One can never have to much information on this subject. For more about ammunition storage, point your browser to this Survival Site
Those interested in rolling their own might want to consider some of this stuff also.
Semper Fi
An Old Man
Posted on 01/28/2008 8:39:17 AM PST by kiriath_jearim
The case of District of Columbia et al v. Dick Anthony Heller has put the question of the Second Amendment before the Supreme Court for the first time in more than half a century. In an amicus brief filed with the Court 15 historians argue that the DC law is consistent with the Amendment's history. An excerpt of the brief appears below.
Click here to read the full brief.
http://www.gurapossessky.com/news/parker/documents/07-290tsajackn.rakove.pdf
INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
The central question is whether the Second Amendment protects a private right to keep handguns and other firearms, independent of an individual’s membership in a state-regulated militia. As a problem for constitutional historians, the question can be elaborated and restated in this way: Did the framers and ratifiers of the Amendment believe they were constitutionally entrenching an individual right to keep arms for personal protection? Or did they conceive the Amendment to achieve a different end, by affirming that a “well-regulated militia” of citizen-soldiers would preserve “the security of a free state,” principally by lessening the need for a republican government to depend on a standing army?
Historians can best assess these claims by reconstructing the context within which the adopters of the Amendment acted. Recovering that context involves more than snatching a line from Blackstone’s Commentaries or Madison’s 46th Federalist, or ringing endless changes on the references to hunting and fowling in the Dissent of the Anti-Federalist minority in the Pennsylvania ratification convention. It instead involves explaining how a popular right to keep and bear arms figured in the ratification debates of 1787-1788; how that debate was in turn shaped by the Militia Clause of Art. I, §8; and why that clause appeared to threaten key Anglo-American political ideas dating to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. Setting the context for the Second Amendment also requires exploring analogous provisions in the parliamentary Bill of Rights of 1689 and the declarations of rights that accompanied the first state constitutions.
Once explored, this context establishes that the private keeping of firearms was manifestly not the right that the framers of the Bill of Rights guaranteed in 1789. Though Anglo-American political tradition did indeed value the idea of an armed populace, it never treated private ownership of firearms as an individual right. The right stated in the seminal English Bill of Rights of 1689 vested not in individuals but in Parliament, which remained free to determine “by law” which Protestant subjects could own which weapons and how they could be used. Nor did the first American constitutions and declarations of rights include clauses protecting private use of firearms.
The right to keep and bear arms became an issue in 1787-1788 only because the Constitution proposed significant changes in the governance of the militia, an institution previously regulated solely by state law. Anti-Federalists argued that Congress would abuse its proposed authority to organize, arm, and discipline the militia by allowing that venerated institution to atrophy from neglect and lack of funding. A national government that could command permanent armed forces with its own resources would gain an engine for tyranny. Republican political thinking had long regarded standing armies as a danger to liberty, and a militia of citizen soldiers as one of its greatest bulwarks. Anti-Federalists rehearsed these arguments, and several ratification conventions—notably Virginia and New York—adopted resolutions affirming that the right to keep and bear arms, when tied to service in the militia, merited constitutional protection. Nothing in the ratification debates of 1787-1788, however, indicated that the exercise of this right required limiting the customary police powers of state and local government.
Federalist supporters of the Constitution dominated the First Congress that met in the spring of 1789. In framing the Second Amendment, they simultaneously sought to assuage the expressed Anti-Federalist concern about the maintenance of the militia while preserving congressional authority over its organization, arming, and discipline. They rejected language that would have modified that authority, including a qualifying provision, proposed by the House of Representatives, defining the militia as “composed of the body of the people.” Acceptance of that definition would impair congressional authority to determine how extensive membership in the militia should be.
Nothing in this argument challenges the idea that eighteenth-century Americans had ready access to firearms, or that they valued the concept of a well-armed citizenry. Individuals were legally free to purchase and keep weapons as they could other property; but like other forms of property, the keeping of firearms was subject to extensive legal regulation. What is at dispute is whether legal rights of private ownership were what the Second Amendment constitutionally entrenched. During this period, Americans were hardly shy about identifying and discussing such fundamental rights as representation, trial by jury, or freedom of conscience, or the natural rights to life, liberty, and property. The fact that references to the keeping of firearms are so few and terse, or that the modern academic controversy over the Second Amendment has been forced to squeeze so much modern interpretive blood from so few evidentiary turnips, is itself an indicator of how minor a question this was at the time. The same cannot be said about the role of the militia in the constitutional order. That was the subject that was patently in dispute in 1787-1789, and that is why the exceptional preamble to the Second Amendment is a true guide to its original meaning.
