"If the price I must pay for my freedoms is to acknowledge that the government was granted the power to infringe on them, then I am not free." -- Pol Anderson
Define reasonable.
when did a nuclear weapon become a firearm?
The “big lie” in the brief is machine guns in private hands present an unreasonable danger (if the 1986 ban were overturned.) In the decades before the ban, registered machine guns in private hands were responsible for ZERO homicides.
Registered machine gun owners are the least threat to public safety of any demographic, contrary to the Bush DOJ brief.
Perfect example of why you don’t compromise to get “electable.”
We may like one politician more than another, but at the end of the day the state is always the state, and we cannot expect it to be otherwise.
“such as the rule that convicted felons may be denied firearms because those persons have never been understood to be within the Amendment’s protections”
Which has nothing to do with the 2nd amendment per say. It’s the 5th amendment that would deny felons firearms after due process.
“To the contrary, the Second Amendment, properly construed, allows for reasonable regulation of firearms”
Here is where the Bush administration’s argument falls down. Let’s define reasonable. Does reasonable restrictions mean that one cannot own a handgun in DC and if one owns a rifle in DC it must be broken down and rendered unusable. I would think that in any normal persons thinking, this is very unreasonable to completely ban a set of firearms and render another set of firearms unusable.
Reasonable restrictions are not allowing convicted felons or people who are deemed physcho or minors to be able to own firearms. Unreasonable restrictions is to ban working firearms from everyone in the city!!
If we consider a person to have served his time (paid his debt to society) then he should get ALL of his rights back or he is not fit for society and should not be released.
"Nothing in the Second Amendment properly understood—and certainly no principle necessary to decide this case—calls for invalidation of the numerous federal laws regulating firearms."
I must call BS on that.
jw
CONCLUSION
The Court should affirm that the Second Amendment,
no less than other provisions of the Bill of Rights,
secures an individual right, and should clarify that the
right is subject to the more flexible standard of review
described above. If the Court takes those foundational
steps, the better course would be to remand.
Respectfully submitted.
Why is it that a `made up’ constitutional right like “the right to privacy” or a “suspect category” receives the `strict scrutiny’ standard of review, while the 2nd Amendment should be subject to—at least according to this administration `mouthpiece’: “a more flexible standard of review”?
strict scrutiny is the correct standard - and SCOTUS needs to realize that adopting any other standard will let the government’s nose under the tent farther than it already is wrt the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments...
The DC Gun Ban
March 12, 2007
Last Friday a federal appeals court in Washington DC issued a ruling that hopefully will result in the restoration of 2nd Amendment rights in the nation’s capital. It appears the Court rejected the District of Columbia ‘s nonsensical argument that the 2nd Amendment confers only a “collective right,” something gun control advocates have asserted for years.
Of course we should not have too much faith in our federal courts to protect gun rights, considering they routinely rubber stamp egregious violations of the 1 st, 4th, and 5th Amendments, and allow Congress to legislate wildly outside the bounds of its enumerated powers. Furthermore, the DC case will be appealed to the Supreme Court with no guarantees. But it is very important nonetheless for a federal court only one step below the highest court in the land to recognize that gun rights adhere to the American people, not to government-sanctioned groups. Rights, by definition, are individual. “Group rights” is an oxymoron.
Can anyone seriously contend that the Founders, who had just expelled their British rulers mostly by use of light arms, did not want the individual farmer, blacksmith, or merchant to be armed? Those individuals would have been killed or imprisoned by the King’s soldiers if they had relied on a federal armed force to protect them.
In the 1700s, militias were local groups made up of ordinary citizens. They were not under federal control! As a practical matter, many of them were barely under the control of colonial or state authorities. When the 2nd Amendment speaks of a “well-regulated militia,” it means local groups of individuals operating to protect their own families, homes, and communities. They regulated themselves because it was necessary and in their own interest to do so.
The Founders themselves wrote in the Federalist papers about the need for individuals to be armed. In fact, James Madison argued in Federalist paper 46 that common citizens should be armed to guard against the threat posed by the newly proposed standing federal army.
Today, gun control makes people demonstrably less safe— as any honest examination of criminal statistics reveals. In his book “More Guns, Less Crime,” scholar John Lott demolishes the myth that gun control reduces crime. On the contrary, Lott shows that cities with strict gun control—like Washington DC—experience higher rates of murder and violent crime. It is no coincidence that violent crime flourishes in the nation’s capital, where the individual’s right to defend himself has been most severely curtailed.
Understand that residents of DC can be convicted of a felony and put in prison simply for having a gun in their home, even if they live in a very dangerous neighborhood. The DC gun ban is no joke, and the legal challenges to the ban are not simply academic exercises. People’s lives and safety are at stake.
Gun control historically serves as a gateway to tyranny. Tyrants from Hitler to Mao to Stalin have sought to disarm their own citizens, for the simple reason that unarmed people are easier to control. Our Founders, having just expelled the British army, knew that the right to bear arms serves as the guardian of every other right. This is the principle so often ignored by both sides in the gun control debate. Only armed citizens can resist tyrannical government.
Congressman Ron Paul
"If the price I must pay for my freedoms is to acknowledge that the government was granted the power to infringe on them, then I am not free." -- Pol Anderson
Right on! Especially since felons have such a stellar track record of being law-abiding, anyways!
Government solution to this dilemma? Eventually make everyone a felon, one little crime at a time.
Thank goodness the Framers of the Constitution included the "automatic adjusment provision". Otherwise, when technologies make changes necessary to the Constitution, we might have to AMEND IT.
The Second Amendment is probably as close to an absolute right as will be found anywhere.
Too bad the Founders didn't say, "Congress shall make no law..." in the Second Amendment. This leaves little to consider. If they can't make a law, then it simply doesn't matter how reasonable the law is. The law would be unConstitutional, no matter how reasonable, healthy, inspired, or appreciated. Words are supposed to have meaning.
I see no reason to suspect that "shall not be infringed" was intended to be any less absolute than "shall make no law".
Strange then that it wasn't until 1938 that Congress passed such a law, and that didn't forbid possession, but rather forbid the newly required FFL dealers not sell to them and that they not receive any firearm that had moved in interstate commerce. Why didn't the founders or subsequent generations of Congress pass such a law? You think they had no criminals, then or in the ensuing 136 years?
BTW, that 1938 law, the Federal Firearms Act, the first substantive federal gun control law, was shepherded through Congress by the NRA as a "compromise" to stave off handgun registration, which the Roosevelt Justice Department was forever trying to get through Congress. (Eventually if you keep giving up a half a loaf, you soon have not enough bread to see with a microscope).
The Second Amendment has never applied to people who were not free persons. Per the Thirteenth Amendment, someone convicted of a felony can be made a slave of the government. While there are some procedural problems with the way things are done (e.g. the federal government does not have the authority to mandate loss of RKBA for state crimes) the general concept that felons may be denied the RKBA would be entirely consistent with the Second Amendment if the laws mandating such were properly written.