Posted on 08/14/2003 1:05:58 PM PDT by mdittmar
The National Rifle Association has plenty of company in a major gun rights case that the Supreme Court is considering hearing.
Among the organizations that have joined the case are the Pink Pistols, a group of gay and lesbian gun owners; the Second Amendment Sisters; and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. They are asking the court to consider if the Constitution's Second Amendment guarantees the right to own a gun.
At issue is an appeal filed this summer by some rugby teammates and friends who challenged California's assault weapons ban. They lost at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which ruled the Constitution protects gun rights of militias but not individuals.
Their lawyer, Gary Gorski of Fair Oaks, Calif., mainly expected to receive support from conservative, male-dominated organizations. Instead, friend-of-the-court briefs backing the appeal were filed by two women's groups, the Jewish organization, a doctors' group and the gay gun owners.
"Women Against Gun Control asks this court to give due regard to the interest of women in equalizing things, be it in the workplace or a dark parking lot," lawyer Howard J. Fezell of Frederick, Md., told the court in a filing.
Pink Pistols lawyer Lisa Steele of Bolton, Mass., said justices have an opportunity to save the lives of gays who face hate crimes. A gun will help them "lawfully defend themselves against would-be gay bashers," she wrote.
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership reminded the court that German Jews were barred from having firearms before the Holocaust.
"The tragic history of civilian disarmament cries a warning against any systematic attempts to render innocent citizens ill-equipped to defend themselves from tyrant terrorists, despots or oppressive majorities," wrote the group's lawyer, Daniel Schmutter of Paramus, N.J.
NRA lawyers, in their filing this month, said that the right of people "to keep and bear arms is a bedrock feature of the Anglo-American legal tradition."
California has not filed a response to the appeal. But the state defended, in the lower court, defended its ban of 75 high-powered weapons with rapid-fire capabilities.
The Supreme Court, after returning from the summer break, should announce this fall whether it will hear the case.
The case is Silveira v. Lockyer, 03-51.
I think I might be worried about their target recognition.
If they lose some members of the SC need to be impeached for not being able to read plain English.
But they allowed numerous other rifles with the same rate-of-fire capabilities. I immediately went out and bought a couple when they passed the law. The difference? A pistol grip.
A rifle is evil if it has a pistol grip. But a rifle with a conventional stock is harmless.
Redundant
3. linguistics repeating meaning: with the same meaning as a word used elsewhere in a passage and without a rhetorical purpose;)
All too many of the ... 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. [Citation.] 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.Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F.3d 567, 569 (9th Cir. 2003) (Kozinski, Circuit J., dissenting from order denying rehearing en banc).
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.
Stay safe,stay armed.
There's no way to predict what will happen between now and when the case is heard. This would be true just about anytime a suit is filed. It takes a while to wend it's way to the top of the docket--and anything can happen to people which could change the make-up of the court.
Don't I wish! If they're idiots, how come they're running things and we're not?
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