Posted on 04/21/2012 8:58:05 AM PDT by OneWingedShark
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The Constitution of South Dakota says, in Section 24 of Article VI, the following: The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the state shall not be denied. The language is plain, with perhaps the only confusion being that of the word ‘shall.’ The word itself is nearly synonymous with ‘will,’ except that when used in a sentence in the 2ND or 3RD person it implies authority, command, threat, promise, determination, and/or inevitability. By its usage in the above cited constitutional section its meaning can be discerned obviously as being a command, and being constitutional, must have authority. Further, a constitution without sureness would be utterly useless. Therefore, it must also imply promise. Given that the purpose of a constitution is to set forward the fundamental principals according to which an organization – a nation, state, corporation, etc. – is to be governed, it cannot be sound to allow any contrary authoritative act to stand; for if it should stand, then all that will be built upon it will, of necessity, erode the foundation of that organization. Such is the case of SDCL 22-14, which prohibits (denies) the bearing of weapons into various state buildings. As an example, the following section says: There, on its very face, is a contradiction to the State’s Constitution; the seemingly benign and ‘common sense’ restriction is nothing less than the complete disregard of the State Constitution in more ways than the merely obvious. I will now show them and their implications. First, let us consider the statutes themselves. Statutes are normal legislative acts and therefore not allowed to modify the Constitution. If they were so allowed, then the Constitution could neither restrict legislative action – such as Article 3, Section 23 – nor guarantee anything such as rights or the tolerances mentioned in the 2ND paragraph of Article 22. The entirety of Article 6 of South Dakota’s Constitution is therefore testament against such a notion, but Article 23 thereof explicitly states such in Section 3. Second, such statutes degrade the opinion of all those involved in jurisprudence from the patrolman to the district attorney to the Judicial branch of the government itself. If a policeman were to enforce such a law, then he violates his oath to the Constitution; if he does not then he could be gainsaid as one who does not respect the law. The district Attorney is likewise shamed, but there is the added temptation of arbitrary, and likely political, prosecutions for violations. Penultimately, such statutes as the example are Machiavellian; the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the police have no affirmative obligation to provide for the safety of [any] particular private citizen, yet private citizens (not accused of any crime) are commonly compelled under legal penalty to appear in the courthouse, for jury duty. Lastly, the Judiciary is shamed for allowing such to exist, for the Judiciary’s whole point is to perform Justice, by upholding the law. (As the first point, and subsequent points will show, the statutes in question are not valid laws.) Third, the statutes are written such that there are exceptions to them by a particular class of individual: the ‘law enforcement officer’ (or at the least, agent of the government). This is particularly disturbing in the relationship it creates between the ordinary-citizen and the official, Terry Pratchett’s Snuff gives an internal monologue that accurately describes it: “[…] he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a very dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.” This is not such a far-fetched conclusion, especially given that there are multiple exceptions in federal law specifically for ‘Law Enforcement Officers’ in things like possessing and using fully automatic weapons, but even moreso when one considers looking at them as a privileged class which enjoys qualified immunity from prosecutions, that is to say that by tradition the Nurmburg defense of “I was just following orders” actually works! Such a defense would not be tolerated even in our soldiers, so why should it be accepted from our policemen? Possibly because there is one other thing that a “non-civilian policeman” could be, in a slight variation of the words attributed to King Louis XIV: “I am the law.” … and in a nation where the police are the law, there is no such thing as police brutality, only a harsh law; there is no such thing as corruption via bribe, only the payments of fines as required by the law; there is no need for judgment by one’s peers, for the law has already determined one’s guilt or innocence; and last, there is no peace because there is no justice, for the law is entirely subjective and varies not only with location but with it’s own internal mood or whim or health. So, then, we see that these exceptions, taken as a whole, indicate there is in the law a distinction, a de facto class, which is prohibited by section 18 of Article 6. Fourth, the exceptions mentioned in the third item is the granting of immunities from those laws. Article 3, Section 23, says “The legislature is prohibited from enacting any private or special laws in the following cases: […] 9. Granting to an individual, association or corporation any special or exclusive privilege, immunity, or franchise whatever. […]” So we immediately see the same laws from the previous point that can be taken as a reinforcement of a de facto special class of citizen would also violate this if it said individuals instead of individual. There are, however, two other words that bear investigation before we eliminate the offenses of the previous point as irrelevant to this: association and corporation. The Law Enforcement Officers, the District Attorneys, and the judges obviously make up an association that we commonly refer to as the justice system. Also, individually the United States (federal) and the State of South Dakota are both corporations – and, taken together, an association – by the common definition:
The phrases “state of South Dakota” and “South Dakota” map nicely to definitions 1 and 3, but they can indeed be exchanged indicating that South Dakota is indeed a corporation under the common-language definition of the word; indeed the common definitions must be considered when considering a constitution [in the cases of States and Nations] for the very reason that the constitutions are put forth by the cumulative collection of the persons of the state, the people as a whole. As the first six words of the State’s Constitution say, “We, the people of South Dakota,” it is beyond ludicrous to assert that the document governing the institution of government by the average person is inaccessible to the average person. It is exactly saying that the writer doesn’t know what he wrote and needs someone to tell him what it means. An any case, these associations/corporations are indeed granted special privileges and immunities, which violated the state constitution. Fifth, the Constitution of the United States is acknowledged as the supreme law of the land in the final sentence of Article 6, Section 26, which reads: And the state of South Dakota is an inseparable part of the American Union and the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land. This means that the Second Amendment applies and, because it is written in the passive voice, it is the infringement itself upon the right to keep and bear arms that is prohibited to all levels of government. Furthermore, it also means that the second sentence of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment is applicable; that sentence reads: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Obviously the liberty of being armed, which is the subject of this piece, is being violated and it has been done so without due process of law, as proved in the second point. To recapitulate, the statutes in question:
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A minor victory, but I’ll take it.
well done Sir !!!...only 999 more cuts to bleed the beast...
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