Posted on 08/21/2009 1:08:28 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
That's amazing. Someone is claiming that we can't require felons to register firearms, but we can require patriotic Americans to register?
Apparently not. "Idiots with half a brain" sounds like a good description of the most of Congress and SCOTUS and they don't seem to get it.
As usual. :-( One of the few things Bush did well was SCOTUS nominations (well, after Miers and the Gonzales fiasco). I was hoping for just one more. Let Kennedy stay. He's OK at least half the time, but replace Stevens or Grandma Moses with a libertarian Constitutionalist so Kennedy's no longer the center of the universe. I'll bet Heller would have been a lot stronger were it not for Kennedy.
To the contrary, the hard-leftist Democrats know exactly what the Second Amendment means and why it was written: it was written, among other things, to protect the country from totalitarian anarchists like them. That's why they want to get rid of it.
Comment #19 points to the Haynes vs. United States case which is also referenced in Guy Smith’s Gun Myths book. Funny the protection of criminals from incriminating themselves may very well be a major factor in protecting our rights as well!
But the bare fact is that registration is impractical. When I was researching for Guy Smith, Gun Myths 5.2 (Licensing and Registration, pg 19), we found information that the British Home Office Officials abandoned their unwieldy registration system, it just stressed the organization too much, they couldn’t keep up. And Canadian officials did the same thing, plus they refused to enforce the law once they saw how many citizens refused to register.
HOWEVER - none of the commenters mention the 9th amendment:
‘‘The language and history of the Ninth Amendment reveal
that the Framers of the Constitution believed that there are additional
fundamental rights, protected from governmental infringement,
which exist alongside those fundamental rights specifically
mentioned in the first eight constitutional amendments. . . . To
hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in
our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because
that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first
eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth
Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever. Moreover, a judicial
construction that this fundamental right is not protected by the
Constitution because it is not mentioned in explicit terms by one
of the first eight amendments or elsewhere in the Constitution
would violate the Ninth Amendment. . . . Nor do I mean to state
that the Ninth Amendment constitutes an independent source of
right protected from infringement by either the States or the Federal
Government. Rather, the Ninth Amendment shows a belief of
the Constitution’s authors that fundamental rights exist that are
not expressly enumerated in the first eight amendments and an intent
that the list of rights included there not be deemed exhaustive.’’
So once again, our founding fathers come through for us. You see, we do have other rights, such as a right to privacy, which the first 8 amendments did not cover. That is what this will boil down to (my opinion), I am sure, registration will become a violation of our right to privacy. That plus the fact that nobody smart enough has invented a database to hold and manage all 55 million of the gun owner’s information AND that those 55 million gun owners will never comply, will be our saving graces. So I think to say that registration is or is not Constitutional is a moot point, we defend our rights one at a time with the good tools our founding fathers gave us.
But I’m with one of the commenters, “What guns, they all fell overboard in that tragic boating accident.”
Also, behind every founding father was a founding woman too!
Hey no worries.. the “Blue Dogs” will cave on this too...
Welcome to Canadian/European style gun control...
I may as well pack up my belongings and head back to Canada...
Health care and firearms registration... sounds just like back home in Canada
If the federal constitution were applied as originally intended, then it would NOT be constitutional for the federal government to restrict our gun rights but it would be constitutional for states to do so.
Of course the same goes for old number one and the others as well. Folks who believe in original intent must honestly admit that states were intended to have such potential powers that the Founders specifically prohibited at the federal level.
Remember, some states did legally have ‘intermeddlings’ with specific religious denominations back then which was NOT unconstitutional because the Bill or Rights only applied to the feds. The imagined ‘wall’ of separation between church and state is not even legal doctrine. It is political. It was simply a phrase pulled from a letter Jefferson wrote to some Baptist ministers. And was NEVER intended to apply to states anyway.
As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, after the BOR, it was legal for states to restrict guns, have state religions, etc. But NOT legal for the feds to do so.
The Second Amendment has never been formally recognized as part of the incorporation doctrine as have most of the other federal Bill of Rights amendments.
That depends on your state. Texas has both organized and unorganized militia. We are not alone in that. The "organized" part is called the "National Gaurd", both Army and Air (when not called into federal service) , and the Texas State Guard, which is not "dual hatted" as part of the federal military reserve as the NG is. The TSG even has a Maritime branch. The unorganized part is everyone else, not in the federal military, aged 18-60, women included, save a few public officials. Most of 'em are armed, or have ready access to arms.
The "hard" copies are kept by the dealer. The feds are legally required to destroy the information from the mandatory background check, other than the fact a check was done and approved, after the transaction is complete. They did that during the Bush Adminstration, but kept it more or less indefinitely under Clinton.
I suspect under Obummer and his AG, Eric Holder, they are making so many copies we could never find them all to destroy them
It's much higher, it really means that Congress cannot establish a State religion. The states, some of them, once did that, and it was perfectly Constitutional.
