Posted on 03/30/2007 5:09:20 PM PDT by neverdem
Earlier this month, in the case of Parker v. District of Columbia, a three-judge panel of the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia broke with all other federal circuits by holding that a gun-control statute violated the Second Amendment.
In a split decision, the court found that the District of Columbia's ban on handguns and a companion law that requires that legally owned firearms be stored disassembled could not be reconciled with the text of the amendment.
The amendment reads, "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 only modern Supreme Court case to look at the issue, United States v. Miller, found that the Second Amendment was designed to preserve the effectiveness of the organized militia.
The Parker case breaks from this precedent by finding that the militia purpose is but one among a laundry list of other individual uses of arms protected by the Second Amendment, including hunting, self-defense, and protection from the "depredations of a tyrannical government."
This last claim, that individuals have a right to take up arms against representative government, was last tried out by the Confederate States of America.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, many Southerners, fearing that Lincoln would abolish slavery, felt they had no obligation to accept the results of the election. Southern attempts to withdraw from the union quickly led to individuals taking up arms to fight what they perceived as federal tyranny.
As president, Lincoln acted on his belief that violence against the government was illegal and unconstitutional. In his first inaugural address he stated, "It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination."
As he asked the nation to go to war to protect its sovereignty, Lincoln added, "And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States ... It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration ... can always ... break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the Earth."
Lincoln made it clear that individuals or even states did not have the authority to determine what was "just cause" to wage a war against the union. As much as it pained him to send young men off to die, he did so to vindicate the idea that the Constitution and its amendments did not create some kind of national suicide pact.
Following the Civil War, the Supreme Court, in the case of Texas v. White, adopted this view and held that the Constitution did not countenance armed rebellion against the federal government.
The Parker court, by implicitly reviving Confederate constitutional theory and wrapping it in the authority of the federal courts, takes the ideals of conservative judicial activism in a lunatic direction.
The case is likely to be appealed. Let's hope that the rest of the D.C. Circuit knows enough history to recog´ nize that Lincoln, not Jefferson Davis, is the guiding spirit behind our system of constitutional government.
Horwitz is the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
the way it works is that DYs say," where is your proof??"
then after countless hours of research (Yes i used to "do homework" & "footnote" my posts, until it became obvious that the DYs on FR are NOT interested in proof. instead they just want to LIE,pontificate about how wonderful the north was & how bad the south was, change the subject & scoff at the records & the research that was done at their request.), the proof is provided & then the DY says: i don't accept that as proof. go find some other sources (i.e., those that agree with the DY's position!).
i know that "game" all too well. in one case, i spent a week of my spare time at the U S Archives (researching Black CSA pensioner's records),at the request/demand of one of the members (Whiskey Papa)of "the DAMNyankee coven of haters, nitwits, REVISIONISTS, lunatics, haters & a BIGOT", only to be told that ====> You can't believe the service records at the archives, as the neo-confederates run that place. they just change things to suit themselves. (THAT was when i QUIT doing "homework"!!!)
free dixie,sw
I am aware that Watie branch of Cherokees removed voluntarily across the Mississippi.
Of course they did so because of the harassment and murder of Cherokees by the government of Georgia and because a southern-dominated US government was not about to protect them as required by treaty, even when instructed to do so by the US federal courts.
As far as atrocities committed by the DYs, such are an inevitable consequence of war. That more southern civilians were affected by such is no doubt due primarily to the fact that almost the entire war was fought in southern territory.
The treatment of POWs on both sides was barbaric, more due to inadequate provision of resources than to intentional mistreatment. The North had fewer excuses for this than the South, which had fewer resources available and in particular a much less effective transportation system to get food and other supplies to the prison camps.
When compared against other great civil wars, the WBTS had remarkably few atrocities, with the greatest committed by southerners at Lawrence.
Except that the Supreme Court did rule that the Southern secession was illegal. They're a standing legal authority, aren't they?
"punitive raids" like the cavalry raid on Lawrence are acceptable under The Law of War,provided that :
1. crimes have been committed,
2.that the government, of the area raided, refuses to take the criminals into custody and/or punish the criminals &
3. the victimized have no other reasonable means of redress.
that was the situation that caused the raid on Lawrence, KS.
fyi, my ancestor PVT William James (called: LITTLE THUNDER) Freeman, late of A Company, 4th MO Partisan Rangers, was ON the raid. he said that it was the "best days work, i ever did".
also, reference your comments about treatment of POWs= the US POW Center at Andersonville, GA openly states in one of the displays that NO proven atrocities or INTENTIONAL mistreatment of US POWs has been found (there was MUCH starvation, lack of medical care/knowledge, death, etc at Camp Sumpter, but NO intentional abuse. NONE!).
otoh, there were MANY thousands of INTENTIONAL assaults, rape,intentional denial of food/clothing/shelter/medical care & outright murders of CSA POWs by the US high command. the proof of those WAR CRIMES is UNdeniable to anyone, who bothers to read the records.
finally,one FReeper, "nolu chan", was banned from FR for posting documented proof of DY atrocities "on forum" AND for posting lincoln's own words. (several members of "the coven" complained bitterly that posting what lincoln wrote "in his own hand" was UNFAIR & the "offending posts" were removed from the forum, when "nolu chan" was banned!)
finally, i am NOT a member of the Watie family. i "took" a "diminutive" of our tribe's principle hero's "war-name" (imVho, NO living man is WORTHY to carry the WAR-name of the General. i'm only his mule-holder on FR.) as my "screen-name", as he was my ancestor's commanding general, when "Little Thunder" was a member of the First Mounted Cherokee Rifles.
