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To: Dead Corpse
"What is a "group" made up of?"

I thought you said you read Parker. No?

"Indeed, the Supreme Court has recently endorsed a uniform reading of “the people” across the Bill of Rights. In United States v. Verdugo- Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259 (1990), the Court looked specifically at the Constitution and Bill of Rights’ use of “people” in the course of holding that the Fourth Amendment did not protect the rights of non-citizens on foreign soil:

[T]he people” seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained and established by “the People of the United States.” The Second Amendment protects “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to “the people.” See also U.S. CONST., amdt. 1; Art. I, § 2, cl. 1.

While this textual exegesis is by no means conclusive, it suggests that “the people” protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.

853 posted on 11/14/2007 2:15:37 PM PST by robertpaulsen
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To: robertpaulsen
I have. Your citing the 9th Circuits precedent used by DC to support their ban doesn't surprise me...

From the paragraph you omitted:

The District’s argument, on the other hand, asks us to read “the people” to mean some subset of individuals such as “the organized militia” or “the people who are engaged in militia service,” or perhaps not any individuals at all—e.g., “the states.” See Emerson, 270 F.3d at 227. These strained interpretations of “the people” simply cannot be squared with the uniform construction of our other Bill of Rights provisions. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recently endorsed a uniform reading of “the people” across the Bill of Rights. In United States v. Verdugo- Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259 (1990), the Court looked specifically at the Constitution and Bill of Rights’ use of “people” in the course of holding that the Fourth Amendment did not protect the rights of non-citizens on foreign soil:

Or the paragraph after...

Id. at 265. It seems unlikely that the Supreme Court would have lumped these provisions together without comment if it were of the view that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right. The Court’s discussion certainly indicates—if it does not definitively determine—that we should not regard “the people” in the Second Amendment as somehow restricted to a small subset of “the people” meriting protection under the other Amendments’ use of that same term.

In sum, the phrase “the right of the people,” when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual. This proposition is true even though “the people” at the time of the founding was not as inclusive a concept as “the people” today. See Robert E. Shallope, To Keep and Bear Arms in the Early Republic, 16 CONST. COMMENT. 269, 280-81 (1999). To the extent that non-whites, women, and the propertyless were excluded from the protections afforded to “the people,” the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is understood to have corrected that initial constitutional shortcoming.

Dumba$$...

855 posted on 11/14/2007 2:27:51 PM PST by Dead Corpse (What would a free man do?)
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To: robertpaulsen
refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.

That's what "the people" means, eh? I'd say that people meeting that classification include my wife (non-citizen female), brother (over 45), nieces & nephews (four under 17), parents (way over 45), along with a few hundred million other people who don't fall into your 15% category. You'll be hard pressed to explain why all of them have failed to "have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considerred part of that community."

I think you just flame-roasted your own argument there, RP.

864 posted on 11/14/2007 3:32:14 PM PST by ctdonath2 (The color blue tastes like the square root of 0?)
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