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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: Dead Corpse
"Your citing the 9th Circuits precedent used by DC to support their ban doesn't surprise me..."

Huh? What does the 9th Circuit have to do with my post? I cited Parker. Parker cited United States v. Verdugo- Urquidez. That case defined "the people" as a certain class of individuals, which answered your question.

My point, if you forgot, was that "the people" did not mean every person. Why you went off on a tangent of "individual" vs "collective" is beyond me.

And stop the insults. I'll see to it that you get equal time from the mods if I have to go to Jim to do it.

858 posted on 11/14/2007 2:45:49 PM PST by robertpaulsen
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