Supreme Court to Affirm Right to Bear Arms?!?

Discussion in 'Politics' started by madanthonywayne, Mar 19, 2008.

  1. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    The Supreme Court is hearing its first major case on the Second Ammendment in decades. So far, it seems they're getting ready to affirm the personal right to bear arms.
     
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  3. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    well neither the typical liberal or conservative view on the topic is correct but it seems like they are going to go with the conservative one here
     
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  5. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    The end of the beginning?

    Source: New York Times
    Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/washington/17scotus.html
    Title: "Gun Case Causes Bush Administration Rift", by Linda Greenhouse
    Date: March 17, 2008

    I don't think anyone should be surprised that the Court is leaning toward the individual right to bear arms. But the Devil, as the saying goes, is in the detail. And that will prove the compelling aspect to this story.

    The article suggests that a dispute has arisen within the Bush administration because Clement's brief "offers a road map for finding the law unconstitutional, but by a different route from the one the appeals court took." According to the New York Times, Clement's approach is regarded by some in the administration as "close to betrayal".

    And while there had been speculation that Clement would amend his argument once he was in front of the justices, he remained firm in defense of the machine-gun ban:

    It is interesting to note that while Chief Justice Roberts apparently "expressed considerable impatience" with Clement's argument, Justice Scalia took a different tack, pointing out that machine guns were not in use at the time of the Second Amendment's drafting. "I don't see why you have a problem," Scalia said. Justice Breyer, for his part, seemed to support the law, pointing to early regulations on firearms including a Massachusetts law that prohibited keeping a weapon loaded at home because of the risk of fire.

    It is not impossible that the Court will actually duck the issue:

    Additionally, Clement argued that, "The Second Amendment talks about the right to bear arms, not just a right to bear arms. And that pre-existing right always coexisted with reasonable regulations of firearms." And while Roberts, in expressing his impatience, stated, "I don't know why, when we are starting afresh, we would try to articulate a whole standard that would apply in every case," it is not beyond reason to suggest that, in starting afresh, the Court is not presuming anything about the individual right. There seems to be a gap wide enough for the court to sail through in agreeing with Mr. Gura that the D.C. statute fails any reasonable measure of constitutional scrutiny.

    Nonetheless:

    Stay tuned. It may be a while yet before we know what any of this means in practice.
    _____________________

    See Also:

    Novak, Robert D. "Gun Battle at the White House?" Washington Post. March 13, 2008; page A17. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/12/AR2008031203396.html

    Greenhouse, Linda. "High Court Considers Right to Bear Arms". New York Times. March 18, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/washington/18cnd-scotus.html
     
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  7. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    what a pitty, maybe the supreme court could sugest that if people need to keep "guns" they could keep a bb gun and thats all. After all that would be about as effective as anything privatly kept against the tanks
     
  8. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Tanks, crackheads, the black people down the street. Whatever works.

    Let's wait for the court's ruling before we decide how much of a pity it is. Given what the Constitution says, Asguard, you, personally, can expect to be disappointed.

    Is there a supreme law of the land in Australia? Something that every other law has to answer to?
     
  9. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    The Supreme Court will uphold the second amendments intentions of having anyone be given the right to bear arms unless of course they are a convicted felon or have a medical mental problem.
     
  10. TW Scott Minister of Technology Registered Senior Member

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    Which unfortunately is still a perversion of the original intent of the second amendment.

    At the time the British Government used the army like a whip against the common people. It wasn't the Bobbies who c ame to arrest people, it was the Army. The Army also possessed rights and privilages that would makeany sane person cringe. They could basically do anything they wanted, as long as they filed a report that said the victims did anything to provoke them.

    The second amendment was a attempt by the founders to put the citizens in charge of the government. After all if the citizens are as well armed as the Army, or at least comparably, then the possibility of a government trying to abuse it's people becomes null. Freedom of Speach is an important part of our freedoms, but the Right to bear Arms is the corner stone.
     