ARGUMENT
Even after the parliamentary Bill of Rights of 1689 allowed certain classes of Protestant subjects to keep arms, British constitutional doctrine and practice subjected the limited right therein recognized to extensive legal regulation and limitation.
The closest English antecedent to the American notion of a right to bear arms appears in the Bill of Rights, the parliamentary reenactment in December 1689 of the Declaration of Rights that the new monarchs, William and Mary, accepted seven months earlier after the Glorious Revolution forced James II to vacate his throne. Knowledgeable Americans were familiar with the Bill of Rights and the circumstances of its creation. Americans saw the English document as part of a common constitutional tradition, a binding pledge by the Crown to acknowledge the legal supremacy of Parliament and thereby respect the rights of the people.
That link between parliamentary supremacy and popular rights is critical to understanding the import of Article VII of the Bill of Rights, which provided “That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Armes for their defence Suitable to their Condition and as allowed by Law.” The formal grievance that Article VII answered was that James II had violated settled law “By causing several good Subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when Papists were both armed and Employed contrary to Law.” Bill of Rights (1689) reprinted in 5 The Founders’ Constitution 1-2 (Philip Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds. 1987). The authors of the Bill of Rights were reacting to the efforts of Charles II and James II to maintain Stuart rule through a standing army increasingly officered and manned by Irish Catholics. Commissioning Catholics as military officers did indeed violate the Test Act, which required officeholders to swear an oath denying Catholic doctrine on transubstantiation. In the paranoiac atmosphere of the 1680s, James’s open practice of Catholicism and the birth of his male heir made the fear of a Catholic restoration all the more ominous.
The arms-bearing right that the Bill of 1689 affirmed, then, was a response to this specific situation, tied to the belief that an armed Protestant population would safeguard the realm against a Catholic restoration. It did not establish a general right of all persons to keep weapons, and especially firearms, for purposes of individual defense. An earlier version of Article VII could be read to grant the right to all Protestants. But that expansive possibility was checked when the House of Lords added the crucial qualifying language, “Suitable to their Condition and as allowed by Law.” (Lois Schwoerer, To Hold and Bear Arms: The English Perspective 76 Chicago-Kent L Rev. 30-48 (2000). The first qualification tracked a long history of legislation making the possession of weapons, and again especially firearms, dependent on the holders’ social and economic status. The second qualification was a reference to the Game Law of 1671, which allowed lords of manors to appoint gamekeepers to “take and seize all such guns” used by “divers disorderly persons” to hunt and trap “game intended to be preserved” for the higher classes of English society. 6 English Historical Documents 466-467 (Andrew Browning, ed., 1988). Adoption of the Bill of Rights did not affect Parliament’s capacity to regulate who could or could not possess firearms. In fact, when a new Game Act was adopted in 1693, the House of Commons rejected (169-65) a proposal allowing “every Protestant to keep a musket in his House for his defence not withstanding this or any other Act.” Many members voting had sat in Parliament in 1689; they evidently did not read Article VII as establishing a broad-gauged right all Protestants could claim. Schwoerer, Hold and Bear Arms, supra at 50-51.
The notion that Article VII made ownership of firearms a fundamental right immune to substantive regulation fails for a broader reason. The lasting constitutional significance of the Bill of Rights was not only to identify certain rights of the subject that merited protection, but also to lay down the basic premises that shaped British constitutionalism thereafter: that the monarch could not make law simply by royal edict, but that he must rule lawfully, with the consent of Parliaments freely elected and frequently assembled. The concept of parliamentary supremacy, as exercised through the king-in-Parliament, was the great principle the Bill of Rights vindicated. The liberty Englishmen cherished would be secured by confirming that a Parliament respectful of their rights and representative of society would have sovereign authority to make law. Article VII endorsed the idea that well-to-do Protestants might keep arms against the threat of a Catholic restoration, but as the formula “according to law” made clear, this imposed no limit on the reach of parliamentary power.
