I agree with you on the who, but your reading of the what is too expansive. Miller does not say what “arms” are covered by the amendment, only that they must be suitable for militia use. Given that explosives are in fact used by the military, it’s conceivable that they would be found suitable for militia use. Not likely, but conceivable.
What? 
I’m honestly asking you why you feel the need to require NICS-style background checks on every private transaction when the “problems” you raise (criminal transactions, or protecting “innocent” sellers from inadvertantly becoming criminals by selling to a criminal who is misrepresenting his criminal past) are, IMO (and backed up with some research), not really problems at all (not in comparison to the main flow of criminal firearms supply: thefts).
In the first, the criminals won’t comply (even if it raises some 5th Ad. issues), and in the second, isn’t shown to be any kind of problem.
Why have our NICS system flooded with thousands, perhaps tens-of-thousands more calls per daily basis, and strecth law enforcement even further running down harmless transactions, when other strategies hold a much better chance of succcess within the budgetary and manpower restraints of our current force of law enforcement officials?
Note that I’m not bashing your motives; techniques for better tracking of the criminal gun traffic are worthy of consideration, with the end-goal of interrupting this supply in mind. But these techniques need to have some reasonable basis of success without stretching law enforcement beyond it’s ability to cope, and without distracting them from chasing criminals and instead has them chasing citizens on what turns out, 99% of the time, to be nothing worthy of their time and effort.
That’s my point.
Please: look in the classifieds of your local paper and see how many “Guns For Sale” there are, and specifically, what types; research Maryland’s gun transaction laws, especially handgun transactions (the choice weapon of criminals).
Occasionally. When I have shit like this splashed across my screen.
(1) If you think it’s not really a problem at all when criminals purchase guns, you’re batshit crazy.
(2) If you think that a secondary market for criminals to purchase guns should remain open and unregulated because there is also a primary market, you’re batshit crazy.
(3) Delete introductory clauses.
You should do something about that batshit stiupid s.o.b.
“batshit stupid”
That is all.
It’s not a problem, comparatively speaking, if it’s only, say, 1% of that supply equation.
If it is the secondary, sure, lock it up tight. But if it is the tertiary, or whatever the word is for the fourth, fifth, or even lower part of the supply equation, I don’t see it as effective employment of law enforcement resources to focus on it and not spend more time and energy on the, say, top 3.
And a raft of state and federal laws hardly constitutes “unregulated.” Texas may be more liberal than, say, California, inasmuch as Texas doesn’t go any further than the current federal laws, but still, it’s not “unregulated.” It may be largely untraceable, depending on where you live, but thta’s a horse of a different color.
And if I’m batshit crazy, then you made me that way. :wally
So if only, say, 1% of drunk drivers got loaded at titty bars, you’d be in favor of exempting titty bars from laws limiting service of intoxicated patrons?
[quote\If it is the secondary, sure, lock it up tight. But if it is the tertiary, or whatever the word is for the fourth, fifth, or even lower part of the supply equation, I don’t see it as effective employment of law enforcement resources to focus on it and not spend more time and energy on the, say, top 3.[/quote]
We’re not talking about law enforcement resources, batshit crazy person. We’re talking about the law. Do you or do you not want the law to enable criminals to purchase guns on the tertiary market?
Bow before the great and powerful minty green, know-it-all at law! Able to make sane people batshit crazy merely through the force of argument!
Throught he force of you not being able to see the foolishness of your argument!
To resort to colloquialism:
You’re tossing up a great big barn door to keep the billy goat out of the dog chow, when it’s the thousands of crows in the cornfield you really need to be worried about.
Requiring NICS-style background checks for every private transaction will require not only NICS but dozens of state agencies to greatly expand their telecom capacity to the NICS centers (and state equivalents), as well as adding additonal staff (requiring salaries, health benefits, retirement plans, etc.,) to handle the increased volume.
Failure to do so will result in the backdoor banning of private sales, as those centers, under current staffing, will become swamped and unable to respond to the thousands of additional calls flooding their switchboards.
I would much rather see those resources go towards funding law enforcement, prosecutors, and institutions of incarceration, and have them focusing on the greater conduits of “illicit flow of guns” than the (much) lesser.
Now excuse me, I gotta go kick Elvis in the balls (figuratively speaking).
I didn’t say state militia national guard, I said state militia.
If you actually read Perpich, you’d see that indeed they confirm the complete federalization of the National Guard as an adjunct to the U.S. Armed Forces.
