OT- 2nd Amendment IS an individual right-Officially

Nothing.

-- Robert Sturgeon Summum ius summa inuria.

Score another one up for the trite, 'when was the last time I heard that' line of the week. You ought to be able to come up with better stuff than that junk Gunner.

Your credibility on the 2nd amendment stuff is bottoming out here.

Jim

Ah, I'm talking about opting out of lengthy Second Amendment discussions, not out of the newsgroup.

This issue is strange to discuss online, or even in person, because most of the people who are interested in it come to it in the first place looking for support for an idea they already have -- usually pro-gun, but always partisan. It's always been a subject on which it was easier to find partisan arguments than objective scholarship. In fact, there is almost no objective, modern, well-informed scholarship about it in existence. The few exceptions include Sanford Levinson's article in the _Yale Law Journal_ some years back ("The Embarrassing Second Amendment"), and Laurence Tribe's second edition of _American Constitutional Law_, published in the late '90s. Other than that, it's pretty much a vast wasteland for a student who wants a balanced view.

Which makes me an odd-man-out in these discussions, because my interest in the Constitution began when I was a political science student in college. I started looking at it from an academic angle and never changed my approach. I have no interest in practicing law so I never thought in terms of making arguments from it, except for a year or two each side of 1990, when we were fighting our "assault rifle" legal battles here in NJ. I wrote pro-gun editorials in those days. I neither became angry nor enthralled with Robert Bork. He's just another interesting, very smart character in the political history of the Court.

And all of that leaves me as stranded as a beached whale when I try to discuss it, because, while I generally agree with the individual-rights argument, and I see a core of timelessness in the Second, I despise the misleading, half-assed legal arguments that get written by blowhards (the blogsters) and thinly-disguised partisans posing as academic purists (Kleck, Kopel, John Lott, etc.), which get passed around and treated as gospel by people who don't have enough background in Constitutional law to know when they're being led down a primrose path. They have mountains of misleading crap to cut-and-paste into these discussions, which makes it all but impossible for any intelligence to work its way to the top. You really can't have a friendly and informative exchange of ideas and information about it today, with almost anyone on either side. They know tons of anecdotes and details, but not how it all works. So they grumble about how stupid or malicious the Justices are, because they don't really know what the Justices have to work with, nor what the consequences of one doctrine or another would be.

Anyway, enough of that.

Good luck. Nobody wants it unless it's on their terms. The Supreme Court hasn't shown any inclination to want to decide it, and I haven't heard anything about a new amendment in the works.

But it would be a good idea if it could happen. It's such a source of anger and distrust that it undermines the understanding of the Court, and an appreciation of how well it's served us overall.

I agree.

The ratio of OT posting seems to be related to how much people have to say at any given time about machining. There was a string of threads about reviving CNC machines from the '80s and even beyond a while back. It's hard to get passionate about it...except for Hamei, maybe. d8-)

Like your opinion means anything. Shrug

Gunner

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

- John Stewart Mill

It's not out of context, Gunner. There's a whole section in that memorandum devoted to it. It even has its own subhead: "The Limits of Prefatory Language." The subject is an argument that the militia phrase does not impinge on the wholly independent RKBA; in fact, that it has no legal consequence at all, except if the "operant" part of the statement is ambiguous. And they then say it isn't ambiguous.

I don't understand how you could miss that point. It's essential to getting the Second treated as an individual right that would be protected against state laws. Without it, the dilemma is that the states still have (nominal) authority over the militias, and thus, over the RKBA. That's how it was before the Civil War, when these things were matters of states' rights. It's also how it is today, in the case of the Second, because the Second has never been incorporated under the 14th.

The memo reads like any argument presented in a Supreme Court case. They cover every base they can think of, and let the Court decide which right is being abridged. The arguments often can seem contradictory in that sense because, as with this example, they make a case for the militia being every man in the country, and then say that the militia has nothing to do with it.

If you read other Court arguments, or amicus curie briefs, you'll see that same pattern over and over again.

-- Ed Huntress

AHA! Now that we've established what you are, we can negotiate over the price.

-- Ed Huntress

Gunner

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

- John Stewart Mill

%%%% If I do not have "an individual right" why was I able to buy a firearm

%%%% I can buy bread because I have "an individual right" to. :o)

%%%% Everything.

%%%% According to a leftard I'm familiar with it is part of the "life, liberty and the presuit of happiness". :o)

%%%% According to the header you are (shall we say) wrong.

%%%% Why would they arrest a fellow FOP member?

%%%% I live in a "Conservative" open carry state and not a liberal gungrabber one.

"I stepped out of the bedroom on the second floor and shouted into the darkness, 'I don't know who you are or what you want, but if you don't get the hell out of here I'm going to blow your ass off. And if you don't believe me, listen to this.' "With that I rammed a shell into the chamber of a shotgun. There is no mistaking that sound. Within seconds the intruders, or whatever they were, had fled." -- Dan Rather in his 1977 book, The Camera Never Blinks.

amen.

there's this about the 2nd ammendment: remember Waco. Koresh and his boys had lotsa automatic weapons. The LEO knew that, so they called in the dudes with Tanks. You gonna buy tanks too? Hello? Owning assault weapons is false security. The only thing that protects your right to own a fire arm, and defend your own with it, is the consent of your local voters, who will sit on a jury in case you are ever in court with it.

I own a 12 guage pump. I know where the hacksaw is. If I need more than that, I'll need more friends.

Too bad they never found any automatic weapons that anyone besides the prosecution ever saw.

Dont live out West, do you?

Here, a 300 Win Mag is about right for when the boogers are out at

Gunner

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

- John Stewart Mill

%%%% I own 4 of them. 2 have 20" open cylinder barrels.

If I need more than

%%%% I have more of both.

In Re: OT- 2nd Amendment IS an individual right-Officially on Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:06:10 -0500, by Ed Huntress, we read:

While it has been claimed, in a free republic there is no "compelling state interest". This was made clear after the 1861 Lincoln debacle.

And if there is a fire in a crowded theatre?

More legalisms by a lawyer wannabe.

It must be mighty frustrating to be defined by legal code.