Posted on 04/21/2009 5:10:29 AM PDT by Delacon
Last June, the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individuals right to keep and bear arms, at least in the home for self-defense. Heres our own Bob Levy, who masterminded the Heller litigation, talking about that decision:
While the Courts ruling was a watershed in constitutional interpretation, it technically applied only to D.C., striking down the Districts draconian gun ban but not having a direct effect in the rest of the country.
Well, today the Ninth Circuit (the federal appellate court covering most Western states) ruled that the Second Amendment restricts the power of state and local governments to interfere with individual right to have guns for personal use. That is, the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment against the states, as the Supreme Court has found it to do for most of the Bill of Rights. I rarely get a chance to say this, but the Ninth Circuit gets it exactly right.
Heres the key part of Judge Diarmuid OScannlains opinion:
We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is deeply rooted in this Nations history and tradition. Colonial revolutionaries, the Founders, and a host of commentators and lawmakers living during the first one hundred years of the Republic all insisted on the fundamental nature of the right. It has long been regarded as the true palladium of liberty. Colonists relied on it to assert and to win their independence, and the victorious Union sought to prevent a recalcitrant South from abridging it less than a century later. The crucial role this deeply rooted right has played in our birth and history compels us to recognize that it is indeed fundamental, that it is necessary to the Anglo-American conception of ordered liberty that we have inherited. We are therefore persuaded that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment and applies it against the states and local governments.
In short, residents of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington now join D.C. residents in having their Second Amendment rights protected. And courts covering other parts of the country most immediately the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago will have their chance to make the same interpretation in due course.
Just as interesting and potentially equally significant is the footnote Judge OScannlain drops at the end of the above text in response to arguments that the right to keep and bear arms, regardless of its provenance as a fundamental natural right, is now controversial:
But we do not measure the protection the Constitution affords a right by the values of our own times. If contemporary desuetude sufficed to read rights out of the Constitution, then there would be little benefit to a written statement of them. Some may disagree with the decision of the Founders to enshrine a given right in the Constitution. If so, then the people can amend the document. But such amendments are not for the courts to ordain.
Quite right.
Until the 14th amendment, this was not true. As soon as you accept incorporation, federalism/states rights goes out the window. Hell, without incorporation, the Feds would have no way to create rights--like, for example, a right to abortion. They'd have no say in, for example, religion in schools, etc. Like I said, it's done more harm than good. We'd be better off fighting for our rights at the state level.
“Until the 14th amendment, this was not true. As soon as you accept incorporation, federalism/states rights goes out the window”.
Then why did the framers feel the 10th amendment was necessary? Specific powers of the federal government were granted to it over the states. Why else would the framers feel the need to grant “all the other powers” to the states and the people?
It is subject to abuse, but IMHO it is necessary in order to protect our rights. The main opposition to the Bill of Rights was that it could be construed to be all of our rights, thus th 9th Amendment.
Every time the question of concealed carry is brought up the arguement has been put forth that ‘it stands to reason that allowing large numbers of people to carry guns will result in more gun crime.’ That arguement has been routinely defeated by subsequent data. In fact, allowing concealed carry usually results in a reduction of violent crime.
On page 4504 the court says “It is not difficult to see how 4,000 shoppers trading in modern firearms pose more danger than a crowd of history buffs in traditional garb playing with blank ammunition.”
Is this not a simple paraphrasing of the gun-banner’s lament from my first paragraph? The court has gone to great lengths to substantiate every step it has taken through the vast swamp of prior decisions. Yet it hangs the Nordykes out to dry on nothing better than opinion! This especially after admitting that “The parties agree that
nothing violent or illegal happened at those events.” (Page 4471.)
IANAL but it sure looks to my untrained eye as if the Nordykes have a basis for an appeal.
The 14th Amendment, in a nutshell is unconstitutional...not as it is written, but as it's interpreted. If a State has an unconstitutional action, which is one that is disagreed with by the People of that State, it is up to the People to remedy it, NOT the federal government.
The Constitution was never intended to have any operation on the People who ordained and established it. For your perusal, here is View of the Constitution of the United States .
But a contract of this nature actually existed in a visible form, between the citizens of each state, respectively, in their several constitutions; it might therefore he deemed somewhat extraordinary, that in the establishment of a federal republic, it should have been thought necessary to extend it's operation to the persons of individuals, as well as to the states, composing the confederacy. It was apprehended by many, that this innovation would be construed to change the nature of the union, from a confederacy, to a consolidation of the states; that as the tenor of the instrument imported it to be the act of the people, the construction might be made accordingly: an interpretation that would tend to the annihilation of the states, and their authority. That this was the more to be apprehended, since all questions between the states, and the United States, would undergo the final decision of the latter.
This was used, I believe in the Heller case as evidence. It's the first legal paper written on the Constitution after Ratification.
No federal judicial court has the ability to sit in judgment of a State.
Actually, the ORIGINAL intent was that it did indeed put limits on the states (see William Rawles, "A View of the Constitution", written by an eminent jurist of the period). The "not applicable to the states" was invented by Southern jurists to avoid Federal interference with slavery.
“Every time the question of concealed carry is brought up the arguement has been put forth that it stands to reason that allowing large numbers of people to carry guns will result in more gun crime. That arguement has been routinely defeated by subsequent data. In fact, allowing concealed carry usually results in a reduction of violent crime”.
Did you ever read the article “Kennesaw Revisited” By Jeff Knox (October 7, 2008). I think you might enjoy it.
http://www.firearmscoalition.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=285&Itemid=37
An interesting work, but do you really consider 1830 "of the period?"
Which is why Texas vs. White, the cobbled-up Supreme Court decision the opinion in which was written and handed down by a Chief Justice who spent most of the Civil War as an active combatant in Lincoln's cabinet, was totally unconstitutional -- among other things, Chief Justice Chase found that the Confederate secession conventions were all, all illegal, that the People of the States had no power to withdraw from having the Union enforced on them.
Not so in the case of the Second. The language is not the narrow "Congress shall make no law" that would support your reading, but rather the very broad and illimitable "shall not be infringed" (i.e. by anybody).
Otherwise, a local sheriff could deprive you of every one of the freedoms enumerated in the BoR and several not so enumerated (just to violate the 9th and 10th), and under your reading (and the Supreme Court's, in its 1877 Cruikshank opinion, which very significantly was a Klan case involving the Force Acts), he would be absolutely unimpaired in his ability to do so.
Hence the rise of political bossism after the Civil War (or more to the point, after Cruikshank). This in spite of the ratification of 14A.
Repealing the Second Amendment would not remove the right to keep and bear arms. It would only remove the prohibition of the government to try to infringe upon it.
Bang
My God
That judge pretty much just told the federal government to go bugger off and not come back.
I’m speechless
James Madison, the last surviving Framer, was still alive in 1830. Numerous other Framers passed away in the ten years prior - John Lansing in 1829, William Few in 1828, Rufus King in 1827, Luther Martin in 1826, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in 1825...
I would think that when you can go call on and talk to the people who were directly involved in, and indeed, the architects of, the event in question you can consider that "of the period."
Personally Huck, I think we should take everything we can.
This is absolutely huge, considering it’s the Ninth Circus. It could lead to a huge fall of oppressive firearms laws around the nation, especially IL, NY, NJ and CA.
Also personally, I’d love to walk into the Jacob Javits Center, and come out with a rifle and shotgun; doing so because NY’s and NYC’s socialist firearms laws having pretty much been done away with.
Which is an imbecilic finding considering that the current US Constitution was formed AFTER States began seceding from a document called the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
If they could do it then, they can certainly do so in a compact where any such permanency is never even hinted at.
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