How can they guarantee the state’s the right to form militias of the people, even while taking that militia away, turning it into a full-time auxiliary federal force not under the control of the states, and denying the state’s executive powers the ability to withhold consent to have their state militias participate in federal activities to which they object?
It has become precisely the “select federal corps” to which the FF were so opposed. It is no longer the militia of, for, or by the people, but of Uncle Sam.
Here’s but one example of the real militia. Here’s another.
And if you had read it, Justice Stevens (delivering the opinion of a unanimous court) confirmed the total federaliztion of the National Guard, reserved to the states only when the Fed don’t need or want them.
:rolleyes: Then actually cite the Supreme Court; it ain’t that hard, kemosabe. Although I personally think FindLaw’s search engine is more user-friendly.
There you go. Glad to help. Now you know how to Google a little better.
While affirming that it is indeed the militia that the Constitution refers to. That’s the final word, like it or not.
More farting in the wind deleted. We already know you don’t like the law the way it is. Complain all you like but it doesn’t matter. Getting the laws changed or an amendment passed to make it what you want would matter. Pretending you’ve already done so, or that the reality you don’t like is not actually reality at all, is, if short of “batshit crazy”, simply sad.
Does that mean you do now accept that those rulings are real, and applicable, and final pending this political effort you don’t seem willing to undertake? Does that mean that you cease whining about your assessment of the credibility of sources that refer to them? We can be hopeful of that, but not optimistic.
(a) Nonsense. (b) Even if not nonsense, BFD.
So far in this thread, you’ve taken the position that private sales account for only a minor portion of the overall number of gun sales. So if it’s only a minor portion, how would requiring them to also phone in for a background check going to “greatly expand” the burden on those poor beleaguered NICS bureaucrats? Seems to me that if, say, 5% of sales are private, then we need to expand the background check position by 5%. And my guess is that private sales account for well less than 5% of gun sales.
And even assuming we would need to “greatly increase” backgroud check capacity, so what? It’s a democracy, after all. If the public, through its elected representatives, wants to make background checks universal, and is willing to foot the bill for it, that’s their call to make.
No, I have not; it would be a pleasant change if you’d actually read what I posted. I said there no evidence to suggest that illicit sales account for anything more than a [very] minor portion of private transactions.
If the informed “public” truly decides that it wants to marshall law enforcement resources and bureaucracies against a minor source of criminal activity (when other, larger sources are more in need of addressing), then fine.
But if a handfull of anti-gun yahoo legislators decide that they want to backdoor ban private transactions with another piece useless, feel-good legislation, and lie and distort the facts to achieve it, then I’m against it.
The slippery slope is an essential aspect of your persecution complex, isn’t it?
:rolleyes: You are such a tit. Why do you even bother?
I was waiting for later, but since you insist.
I googled what I wanted you to see (in illustration of my point), not what you wanted to think I was saying. Since the Federal gov’t has usurped the National Guard into being a near-total Federal force, many states have taken the initiative to [re]form their own State Guards.
Perpich affirms the near-total federalization of the National Guard as the “organized militia,” and acknowledges as law the unorganized militia per the U.S. code. The plain wording of Perpich clearly states that the “well regulating” is the organizing and diciplining of the armed forces, be they regulars, or militia (organized or unorganized); it does not mean “creating a raft of gun control laws to disarm the people.”
It is the People, in their role now as the “unorganized militia,” who have the right to “keep and bear arms,” of a type that is “…any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State of Tennessee, 2 Humph., Tenn., 154, 158.”[Miller]
The right to keep and bear as individuals who are not part of the organized militia (since that is what the unoragnized militia is comprised of) is being threatened with excessively restrictive gun control laws.
To my knowledge, such “keeping and bearing” has never been recognized or restricted under any Supreme Court ruling to be exclusive of other legal uses of firearms: recreational shooting, hunting, and self defense. If they have, please point it out to me.
What is interesting about Cases v. U.S. is that they felt the need to concoct some “mindest and intention” rule regarding a 2nd. Ad. challenge to the denial of a concealed carry permit, when no such justification was even necessary under Miller’s plain wording; they simply could have denied based upon concealed carry not being an ordinary function of an ordinary military unit, but that of some form of “special forces,” and of military police detectives (which are a select and special unit of the military police).