Cases v. United States, 131 F. 2d 916, 922 (1st Cir. 1942), cert. denied, 319 U.S. 770 (1943), the court, upholding a similar provision of the Federal Firearms Act, said: ‘‘Apparently, then, under the Second Amendment, the federal government can limit the keeping and bearing of arms by a single individual as well as by a group of individuals, but it cannot prohibit the possession or use of any weapon which has any reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.’’ [emphasis mine]
Moroever, Hickman v. Block, 81 F.3d 98 (9th Cir.) (plaintiff lacked standing to challenge denial of permit to carry concealed weapon, because Second Amendment is a right held by states, not by private citizens), cert. denied 519 U.S. 912 (1996) and US v. Gomez, 92 F.3d 770, 775 n. 7 (9th Cir. 1996) interpreted federal prohibition on possession of firearm by a felon as having a justification defense ‘‘ensures that [the provision] does not collide with the Second Amendment’’). Furthermore, Lewis v. US, 445 U.S. 95 (1980) concerned itself with 18 U.S.C. 922(g) (1986) violation of the Second Amendment. The Court's opinion was
"Thus, since convicted felons historically were and are subject to the loss of numerous fundamental rights of citizenship --including the right to vote, hold office, and serve on juries--it was not erroneous for the Court to have concluded that laws prohibiting the possession of firearms by a convicted felon "are neither based upon constitutionally suspect criteria, nor do they trench upon any constitutionally protected liberties." .The Court concluded in U.S. v. Day, 476 F.2d 562 (6th Cir. 1973), Miller cit., after review of a challenge to the statute barring dishonorably discharged persons from possessing firearms, that "there is no absolute right of an individual to possess a firearm." [emphasis added]. Since there are certain narrowly defined classes of untrustworthy persons, e.g., convicted felons and, as here, persons dishonorably discharged from the armed forces, who may be barred the possession of firearms, it is a truism to say that there is not an absolute right to possess firearms. In so saying, the court implicitly recognized the individual right of peaceful and honest citizens to possess firearms.
U.S. v. Tot, 131 F.2d 261 (3rd Cir. 1942), rev'd on other grounds, 319 U.S. 463 (1943) was another case involving possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Despite holding that the failure of the defendant to prove, as required by Miller, a militia use for the firearm was an adequate basis for ruling against the defendant, the court, in dicta, concluded that the Second Amendment "was not adopted with individual rights in mind..." based on reliance on an extremely brief--and erroneous--analysis of common law and colonial history.1 In addition, apparently recognizing that it decided the case on unnecessarily broad grounds, the court noted that, at common law, while there was a right to bear arms, that right was not absolute and could be restricted for certain classes of persons "who have previously...been shown to be aggressors against society."
That notwithstanding, in U.S. v. Graves, 554 F.2d 65 (3rd Cir. 1977), since the defendant in that case did not raise the Second Amendment as a challenge to the "statutory program which restricts the right to bear arms of convicted felons and other persons of dangerous propensities," the only discussion of the Second Amendment is found in a footnote wherein the court states "[a]rguably, any regulation of firearms may be violative of this constitutional provision." [emphasis added]
Felonies include both violent and non violent crimes, such as grand theft, embezzlement of large sums of money, first degree assault, or assault that causes severe bodily harm, all degrees of murder, rape, racketeering, large scale fraud, kidnapping, and serious drug crimes.
According to Army.com:
a list of typical felonies the Army looks at are:
The following are some offenses which can be waived:
Note: 1) For example, the court referred to the colonists as "a defenseless citizenry..." when, in fact, it was precisely because the citizens did have arms and were not defenseless that they desired the Second Amendment; they did not want to become defenseless.
Exactly!
The Constitution is a document of restriction, not of permission.
Anything not in there isn’t permitted by the federal government.
Registration serves no purpose that advances liberty so the states would even be hard pressed to prove a need other than to rile gun owners.
Judicial activism has helped bring about the end of the country.
It’s been time to do something, yet nobody does anything.
Register my guns? What guns? I have no guns. Sold ‘em all to “some guy” at the gun show.
b u m p t h a t p o s t
“such weapon (like Molotov cocktails) can contribute nothing usefull to the ‘common defense’”
First of all, Molotov cocktails indeed can contribute to defense, at least as much as certain other small arms. They’d come in handy if our cities were ever occupied by foreign or domestic enemies and we had to take to the barricades. I can very easily imagine militias using sawed-off shotguns. They probably do in areas of the world less peaceful than our own.
More to the point, who says a weapon has to contribute to the “common defense” to be Constitutionally protected? The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. I don’t care what the preceeding clause says, the “right of the people” clause means exactly (and only) what it says. It does not say the right of the people to keep and bear arms to be used in well-regulated militias shall not be infringed. Judges need to learn how to read.
“it cannot prohibit the possession or use of any weapon which has any reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.”
This is B.S. in my opinion, a misreading of the Constitutional language. The Second amendment could have very easily said, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms for the purpose of serving in well-regulated militias shall not be infringed.” It did nothing of the sort. What it does say is that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, period. That’s it. No qualifications.
Hell, the Romans threw pissed off cats at their enemies. Hmmm, that puts that whole "Get your cat a license or get a ticket" thing in a whole new light!
Why register with the state government?
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