  11. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    I am pleased with the direction this seems to be going, but, as Tiassa pointed out, the devil is in the details. I was pretty scared when I heard the Court was going to hear this case. I don't even own a gun, but I planned to run out and buy one if the Court overturned the second ammendment.

    I'll bet I wouldn't be alone either. A decision in favor of banning gun ownership would likely set off a run on guns and ammo.
     
  12. mikenostic Stop pretending you're smart! Registered Senior Member

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    What people seem to be painfully and eternally oblivious to is that banning gun ownership does precisely jack shit in stopping crime.
    Washington D.C. is a PRIME example. All it does is keeps the honest, law-abiding citizens from (legally) owning one. That paves the way for thieves, drug dealers, gang members to illegally obtain them(which they will regardless if there is a total gun ban), and terrorize the honest citizens.
    I'm all for gun control, BUT in the form of making it difficult to obtain one(i.e. mental issues, felon, etc.), not forbidding otherwise qualified people from keeping one in their house.
    If it is known that a person that lives in a certain house has a handgun, would-be burglars usually avoid those houses because they know they will be catching a few rounds if they ever tried to break into that house. Even if they think the owner might own a gun, they steer clear.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Guns can attract burglars.

    One of my brothers lived in a burglar-attractant neighborhood - every house on their block was robbed, and the guns (most had guns) stolen. Their house had no guns, and was not robbed - they had a dog, a lovely, quiet, sweet-tempered Akita who wouldn't hurt a fly unless it tried to come in the house without permission.

    But in general, the second amendment seems pretty clear. The only difficulty comes in the meaning of the word "militia" - people seem to think it means an organized force with weapons storage and the like. I doubt Roberts will have any difficulties parsing things.

    The wild card might be Scalia - it would be just like that egocentric blockhead to decide that because the repeating rifle didn't exist when the Constitution was written, only black powder or single shot weapons are covered under original intent.
     
    Last edited: Mar 19, 2008
  14. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    Must you reduce every issue/topic to such a either/or choice? Politics is a little more complicated than this.
     
  15. mikenostic Stop pretending you're smart! Registered Senior Member

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    I have the best of both worlds; two guns, and a 90 lb. Doberman that barks rather fiercely when someone knocks on the door, every bit as ferocious as the Akita if he sensed his domain was threatened. My shotgun and handgun stays in a safe at my house, with trigger locks.*
    I also have an alarm system for my house. If it goes off, the alarm company calls me. If I tell them that I didn't trip the alarm, they dispatch the police.
    Theives like to work as quick as they can, so if they can get past the alarm, past the Doberman and crack my safe to take my guns, then I believe they'd be way to talented to be breaking into a middle class house like mine.
    But the bottom line is, that having my guns stored at my house with a small chance they might get stolen is a risk that I'm willing to take. And if you own guns in a burglar rich area, be sure to keep your guns locked to the point where burglars would deem that trying to get to them would not be worth the risk. Cracking safes takes a lot of time, even for experts.

    *the handgun, whenever possible, goes with me and stays in the car. Whenever I'm in the house, it's in my nightstand drawer, loaded.
     
  16. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    It depends what you mean by surpreme law

    There is no bill of rights in australia, they all come from either legislation or common law

    Our constitution is mostly interested how power and responcability is devided. For instance the fact that water is a state responcability alone and so if the fed want control over the murry then the states have to CHOSE to hand that power over and can take it back. The constitution also defines the deference between the terriotries and the states ect
     
  17. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Notes on the question

    The thing is, though, I just don't see how they could "ban" gun ownership. The big question at play here is how many hoops people would have to jump through. Once upon a time, at another board—now defunct—I proposed my infamous "accountability" standard, that there are no accidents. One can own whatever firearm they want, but the owner is legally—both civilly and criminally—responsible for every round fired from those weapons. There are no accidents. A gun owner seized on the word accountable and pointed out that it's too much paperwork to ask of gun owners, and would thus infringe on the right to keep and bear bear arms. Paperwork? O ... kay. My thing was, and is, that when it's guns and bullets, "I didn't mean to shoot ____" shouldn't be an acceptable excuse.

