[E. Pluribus Unum]

http://www.webcatt.net/2ndAmend_SIG/armed-m/october_97/armedm_1097.html

C. Prior restraints on rights are unconstitutional

1. Second Amendment protects an individual right

Report by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution (1982)-- "The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner." (40)

Supreme Court admits "the people" in the Second Amendment are the same "people" as in the rest of the Bill of Rights -- In U.S. v. Verdugo- Urquidez the Court stated that "'the people' seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. . . . [and] 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." (41)

2. Courts agree that rights should be free from prior restraints

Near v. Minnesota -- In this case, the Supreme Court stated that government officials should punish the abuse of a right and not place prior restraints on the exercise of the right. (42)

What about yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater? -- The courts have stated that one cannot use his "freedom of speech" to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater. And yet, no one argues that officials should gag everyone who goes into the theater, thus placing a prior restraint on movie-goers. The proper response is to punish the person who does yell "Fire." Likewise, citizens should not be "gagged" before exercising their Second Amendment rights, rather they should be punished if they abuse that right.

[dirtboy]

Nice work. Now reconcile that with the fact it is legal to require a protest group to obtain a permit prior to a demonstration. The FR DC Chapter gets them all the time. So the courts have allowed regulation of 1st A rights.

[tpaine]

  Both prior restraint and due process are violated by registration infringments upon the 2nd. This is from the USSC, Poe v Ullman decision:

        In its discussion of the scope of "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment the Court stated:

Neither the Bill of Rights nor the specific practices of the States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment marks the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects.
See U.S. Const., Amend. 9. As the second Justice Harlan recognized:

     "[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause `cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This `liberty´ is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property;
the freedom of speech, press, and religion;
the right to keep and bear arms;
the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on.  It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints, . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment."

Poe v. Ullman, supra, 367 U.S. at 543, 81 S.Ct., at 1777