That understanding also informed a much-cited passage from Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765). “The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject . . . is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition, and such as are allowed by law,” Blackstone wrote, citing the Bill of Rights. This was “indeed, a publick allowance under due restraints, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.” 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries *139. Notwithstanding the reference to “self-preservation,” this passage cannot be construed to assert an unregulated private right of self-defense, for two reasons. First, Blackstone’s corpus of five “subordinate” or “auxiliary” rights involve the subject’s relation to public authority, respectively through the constitution of Parliament; the limitation on royal prerogative; access to courts of justice; the right to petition; and finally, the right to arms as a security against oppression. Id. at *136-139. Second, the phrases “suitable to their condition, and such as are allowed by law,” and “under due restraints” denote the regime of parliamentary regulation that the Bill of Rights made the fundamental principle of British constitutionalism. Blackstone was an unequivocal defender of that regime. “So long therefore as the English constitution lasts,” Blackstone wrote in the very next chapter, “we may venture to affirm, that the power of parliament is absolute and without control.” Id. at 157. Whatever principle the Bill of Rights stated always lay within the power of Parliament to apply and regulate, and thus to modify or limit. In this sense, the Bill of Rights did not establish a catalogue of rights in the modern, positivist, constitutionally-entrenched sense of the term. Like the clauses of Magna Carta, all of its provisions were subject to modification, control, and repeal by subsequent Parliaments. So long as Parliament sat, Blackstone envisioned no situation under which the auxiliary right of resistance could be invoked. ...
When doing a search for a weapon, the BATFE can only take the information on that particular purchase. Name, address, type, etc.
Generally, the searches are guns used in a crime. Most of the time they are either stolen of have been a private sale.
The purpose is to follow a firearm from manufacture to wholesaler to business to purchase. These are the commerce laws that are being followed.
the whole commerce necessity tracking thingy sounds eearily like a vehicle for info compilation made easy...
I really need to do some tradin'...
Now, just for the fun of it, let’s say that the BATFE sent those records to England to a private company and asked them to gather all the information from the paperwork and transfer it to discs, for expediency purposes only, of course. All this is stated in a vague contract allowing them lots of flexibility.
The private ENGLISH company would not be breaking any AMERICAN laws in whatever manner it chose build the file to fulfill the contract, would they? So what’s the difference if they gather all the handgun owners, all the small caliber rifle owners and all the heavy caliber rifle owners into separate files, then break them down as to multi gun owners and single gun owners.
The vague contract allowed them lots of flexibility to determine the best choice and they didn’t have to worry about American courts or laws, did they?
I mean after all your tax papers get sent to India to be reviewed for mathematical correctness these days. No violation of privacy rules to be concerned with when foreigners do the work for American agencies. Kinda slick I think, but then I think most of our governement agencies are run by some pretty slick bastards these days.
I hope you maintain your faith in the integrity of the Feds. Life has to be easier that way, I'm sure.
There are some indications that the BATFE has handed over US gun owner lists to Mexican police. Stick that in your hypothetical and smoke it.
Mexico isn’t concerned about American privacy laws, are they?
Could you explain why we’re not allowed to get a copy?
One can never have to much information on this subject. For more about ammunition storage, point your browser to this Survival Site
Those interested in rolling their own might want to consider some of this stuff also.
Semper Fi
An Old Man
I can’t say what I’d do.
***The disarmed volunteers inspecting the armed citizens. I can predict how that will go.***
I think it will go fantastic.
So do I, obviously. I know a whole lot of pro-personal rights, 2nd Amendment types. Not a one of them would shoot or even threaten an unarmed person with a weapon who politely knocked on their front door and asked to verify their personal firearm collection, especially under authority of the federal law.
A few of them who are legal minded types might ask to see the particular law that have them the authority to ask these questions that invade our personal privacy. A few others would ask the volunteer inspecters to wait while they made a call to the attorneys office. Not one would threaten violence.
I am certain that the unarmed volunteers would leave the property if requested to do so. As you said, “I think it will go fantastic.”
A few more years and when the newer public school educated young adults take up voting the politicians will easily convince them that this personal rights invasion is for their safety. They’ll fold.
You misunderstood me
ping .... the website
At the risk of misunderstanding you again, would there be a slaughter of unarmed volunteers? I don’t think so.
Depends on what those inspectors do.
94 replies and RobertPaulsen hasn’t pooped all over this thread? He must not be feeling well.
Hah
Thank you. That’s quite the website. I especially enjoyed the tale of Uncle K.
A lot of us Old Men are just like Uncle K!
Semper Fi
An Old Man
At the first sign of reluctance to comply, they would leave and report the ‘offender’ to headquarters. That’s where the armed team would set up to return and guarantee compliance of the offensive resister. The moment the volunteer inspectors leave that’s when you should leave too.
Thanks for the heads up.
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