    And I still like that standard. If you shoot at a criminal in your living room, fine. If you miss and hit something else, you will answer accordingly. No accidents, no excuses. I mean, I recall after the Long Island Railroad shooting someone pointed out that things would have gone better if a bunch of other people on the train were armed, and perhaps it would have. But this argument presumes that all of a sudden people are smart, calm and collected, and accurate. The argument necessarily presumes that the vigilantes and defenders of righteousness will never miss. And where do you draw the line? Some people say they will shoot another over a car. A guy once shot a thirteen year-old runaway for searching his trash can for something to eat. There was the infamous Halloween shooting when a guy shot through a closed door and killed a student trying to ask him directions. I was in a bar one night and a domestic dispute broke out. And yeah, afterward there was the tough talk from the usual suspects about how the guy was lucky the bouncers got him first, or else, "I woulda killed him!" Drunk people looking for an excuse? Not exactly people I want packing heat.

    In reality, the question will probably reflect the well-regulated militia. Does requiring an educational standard in shooting—e.g. some sort of registration and licensing—infringe on your right to keep and bear arms? Would it be an infringement to require you to buy shooter's insurance? Does the right of the militia to keep and bear arms mean you ought to be able to pack heat at the library, or your kid's school?

    What actually bothers me most about the gun-control debate is the general dishonesty of the gun lobby and its arguments. So many individual gun owners who echo that rhetoric only hurt their own credibility when they do. Gun control advocates, while often overzealous—and I think the D.C. law will probably fall under that category—are at least well-intended. Their concern is society at large, including other people beside themselves and their own. This doesn't seem true of the "NRA line" and the people who echo it. One way of putting it is that I remember being a kid, and wanting to be a soldier, and wanting to kill bad guys. And I grew up and got over it. I remember wanting to be a police officer, and wanting to get in fancy shootouts like you'd see in Miami Vice. And I grew up and got over it. I thought Schwarzeneggar was cool in Commando. I still adore that movie no matter how bad it is. And at some point I remember wanting to settle justice that way. And I grew up and got over it.

    A lot of the arguments of the gun lobby, especially in the hands of the individual gun owners suggest they haven't grown up and gotten over their vigilante machismo and lethal weapon fantasies. To listen to the pro-gun arguments, I ought to be frightened silly of the world and my neighbors. They're all out to kill me, steal my children, and such. And my government is trying to kill me.

    Yesterday I was talking to a friend who asserted—and I have neither verified or debunked the claim—that all of the PR disasters of the Iraq War stemmed from the actions of reservists and Guard personnel as opposed to full-time professional soldiers. But we got to talking about the conscience of a soldier, and how, in his experience—and he's known more soldiers than I have—they don't like certain orders. We talked about the Esquivel Hernandez shooting in Texas; he seemed to think the soldiers he knew would hate such domestic duty. So I raised a point that belongs in the gun control discussion. Do we really believe that, if our armed services—the Army, the Marines, even the National Guard—were told to go house to house and seize all the guns, that they would obey?

    I don't. Charlton Heston does. The NRA does. A whole bunch of my gun-toting neighbors do. I've always found it strange that liberals who worry about a nod-and-wink culture surrounding military misbehavior are accused of trashing our noble, valiant service members, yet the conservative who says soldiers will murder their own families to take away the guns doesn't have to answer that charge.

    But this is what unsettles me about the gun advocates. We're supposed to live in a constant state of fear: the crackheads, the illegal immigrants, the government. Some people seem to resent the portrayal of gun advocates as paranoiacs with itchy trigger fingers, but that image comes from the public voice of the gun advocates. And it's a tough choice between options: Are they really that frightened and belligerent, or are they just trying to con us? Given that the stake involves devices designed to kill, it seems an important question.

