Posted on 05/09/2002 7:02:38 AM PDT by ethical
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/69642_guned.shtml
Changing the 2nd Amendment
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
It is disturbing, though not surprising, that the federal government has decided after numerous decades of settled thinking on the Second Amendment to reinterpret its position.
The marked shift, formalized in a pair of footnotes to legal briefs submitted Monday to the U.S. Supreme Court, occurs because of the deeply held beliefs of the man who is now leading the Justice Department, Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Last summer, in a letter to the National Rifle Association, Ashcroft foreshadowed the change in official thinking. "Let me state unequivocally my view that the text and the original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protects the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms," he wrote.
The department's departure is profound from philosophical and practical standpoints.
Until now, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, the Justice Department has been in virtual lockstep with the high court's position on the Second Amendment, as last stated in the 1939 decision, United States v. Miller. In that case the court said the amendment protects only those gun ownership rights that have "some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well regulated militia."
While legal scholarship on the exceedingly volatile amendment has seesawed between the two disparate views, the courts have been generally unified in their thinking -- adhering to the Miller decision in more than 100 federal and state appellate cases -- until last fall.
Then, in the prosecution of a Texan for violating a 1994 federal gun law, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals departed from precedent to maintain that the amendment protects the individual right to bear arms. It did say those rights could be subject to "limited, narrowly tailored specific exceptions."
It should be noted that the department, while announcing its change of heart on the basic thrust of the amendment, does not disagree that gun ownership can be curtailed to some extent. And the department would prefer that the high court not involve itself in the Texas case or its companion on appeal, the case of a man convicted of owning two machine guns in violation of the ban against them.
We disagree. Though couched in a footnote, the pointed challenge to decades of unified thinking by the judiciary -- the perspective that ultimately counts -- has been made.
The time is ripe, as is said in legal parlance, for the high court to weigh in again on the Second Amendment and, it can be hoped, reaffirm the position that the Constitution guarantees only a collective right to guns through state and federal militias, not an individual's absolute right. Otherwise, the door will open wide to weakening the responsible gun laws that protect us all.
Where is the other organization filled with 80 million members who can challenge any gun group on how they run things? Are you in any gun group or are you whining again about how things are without doing something about it? There are people just like you whining about what this group did or didn't do while sitting on your lazy @ss.
I'm going to repeat myself for the fifth or sixth time on this board.
GET OFF YOUR FAT LAZY @SS AND JOIN A GUN GROUP.
What's a matter? You can whine on FR but you can't send a letter to the Editor? Come on. Print your letter right here that you're going to send to your newspaper. Put up or shut up. We're waiting.
Do they mean those responsible gun laws that protect me when I'm walking alone at night? Or when I'm traveling alone on a deserted stretch of highway? Or when I'm under threat from a PO'd ex-boyfriend?
1800 to 1865, the Judiciary approved of slavery. Held it as legal. Doesn't mean it is right.
No part of it is hard to understand. The people of the time when that was written kept and bore arms in their homes. Had it not been for that, the Revolution would have been a small riot that ended in greater British oversight and presence in the colonies - not an American nation. Those people kept and bore arms in defense and for action as needed as well as for hunting. Liberal argumentation on the matter dominates in ignorance of the truth.
I always remember that the claimed top speed of a Blackbird was/is 2200mph and is always referred to as 'as fast as a bullet'.
Innocent mistake.
What an idjit. Gun laws don't protect lives. Guns protect lives.
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