The Coming Showdown on Gun Control

[CharlieChan]

The Coming Showdown on Gun Control
By Rhonda Brownstein, Southern Poverty Law Center.


The Supreme Court's ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller may be the most important decision on gun control in U.S. history.

The stage is set for a historic showdown this month between gun enthusiasts and gun control advocates. The United States Supreme Court will hear a case on March 18th that should determine the meaning of the Second Amendment -- the hotly contested and fiercely debated part of the Constitution that guarantees "a right to keep and bear arms." The court will decide whether this guarantee protects an individual's right to have a gun for private use, or whether it only ensures a collective right to have guns in an organized military force such as a state National Guard.

The high court will review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that struck down Washington, D.C.'s flat-out ban on the private possession of handguns. The District outlawed handguns in 1976 in an effort to crack down on violent crime. (The vast majority of firearms-related crime involves handguns.) D.C. residents are permitted to keep shotguns or hunting rifles at home, but even those weapons must be disassembled or have a trigger lock.

The stakes are high, not only for the District, but also for Chicago, which also has an outright ban on handguns, and for many states and cities nationwide that have enacted other tough restrictions on guns....

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=899

[DoctorDoom]

Why is it that in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments, "people" refers to the citizenry, but in the Second, it refers to an organized militia? Obviously our Founding Fathers were too ignorant to realize that they shouldn't have used "people" there. Thank human for our wise liberals who corrected their stupidity.

[RogerFGay]

You have to realize that there's no such thing as People at an individual level. People are artifacts of the State, which necessarily came before People in natural evolution. There is no logical construction for an individual. That's just an ancient bible-thumping religous myth created by a male-dominated society to subjegate women and deny homosexuals the right to marry and clone children.

[DoctorDoom]

Golly gosharootie gee willikers, I didn't know THAT! Goodness gracious and gumdrops, I now have a whole new perspective. Thy word hath set me free!

[HomeschoolrsRUs]

Charlie Chan,
We need a link to that article, and you might need to revise it for content.



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[DoctorDoom]

It's available on many sites. Here's the original.

Legal Brief - Major Gun Rights Decision Looms (http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=899)

The SPLC is just another bunch of kneejerk ultraleftists who fling "hate" like monkeys fling shit.

[Rhino]

Original post edited to comply with copyright restrictions, and link added.

[TeenageRepublican]

Obviously, the liberals forgot the first three words of the Declaration (I might've misspelled that) of Independence:
We the People...

[Wolfcounsel]

"Obviously, the liberals forgot the first three words of the Declaration (I might've misspelled that) of Independence:
We the People..." --TeenageRepublican

Ask any liberal. He will tell you that the Declaration is not part of our government anymore. Especially the part that states it is our DUTY to overturn any dictatorship.
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[BarkleUSA]

Washington DC Homicide Rate - 1950 to 2007:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/26/Dc_crime.png

Two key points to understanding this chart are:

1. The number of murders had actually declined dramatically between 1970 to the enactment of the gun ban in 1976. This decline was due to citizens arming themselves against hordes of marauding thugs while the government refused to use profiling to enforce existing gun laws. The citizens had the problem under control by the time the ban was passed.

2. After the enactment of the unconstitutional gun ban, the number of murders quickly escalated through the roof as law abiding citizens dutifully handed in their guns (while the thugs kept their guns). It only declined as otherwise law abiding citizens concluded they couldn't count on the government to protect them and began re-arming to protect themselves and their families.

[The_Sonarman]

The stakes are indeed high.

As to the Second Amendment's "intent", there are many quotes by the Founders who explain precisely the "intent" of the Second Amendment. There is no reason to "interpret" the sentence structure visavie modern terms.

The Second Amendment's primary purpose was to make the US Citizenry an "Invincible Army", so the Citizens could at any time revise the US Government, should a future US Government become oppressive and dictatorial.

I sincerely hope those writings are used by the Justices in their review of the Second Amendment. I sincerely hope the lawyers presenting the case "for" the Second Amendment introduce those writings and quotes into the record.

[Maggie_T]

The Second Amendment's primary purpose was to make the US Citizenry an "Invincible Army", so the Citizens could at any time revise the US Government, should a future US Government become oppressive and dictatorial.



Aha! I knew the reason liberals want to delete the 2nd Amendment so badly had nothing to do with anybody's death-by-gun! :smirky:

[BarkleUSA]

A fair and just government that rules at the consent of the governed has nothing to fear from an armed citizenry.

One that seeks to exploit the citizens, confiscate their wealth and property, deny the citizen's God given rights and impose an engineered set of arbitrary perverse self serving values, rewards and punishments has EVERYTHING to fear from an armed citizenry.

America is sliding down a slippery slope and this court case will determine how quickly we are heading toward the cliff.

[DeclinetoState]

As to the Second Amendment's "intent", there are many quotes by the Founders who explain precisely the "intent" of the Second Amendment. There is no reason to "interpret" the sentence structure visavie modern terms.Why not? Like the rest of the Constitution, it's a "living, breathing document," no?

[Kathekon]

According Volokh and the Scotusblog, based on oral argument it looks like there are 5 justices (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy) ready to overturn the DC law in the Heller case.

The trick will be to avoid language that gives state and local governments the right to define or invent broad needs and purposes that effectively gut the 2nd amendment right. That is, a decision that claims to affirm the 2nd Amendment but really creates a big loophole to permit its curtailment.

We shall see.

[The_Sonarman]

Why not? Like the rest of the Constitution, it's a "living, breathing document," no?

LOL. Of course not, DTS.... as you well know.

The US Constitution is a binding contract. It is not a document of "suggestions" on what the central government powers are..... it a document which strictly limits what the central government powers are.

The US Constitution's purpose was to strictly limit the powers and strictly spell out the few functions of the central government. The Bill of Rights (which includes the Second Amendment) was included to further spell out We The People's rights, and further restrict central government's power over us.

The US Constitution, as a binding contract, is not subject to reinterpretation and change just because one of the parties doesn't like some aspect of it. If binding contracts were "living and breathing documents", then other contracts would be subject to similar one-party change. Let's say I don't like my contract with the mortgage company. If my binding contract.... my mortgage.... is subject to my "reinterpretation", that means I could change my payment schedule whenever I liked. In fact, if this document is "living and breathing, I could even completely rescind the contract, whether the other party to the contract (the mortgage company) likes it or not.

Any change to the binding contract mandates a certain sequence of events, including how many votes are required to change that contract.

[Kathekon]

Why not? Like the rest of the Constitution, it's a "living, breathing document," no?

Do we have a measurement on its "penumbra" size. According to liberals, the 4th, 5th and 6th amendments have big penumbras that allow those passages to mean even more than they actually say but the 9th and 10th Amendments apparently have negative penumbras and don't even mean what they appear to say much less anything else.

I gotta figure that from a liberal perspective, Amendment number 2 has a negative penumbra so there really is nothing in the Constitution about the right to bear arms.

So the Constitution is not only living and breathing but very much in need of anesthesia because big healthy pieces are routinely amputated while others metastasize into unfamiliar forms. Malpractice?

[Taylor1]

Is there gonna be a revolution? Because if there is, I want to go down in history being part of it.