Debate about Gun Control

[Bob Butler 54]

(06-22-2016, 07:00 PM)Mikebert Wrote: 2008 is not recent?  I was refering to this portion of Heller.

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

For example, based on that statement above I would say the 2nd Amendment does not necessarily given one the right to own a nuke (Justin 77 argued that the 2nd Amendment guaranteed the right to bear any military weapon, even a nuke).  Not all law-abiding people will continue on to the future to be law-abiding.  People can (and do) go beserk.  When they do so with a revolver they may kill a dozens, with a nuke it could be tens of thousands.  All I was saying is there must be some line between owning a handgun (Heller) or shotgun (Miller) that is guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment and a personal nuke, which I should hope is not.

The hoped for line is whether the weapon is crew served or not.  In revolutionary times, individuals owned and carried muskets, but the cannon were owned by the community.  This is considered a decent pretext for drawing a line.  If a weapon is crew served, there is no protection.

Legally and in many cases practically it's a decent line.  Alas, it doesn't cover suitcase nukes.  Also, as computers and precision guidance makes more and more dangerous weapons single soldier light weight single operator ready to use, what might be a fine litmus test today could become an ugly precedent not too many decades down the road.

Miller's litmus test is thus important.  Is the weapon carried by common infantrymen?  If so, it is protected by the 2nd.  In the 1930s, sawed off shotguns and assault rifles (specifically the Thompson submachine gun) were not used by the military.  They were gangster weapons, not military weapons.  Thus they were banned.  Alas, by World War II the Thompson was commonly used by the military.  In Vietnam, soldiers clearing out tunnel complexes were using sawed off shotguns.  By the Miller litmus test, that flipped these weapons from subject to ban to protected.

That's what  you have to watch about Miller.  The litmus test is not that the weapon is too deadly.  It is that the weapon has no military use, has nothing to do with the maintenance of a well regulated militia.  Thus, under the Collective Rights / Jim Crow interpretation of the 2nd, the government could restrict possession of the weapon.  While modern gun prohibition advocates misquote Miller as saying it establishes that specific weapons can be banned, they don't quote to criteria established that determines which weapons can be banned.  

Gun rights advocates also quote Miller, but with an entirely different spin.  From their point of view, Miller establishes that common infantry weapons are specifically protected.  Today, that means assault rifles.  This is clearly not what the gun prohibitions favor.  If the question weren't values locked to death I might favor rewriting the 2nd such that a true right to own and carry weapons for self defense clearly and plainly exists, but limitations on things like rate of fire and magazine size are allowed.  Alas, reasonable compromise doesn't seem to be on the table.

You really can't trust the main stream media's spin on the case.  Reading the actual Miller decision is recommended.