free dixie,sw
ONLY the 5-6 % of slave-OWNERS (about the same percent of northerners owned slaves as did southerners) cared enough about slavery to fight a skirmish over it, much less a war. over 90% of southern soldiers/sailors/marines had GROSS ASSETS in 1860 of 25.oo USD or less. they owned no slaves & couldn't have afforded a slave IF they had wanted to buy one.
furthermore, the common soldier of the CSA was "no friend" of the "planter aristocracy" (had the south won, the planters might well have been NEXT on the list of dixie's enemies!)and would NOT have "lifted a finger" to protect some rich aristocrat's "right to trade in human misery". they certainly would not have volunteered to bleed/die for that "right".
the VAST majority of the southern population simply wanted FREEDOM from a government that they believed was acting AGAINST their interests . it was really NO more complicated than that. (fyi, my family were poor farmers. the "Big House" was a distant socially/financially/educationally from our family 160-acre farm as the MOON!)
free dixie,sw
those too are decisions of the USSC. IF you DO agree that those decisions of the court are correct, you are NO conservative for sure.
free dixie,sw
Whether or not I agree with any of them does not change the fact that they were all valid Supreme Court decisions.
And there are only two d's in Dred. Or are you going to try and tell us that the family really spelled it that way and all of history just got it wrong?
J.D.B. DeBow disagrees with you. In an 1861 article intended to convince non-slaveowners to fight for slavery, he states that 2.5 million southerners, about one in three or four, owned slaves.
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/amgov/debow.htm
In 1860, there were less than 500,000 slaves in the states that remained in the Union. That's a ratio of one slave for each 40 or so white people. In the seceded states, there was roughly one slave for each two white people.
How again did 5 or 6 % of northerners own slaves when slaves were only about 2% of the population of Union-loyal states, and all in border states?
A good many of the slaveowners of MO, KY and MD cannot be considered "northerners" by any fair standard, as they fought for the South, among them being all Mr. Lincoln's in-laws. If they weren't southerners, it wasn't for lack of trying!
The 5-6% of southern slaveowners as a percentage of the population were the "owners of record." Their wives and children, also slaveowners by any logical meaning of the term, were not counted into this group. While I suspect DeBow lets his enthusiasm carry him away, and it is doubtful 2.5M of the roughly 7.5M white southerners were slaveowners, probably at least 20 to 25% were. In some states such as MS slaveowners were an absolute majority of the white population.
Slaveowning families as a percentage of the white population by state, according to 1860 census.
Mississippi: 49%
South Carolina: 46%
Georgia: 37%
Alabama: 35%
Florida: 34%
Louisiana: 29%
Texas: 28%
North Carolina: 28%
Virginia: 26%
Tennessee: 25%
Kentucky: 23%
Arkansas: 20%
Missouri: 13%
Maryland: 12%
Delaware: 3%
I apolologize for overstating Mississippi ownership by 2% in a previous post. :)
There you go relying on the kangaroo court. Did you even bother to read that thesis I linked you to? Or are you afraid of being confused by facts?
Then there seems to be a lot of that going on around here. Witness your posts for example.
I've come up with two Supreme Court cases, you've found nothing, I've come up with several names (if you recall, you asked for two, I gave you two).
If memory serves you posted a link to the Milligan Supreme Court decision and two links to the same website dealing with Merryman. What, if anything, proved it was a kangaroo court? Was there something else on Milligan you had meant to post? Or are you just complaining for the sake of complaining?
All court decisions are after the fact. Courts cannot rule on something that hasn't happened yet.
Which just proves you didn't bother to look at the links. Are you saying this is a copy of the Milligan Supreme Court decision, or are you saying that it is about Merriman?
CALL IT PEACE OR CALL IT TREASON:
THE MILLIGAN CASE AND THE MEANING OF LOYALTY IN
THE CIVIL WAR
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/jmadison/about/docs/2005-Coleman%20Thesis.pdf
What a horrible example to use, a pro-slavery political power whose only claim to fame was instigating America's worst full scale insurrection and then getting defeated, that really speaks volumes.
Indeed state sovereignty was more emphatic in the nineteeth century, so much so that a victory for the CSA would have legitimized secesssion at will. We would then be a patchwork of sovereign countries, unable at worst and difficult at best to unite as a superpower. Perhaps that was God's intent, to preserve a great power in the world under the United States.
Indeed again it was intended that slavery be abolished in the South by Southerners themselves. But the Civil War or war between the states was not about slavery although many try to make it seem so.
A modern day split we see without violence is Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
A modern day split we see with violence is Croatia and Serbia.
In the Czech-Slovakia case, the Czechs are clearly the strongest economically but were wise not to impose their will on their poorer neighbor. It may also have alot to do with the pacifist government there and the ruins that remained from seven decades of communism. More likely it has to do with the examples set by the Poles whom the Czechs respect and admire.
The Serbian-Croatian case is almost entirely driven by religious differences that is manifest in who gets appointed to what positions of power is entirely dependent on whether a Serb or Croat is in power.
It seems worthy to study how nations of states may split and what factors exist that render the split peaceful or violent.
One can say that Canada and the USA spit because of the USA unwillingness to remove British rule from Canada and absorb it as a territory of the USA. But for all intents and purposes the USA and Canada have come together in a match of culture and history and although they are separately administered they band together in most cases.
A case to watch will be if Quebec is successful in eventually splitting from Canada, whether it will be allowed or not, and if not what will prevent it from doing so.
the TRUTH is the TRUTH & 5-6% is the generally accepted figure for slave ownership in BOTH north & south.. included are the THOUSANDS of northerners, who owned slaves through their corporations & holding companies.
SOME of those slave-owners were also "abolitionists" (or so they said!!! HYPOCRYTE, thy names is DAMNyankee!!!)
free dixie,sw
what i stated is the TRUTH.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
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