justice to side with them. That was oftentimes Chief Justice John Roberts, but even with his potential swing vote, the conservative justices now decisively rule the Supreme Court.

Since justices on the Supreme Court have lifetime appointments, Barrett will have decades to push her beliefs on the American public. The precedents she has set during her time as a judge in the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals along with her writings have demonstrated how she will behave when certain types of cases reach her desk.

To help you understand the consequences of Barrett’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, I have compiled the following list of things that you should do before she and the rest of the conservative majority overturn or take them away.

The list is ridiculous to an extreme and includes things like “Be Gay” and “Have Reproductive Freedom”–as if Barrett is suddenly going to rule that being homosexual is a capital crime and ban the practice or that people must engage in unprotected sex at all times–but there’s one particular part that takes this lunacy to a whole new level.

Not Get Shot

When it comes to guns, Barrett’s positions are historically unprecedented. In the case Kanter v. Barr (7th Cir. 2019), it was ruled that even people with non-violent convictions should not be able to get a gun. Barrett wrote a 37-page essay dissenting that vote. Though the ban on all felons owning firearms may go too far, her reasoning that there was no historical precedent to allow for such a ban is a little concerning. Machine guns for civilians weren’t banned until the 1980s and there weren’t background checks for gun purchases until 1993. The founding fathers didn’t think guns would be being sold at Walmart when they wrote the constitution, so there being no historical precedent is an irritating and tiresome explanation in a constantly changing world. UCLA law professor Adam Smith elaborates on how far this could go, “Does that mean that there’s a constitutional right to have machine guns because there’s no strong historical precedent for banning those weapons?”

So before any and all gun control is repealed or overturned, go on a walk and enjoy not getting shot with a machine gun.

Yes, Barrett argued that non-violent offenders shouldn’t have their gun rights taken away. Since this is a civil liberty, she really wasn’t wrong. Especially since she made no similar statement about violent felons.

But then again, it’s clear the author has only a passing relationship with facts anyway.

After all, machine guns weren’t “banned” for civilians in the 1980s. The situation is much more nuanced and complicated than that. Machine gun regulations began with the National Firearms Act of 1934. At that point, anyone who wanted one had to have it registered with the federal government and pay an additional tax. It didn’t stop machine guns from getting in the mob’s hands, of course, but it made people feel good about themselves and that’s all that mattered.

People continued to buy and sell machine guns until the so-called ban in 1986.

However, that ban didn’t put an end to private ownership of machine guns. What it did was end ownership of newly manufactured machine guns. Anything made prior to ’86 was still fair game.

While that and natural attrition have reduced the number of machine guns in private hands, they’re still quite legal for many Americans to buy them if they’ve got the money. They’re ridiculously expensive, of course, but still quite legal.

If the writer can get these rather basic facts wrong, it seems clear she’s writing from emotion and not from her brain. Then again, this is a student newspaper and modern college students don’t seem to know how to use their brains for anything except as a buffer between the front of the skull and the back of the skull.

At the end of the day, all this ridiculous fearmongering by the writer fails to also note that the Supreme Court only deals with the cases presented to it. Barrett isn’t about to start issuing decrees out of the blue that unmakes current law. There’s a process to judicial review, after all.

So the writer can still go for a walk all she wants. Especially since the non-violent felons aren’t the ones who start shooting up neighborhoods. Those are the violent felons, after all, who have been legally barred from owning guns for decades yet still manage to get firearms none the less.

Maybe the writer should think about that instead of feeding the fear that permeates the American left.