Posted on 12/01/2003 8:24:27 AM PST by woerm
Bill of Rights supporters will migrate to regions of the US where the Bill is supported. Marxists and cowards will migrate to areas under Marxist rule. The "two nations of Bush and Gore" just got a lot more polarized.
Since such polarization favors freedom supporters, the Dems/Liberals just lost more ground for 2004 and after. Marxists will find themselves confined to the remaining Dem/Marxist urban areas, which are shrinking in size and electoral power. Excellent.
The 9th Short-Circuit Court again? Sheesh!
Oh, I expect you'll be seeing that 9th Circuit line in quite a few anti-gun rulings over the next few years. Without the USSC hearing it, it stands. I'm sure the VPC crowd is orgasmic. They're probably typing that line into their letterhead as I write this.
The National Review article (see post #6) is an excellent discussion of the issues swirling around this case. This case had little chance of success, and we should be glad that the only damage caused was the crappy decision from the Ninth Circuit. I am not prepared to have my right (or my grandchild's right) to own firearms lost just to gratify someone's childlike urge for a decision now and damn the consequences.
Far from it.
When the Ninth Circuit says there is not an individual right conferred by the Second Amendment, it has an immediate effect in the sense that it upholds the California statute which spawned the litigation, and it has a future precedential effect in that it will be binding legal precedent on judges within the states that comprise the Ninth Circuit. It may also have precedential effect, as the National Review article points out, in other Circuits faced with the issue as a counter-balance to the Fifth Circuit decision that upholds Second Amendment individual rights.
A Supreme Court affirmance of the Ninth Circuit would settle the issue of interpretation of the Second Amendment for the entire country for at least the forseeable future.
I am not happy about what came out of the Ninth Circuit, but at least those of us who care about upholding Second Amendment rights are alive to fight another battle on another day. Hopefully, we will choose our battlefield and standard-bearer more carefully the next time out.
[After discussing why the slave states understood the importance of denying blacks a right to bear arms, lest the blacks rightly revolt:]
All too many of the other great tragedies of history- Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few-were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed-where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel's mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.The sheer ponderousness of the panel's opinion-the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text-refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel's labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it-and is just as likely to succeed.
I was just interviewed (and recorded) by Robert Goodman of CBSnews NY.
He recorded the interview over the phone. Dunno if it'll be on radio or added to a story on TV.(thinking radio) What I said was that we are not disappointed, there are other cases out there that are coming up. Also that the New Orleans Circuit has ruled that it is an individual right. Also that perhaps by not accepting the case the Supreme Court was avoiding problems of the differences between the two courts. I did point out that this is NOT a ruling by the Supreme Court that the 2nd is not an individual right, it's just a refusal to hear a case. I also told him that the 97th Congress, Committee on the Judciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, found that indeed, there IS AN INDIVIDUAL RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS. (he did not know this!-hehe!)
True, but you and I both know that that wasn't what the 9th Circus was intending to say with that. They certainly weren't trying to make a Natural Rights of Man case.
Exactly. There are forces on both sides that gain much power, prestige and money from the uncertainty. I would strongly classify the NRA as one of these that would stand to lose big if the SC were to ever rule unequivically that the 2nd is an enumerated personal right.
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