    I won't even start on the flexible definition of the phrase "responsible gun owners".

    When we set aside the irrationality of the "pro-gun" argument and look at the question before the court, it's hard to imagine how the court could side with the D.C. law. I mean, the rhetoric is there, but it would be a new standard well opposed to what we might expect given the current composition of the court. The court does have an out to avoid ruling one way or another on the individual right; it could simply focus on the law at hand and whether, as attorney Gura has suggested, the statute can pass any reasonable measure of scrutiny. But "banning gun ownership" is a ruling so far outside probability that we need rocket engines, plenty of oxygen, and a few years at least to reach.
     
  18. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    tiassa here is an interesting loop hole waiting for exploitation for you. The amendment doesnt say where a gun is to be kept, all it says is you have the right to HAVE them. So by rights the high court could say that everyone can have a gun but all guns MUST remain locked in a police station unless they a signed out for a specific purpose (like fighting off the english hords)
     
  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    A complicated drama

    It doesn't actually work that way. The court could rule that in allowing people to keep the weapons in their homes, the Second Amendment is fulfilled, and that neither the restrictions on what kinds of guns nor the requirement to keep them disassembled infringes on the intent of the Constitution vis a vis the well-regulated militia.

    But even this is unlikely. In the past, the Court has worked to avoid settling this question, and they could easily do the same this time. The only real question is the integrity of the two new justices, which has already fallen into doubt. Roberts, at least, wants to pretend the Court is attempting to start the whole question over, but nobody knows what his presuppositions are. In other words, he might come back and assert that Americans should be able to possess thermobaric and nuclear weapons. This is even less likely than the court upholding the D.C. law, but I haven't confidence in the character of these two judges that they won't throw the debate completely out of context. I hope I'm wrong on the issue of their integrity.

    I'm of the opinion that the Constitution is fairly clear. The only real question is where to draw the regulatory line. People have the right to keep and bear arms. The government has a constitutionally-prescribed interest in regulating on behalf of the general welfare, common defense, and the security of our free state.

    The way it will work is that the court will decide the basic questions of the suit. If we presume the court will strike down the D.C. law, a potential ruling would be 5-4, with Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy in the majority, and Breyer, Ginsberg, White, and Stevens in dissent. The majority opinion would likely be written by Roberts, Alito, or Scalia, with Kennedy writing a concurrence, which is an opinion that, while it holds with the majority on the primary question, dissents on certain points. In other words, we might see a majority striking down the D.C. law while only a minority would assert a specific individual right. There are many ways this could work out, but the one thing that would surprise me most is if this particular law withstood Constitutional scrutiny.

    And, yes, the court well could rule that the law is valid and the people have an individual right to own firearms. Almost no matter what, if the court takes up the question of the individual right to keep and bear arms, you'll hear someone complain about judicial activism.

    (And, yes, the court could refuse to decide anything and follow Solicitor General Clement's suggestion that the case be sent back to the appeals court.)

    As courtroom dramas go, this one is up there.
     
  20. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    tiassa although i think my post would be the most PREFERABLE decision (ie to limit the second amendment to the narrowest possable interpritation) i wasnt really commenting on what they WILL do but rather what they COULD do. They COULD interprite it to mean you have the right to have a BB gun or they COULD interprite it to mean that you have the right to a nuke but it has to be locked up in a police station untill the english arive.

    All it says is you have the right to own "arms" which could even be interpreted as a kitchen knife if thats what they wanted to do.

    Of course for this to happen we would have to see a masicure where every judge on the bench had there young children shot my a psych pt and see what they ruled THEN
     
  21. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    It's mostly illusion that legislation controls the prevalence of weaponry.

    That's far more directly proportional to how much people within a given society seriously contemplate killing each other.
     
  22. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    possably but legislation (and a HUGE ocean and good coustoms service) help a great deal.
     
  23. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    But the actual supply of guns is a factor.
     

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