12-07-2020, 02:37 PM
(12-07-2020, 07:12 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-06-2020, 03:30 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: No, here is the Second Amendment:
Quote:A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.[35][/url]
It's about a militia necessary for the enforcement of the law; suppression of Indian attacks, pirate raids; and slave revolts (now of course obsolete); and formation of state equivalents of the National Guard. The right to bear arms is no more absolute than freedom of speech (I do not have the right to go into a bank or a store and say "This is a stick-up", if I am in business I have no right to do false advertising or to speak in a way in which to facilitate a fraud).
from Wikipedia:
Quote:In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that, "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendments [sic] means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government."[15] In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment did not protect weapon types not having a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia".[16][17][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#cite_note-crs2a-17]
Apparently the government can prohibit me from possessing guns disguised as something clearly not a gun (let us say a cane or an umbrella), grenades, bombs, Katusha rockets, tanks, or nuclear warheads.
No right guarantees the right to harm others or restrict other's rights. It is correct to say as above that no right is absolute, but you should quote what the limits are. You should not say because rights have limits, rights are meaningless.
Cruikshank in 1876 was a ruling by the Jim Crow Supreme Court. They were paving the way to remove all rights so they could oppress the blacks. It was a political deal. The Republicans got the presidency. The Democrats got the south back. Most of these Jim Crow court cases have been clearly reversed, including this one.
Miller was an attempt to disarm gangsters based on the logic of the Jim Crow decisions. The government was trying to forbid gangsters from carrying shotguns and tommy guns, which had no military use at the time. Unfortunately, tommy guns were the early assault weapons, and became commonly used by the US military by World War II. Shotguns were commonly carried in Vietnam. Miller sets up a litmus test that essentially says everyone has a right to own and carry assault weapons and shotguns.
Arms that are disguised as something else are still arms. With the Jim Crow understanding that the government could regulate non militia arms, it made sense to limit disguised arms. With the right firmly an individual right that cannot be infringed, there is far less justification for the laws against disguised arms.
Now nukes are arms too. So are hand grenades, weapons carried by common infantrymen with a direct bearing on the militia. Just because the Founding Fathers did not anticipate weapons development doesn't mean there isn't a need to amend the Second today. It should be possible to forbid certain military arms while allowing folks to own and carry civilian arms. Compromise has proven difficult. The reds are correct according to the text of the amendment and the intent of the authors. The blues are correct by a century of Jim Crow precedent and common sense. Each is hoping for a total victory and is not willing to yield.
Being willing to listen and compromise seems necessary. Instead we get extremists uttering half truths.
If I could I would rewrite the Second Amendment so that it makes clear that
(1) military weapons are not for civilian use, which is consistent with the early-American practice of recognizing that infantry weapons were similar to hunting rifles and really had dual purpose. The common man did not get to keep artillery pieces and certainly not naval weaponry. The Uzi, AK-47, and AR-15 are infantry weapons for modern warfare, but they are not hunting weapons. Machine guns take special training to use due to the recoil. What possible use in civilian life could one have for Katyusha rockets of the type that mowed down the Wehrmacht on the German-Soviet front in World War II? The infantry weapons of the American Revolution were the ones that people killed deer with for venison.
(2) the States have the obvious right to own and such weapons as needed for law enforcement and to delegate to subordinate political entities (county and city governments) the right to establish responsible militias. The federal government was not going to enforce state or local laws with a highly-centralized police force. The States could form equivalents of the National Guard to meet emergencies before a distant Congress could respond.
(3) the idea that the States supply their militias to any national Army (or air force or navy) is obsolete. Such has not been done since the Civil War. The Army, Navy, and Air Force may 'borrow' them, but on the whole... the Union Army was structured (if you want to call it structure) with entities such as Battery "A" 1st Michigan Volunteer Light Artillery, but that sort of structure did not apply in any war beginning with the Spanish-American War. Still, natural disasters are legitimate uses for state (but clearly well-disciplined) militias.
(4) persons who would be rejected from service in a militia for reasons of character (especially criminal record) or mental inadequacy (idiocy or lunacy, as the old words went) should not have guns or access thereto. We don't need anything like the Dirlewanger brigade (Oskar Dirlewanger was a sexual sadist and a fanatical, brutal Nazi... and you can imagine how his brigade of his selection of criminals and perverts operated). Weapons suited only to criminal use are not military weapons and nobody has any inherent right to those.
(5) any such amendment would have a non-discrimination clause (as with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and subsequent amendments establishing or extending voting rights) and would give the states the right to control the 'import' of weapons into their states as is so with the repeal of Prohibition. As an example, someone prohibited by New York state law
from owning a firearm would not be able to buy a gun in Virginia and bring it back to New York or have someone ship such a gun from Virginia (Virginia has lax gun laws).
It would take an Amendment to the Constitution simply to establish a non-discrimination clause to the Second Amendment, and that would be appropriate.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
