Posted on 06/24/2022 4:13:22 PM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
n a 6-3 decision reflecting the sharp partisan divide on the nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court struck down New York’s century old gun law against conceal carry on Thursday. New Yorkers and residents of a handful of other states and Washington D.C.—which had more strictly regulated who can have a conceal-carry permit—must now accept the type of laws popular in Texas and other red states. The decision was hardly a surprise to court watchers, but the opinion is nonetheless troubling on many levels. The fact that this opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, an originalist so rigid in his thinking that Justice Antonin Scalia once used him as a foil to distinguish his respect for precedent—”I’m an originalist and a textualist, not a nut,” Scalia quipped— contrasting the burn it all down approach favored by his laconic colleague. Thomas has long been a proponent of super sizing the Second Amendment and has argued—against strong statistical evidence—that lower courts were treating the Second Amendment as a second-class right. Justice Thomas and his fellow originalists have set out to analogize the Second Amendment to core free speech rights, a bizarre legal analogy with little foundation in either legal history or tradition. ....
Just looking at the history of firearms law in nation’s largest cities undermine the central claim in Bruen. As the table below shows, all of the nation’s largest cities were living under some form of restrictive public carry regime by the end of the 19th century. Many of these laws were enacted during Reconstruction, or soon after. Thomas not only ignores this evidence, but he also ignores recent scholarship showing that these laws were enforced in a racially neutral fashion for decades before white supremacists turned them against Black people.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Ultimately, the majority opinion in Bruen is one of the most intellectually dishonest and poorly argued decisions in American judicial history.
Obviously, this cat hasn’t read the Roe v Wade decision.
This goes to the core of Thomas’ argument - to wit - the 2A is absolute and every restriction enacted since 1934 is abhorrent to the constitution and therefore null and void. It’s not difficult to understand. The federal and (state) government’s only and sole obligation in the matter is to ensure that no law is made which infringes in any way a private citizen’s right to keep and bear arms.
Thank you for that post. That was an apparent hole in my education. I just read up on the compromise and the election. Eye opening.
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Thanks! I think you are probably right. The real problem was that the post-Civil war amendments (except for the 13th) were a bridge too far. The Northern troops had come to detest slavery as an institution that they regarded as a threat to the Union, not because of its mistreatment of blacks, but because of its creation of an arrogant neo-aristocracy in the form of the planter class. The Reconstruction Republican Congress wrote a check that its butt couldn’t cover.
That’s a good question. I suspect that because the extent of the incorporation doctrine was unresolved, the states just gradually infringed more and more, and then we got the NFA and then the GCA. By 1968, no one in the elite took the 2nd Amendment seriously anymore and we had become habituated to despotism via Roosevelt and the national security state during and following WWII. So the Federal courts did nothing.
The first gun control laws in the country were enacted to keep slaves from owning firearms and many gun control laws were aimed at keeping the freed slaves from possessing firearms. The DemocRats that enacted them eventually got around to applying to everyone because they didn’t want the hoi polloi having power to resist them.
This was exactly what I expected from Slate.
They started with throwing some personal insults at Justice Thomas. Then they tried to cite as their relevant “history” gun laws enacted in major cities starting in the late 19th century.
Uhhh guys....you’re at least a century late when it comes to looking at history. The history that matters is the intent of the states at the time they ratified the Bill of Rights. Did they intend for the 2nd amendment to affirm a right to keep and to bear arms? Did they mean that for the individual?
There’s only one answer. Its obviously “Yes”.
Then the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed as the plain language of the 2nd amendment states quite clearly. Cities enacted various gun laws and got away with it for over 100 years? That was unconstitutional and should have been struck down long long ago.
If you don’t like it, the ratios you need are 2/3rds, 2/3rds and 3/4ths. That’s what you need for a constitutional amendment overturning the 2nd amendment.
Pretending the prescriptions of the Progressive Era are consistent with the original meaning of the Constitution is lying about history.
At least much of America then acknowledged the need to properly amend the Constitution for many of their ‘Progressive’ dreams.
The post is a good example of how the Constitution was under attack from day 1, just as Thomas Jefferson said it would be, with people torturing the meaning rather than following the plain and simple wording and original meaning.
Thomas’s gun decision is exactly pursuant tp the wording of the 2nd Amd. Contradicting a portion of the Constitution does not make it legally right even if it stands for a century. Precedent is no good if it is itself unConstitutional.
I agree with you. In my opinion, a ex convict does not lose his Constitutional right to self-defense or to own a gun. As far as I am concerned, if you can’t trust them with a legally owned gun, then they should not be released in the first place. If you are releasing them into the general public, you are saying they have paid their debts.
Ex Cons should not lose their 2A rights.
In practice, it achieves nothing to strip felons/ex-cons of their 2A rights. They are all going to get guns anyway, just illegally. So now the first thing they have to do upon getting out is to commit a crime by stealing a gun or purchasing a stolen gun.
What sense does that make.
I hate arming criminals, but passing a law doesn’t disarm them in practice.
Either way, they will be back in prison shortly, so few reform.
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