Posted on 02/27/2006 12:16:31 PM PST by JZelle
He's ba-a-a-ck. Not that he ever really goes away. After all, he has life tenure. This time the Hon. Antonin Scalia was calling those of us who think of the Constitution of the United States as a living document "idiots." No, this wasn't Ann Coulter doing her stand-up routine, but rather an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Welcome to civil discourse, 21st century-style. A decent respect for those who hold to a different philosophy of law, or of anything else, now seems to have gone the way of powdered wigs, dress swords and chivalry in general. This time Justice Scalia was caught talking out of school, or rather his courtroom, at a meeting of the Federalist Society down in Puerto Rico -- although his formal opinions are scarcely more temperate. His subject on this occasion: The idea of a living Constitution and why it's wrong, wrong, wrong. Mr. Justice Scalia summed up the idea before dismissing it as idiotic. "That's the argument of flexibility," he explained, "and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
You certainly can say that the notion of militia has evolved into state and local police forces - comprised of professionals rather than the "ordinary citizenry". In this case, the 2nd amendment exact original intent isn't the case here, tho I would argue that individual citizens can be considered an "adjunct" to official law enforcement, and that we can now claim that the 2nd amendment protects our individual right (as opposed to only "collective") right to own guns.
I think, I regard the possession of guns as a popular rather than an individual right.
I'd have to disagree there. That argument has been used by the gun control crowd, that doesn't realize that society does change, and the specific terms and meanings of words will change with it. The Founders were against tyranny of all sorts, and, to them, an armed citizenry really meant individual citizens, not some amorphous collective.
I don't accept it as an individual right. The 2nd Amendment has to be seen a reflection of the hostility toward standing armies. The principal that has to be resisted as the disarming of the people. Given the number of unregistered guns available in the United States, that is not going to happen.
I don't think you can separate the idea of gun ownership from the notion of the militia as an organized force capable of resisting say, the standing force of government.
I regard the possession of guns as a popular rather than an individual right.
Well you're in with some pretty poor company on this site, rob.. -- And even worse on the national scene.
Can't by the idea of gun ownership as an absolute right; its a relative right, like owning a farm in a community of farmers.
"Relative" right? -- Good grief rob, are you a conmmunitarian?
This quote says it all:
"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. 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."
"Can't by the idea of gun ownership as an absolute right; its a relative right, like owning a farm in a community of farmers"
??????????? RKBA is a BASIC conservative (and American) tenant....are you sure you wouldnt feel more comfortable in, lets say, a RINO website, or perhaps DU???
The Second Amendment IS a reflection of the hostility toward standing armies. It is also a reflection of the hostility toward any government attempt to disarm the people, such as transpired in occupied Boston in 1775.
Please explain how there could ever be an armed collective of people incapable of perpetrating outrages against the people?
Please explain how such collectives differ in any critical manner from a "standing army".
Please explain why the Second Amendment does not say:
"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the state to maintain an armed militia shall not be infringed."
If your understanding of the Second Amendment is correct, please explain why the alternate version above was not adopted. What "right", aside from maintaining an armed militia, is protected according to your understanding of the Second Amendment?
Please expains why you see gun Ownership as an absolute rather than a relative right? Each person has the right of self-defence against his neighbor, but that does not extend to arming each person with a certain kind of weapon to defend himself. Ultimately he has the right of armed resistence to the government, which is to say the right to revolution, but I cannot see this as anything but a collective action. The preservative of liberty is necessarily a political action. As to your wording, the American concept of the state is not an absolute term. An American state is unitary in form, but federal in its constitution, by which I do not mean the forms of governmenbt but its social make-up. It is, in other words, a bottom to top entity, a collection of neighhoods, towns, counties and regions rather loosely gathered at the state level. These were once the bases of the militia system, and were certainly so in 1789, when the 2nd Amendmnt was written. Given the way that our country was formed, the citizen-soldier is primary. Ipso facto he must be armed.
Nowhere in my response will you see the words "relative" or "absolute". Those are distinctions used by people who would support a federal law outlawing rifles with bayonet lugs simply because they lack the courage to campaign for a Constitutional amendment prohibiting individuals from owning nuclear arms.
The distinction I made was that between an "individual" right and the "understanding" that you claim to have. I posed several very specific questions for you and received no response to them. Instead you have made statements that seem to suggest that collective actions can be taken without individual will. I really don't understand what you are getting at and I can't apply your response to my questions.
It embodies the very principle of individual self defense as a Right. Your "acceptance" of it is not required.
I am sure that George Washington, who mustered several militias to put down the Whiskey tax Rebellion. must also have parroted similar words as an abstract principal. But why guns and not swords if everyone had individual self-defence in mind rather than the right of the right of revolution? I suppose because with the proliferation of guns in the United States, a sword or long knife, which was adequate defence in 18th Century London or New York, is not today.
Critcally ill would be a better diagnosis.
Suffering from severe Democrat liberal attack, public apathy and Republican ineptness.
"individual citizens?" As Justice Storey noted more than 150 years ago, the original notion of militia has gradually disappeared, but as a social institution it was analogoous to the jury, an institution that has also had its character changed during the last two centuries. Rugged individualism is a concept better viewed in an urban environment than in a rurtal community On the frontier,individual households were exposed to attack by indian raiders and white drifters, but the best security was, in the end, common force. Hard to mount a posse unless it already has arms at the ready. People living in scattered farms probably knew each other better than most of us know our neighbors in the suburbs. That's why guns were kept loaded, in case strangers showed up.
You just wrong on this issue....pester someone else I wont try to convince you about your revisionist history any longer. You sound like Hillary and I wouldnt waste my breath trying to convince her of the importance of the constitution either. No need to reply, I wont answer.
Or when they come up with the whack-job theory that because something's not in the Constitution, the Constitution can prohibit it.
Allrightythen!
(LOL)
Are you kidding?
There are FReepers who are convinced the Constitution isn't a contract!
Every group is comprised of individuals. The measure of a group is how well the individual's Rights are protected.
Technically the Constiytution isn't a (social) contract, but is it a legal instrument. We couldn't survive if the courts monkeyed around with most legal instruments the way they do with the Constitition. But blame John Marshall, who was the first to put spin on the words of the Constituition.
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