Also, in U.S. v. Tot, the court also could have upheld the conviction using the plain wording of Miller without resorting to rewriting history by simply saying that silenced weapons are not part of ordinary military equipment; again, it is a weapon used almost exclusively by “Special Forces.”
The legitimacy of the reasonable restriction of firearms and who may possess them has never been an issue except in the straw-man arguments of those wishing to categorize the NRA and other pro-rights organizations as “anti-control” (I’m not picking on you, Soul Brother, if you’re still reading).
By the plain wording of Miller, I should be perfectly within my rights to go out and purchase an M-16 without having to pay “special taxes” beyond ordinary sales taxes, or being required to have special gov’t permission beyond the standard BATF Form 4477 and the required NICS check to do so.
Ahem. You were insisting, at great length, that “The Militia Is The People” etc., not the National Guard By way of Googling, you left out (intentionally, apparently) the key phrase “National Guard”, and then went on at great length about not being able to find the name in the stuff that came up. As already seen, an *honest * inquiry shows the facts in, yes, about two seconds. You wanted me not to see the facts that you have refused to see. That is simply sad.
Your subsequent explanation about why you think the Supreme Court has always been wrong is of no consequence. Right or wrong, their word is final until either the Constitution is amended or they reverse themselves. Your disagreement is immaterial. Your preferred interpretation is of only casual interest. Your loud insistence that anyone who disagrees with it is a “fucking liar” and so forth persuades no one but yourself. The law is what it is, not what you or anyone else might want it to be. Someone who tells you so is telling the truth, not lying. Someone who insists that their disagreement trumps the law is lying - someone like you, that is. Is that clear now?
Is it also clear that the result of the relevant Supreme Court decisions is that the “right” to bear arms is not affirmed to be universal or individual, but in fact is limited to well-regulated militia use - like it or not?
Nor has any ruling affirmed your preferred absolutist interpretation, not in 220 years. As minty has pointed out, they haven’t had to decide broader issues in order to rule on narrow ones.
Go right ahead and become a test case, then. Be sure to let us know how it turns out.
Minty
I have a question on your little tet a tet with Una regarding the meaning of “well regulated”. As far as I can tell, Una presented some points that an alternate meaning for the phrase could reasonably be considered what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Your response was “No, it’s not”, but AFAICK, this is based entirely upon your own opinion. In essence, you’re saying “It is my opinion that that opinion is wrong, and that settles it” The only prop you seem to have under your argument is that the word regulate was used elsewhere in the Constitution to mean governmental control, but that seems a very flawed argument, the logic that a word with more than one meaning is limited to only one of those meanings in a single document makes no sense. It galls me that you would have the gall to suggest that. Since the rest of the BoR is all about limiting the power of the government over the citizens of the U.S. and reaffirming the belief that rights inherently belong to the people unless they are specifically limited by the Constitution, why do you believe that this one rogue amendment, the 2nd, is about unilaterally removing certain rights from the people and assigning control of these rights to the government? That’s certainly logically inconsistent, to say the least. And what gives your opinion more weight that the one Una quoted? Finally, I note that earlier in the thread, you stated that Miller “didn’t bother to show up” for his Supreme Court case, considering that the man was dead at the time, doesn’t that strike you as a slightly disingenuous way to put it?
Mhendo,
The onus of obeying the law is on the individual, not on the government to make him obey. Me? I wouldn’t take the chance. If I owned any guns, and wanted to sell them, I’d do so through a licensed dealer where a check is made. If you wanna sell a gun to Joe Schmo because he has an honest face, and he uses it to gun down a bus load of pregnant nuns, and you get prosecuted for selling him the gun, well, that’s the risk you take, isn’t it? You played fast and lose with the law and it cost you. The law covering this particular situation is already on the books.
Dave, you have completely misread my posts. I refer you in particular to #103 to correct your misapprehension. In short, I take issue only with the assertion that the word “regulate” meant something completely different than it does today. I do not dispute that the word may be employed in different senses/definitions, nor that it was so employed in the 18th century.
I also refer you to the text of the Bill of Rights, which (to the extent that it makes any practical difference at all, which it doesn’t) does in fact, liguistically speaking, confer rights on people in addition to recognizing other rights and restricting the powers of the government. See Amendment VI (“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed . . . .”).
I was referring to his trial, which is where he was required (and failed) to put on evidence of the gun’s suitability for militia use. As discussed above, you can’t submit evidence on appeal. I don’t know when Miller kicked the bucket, nor do I care, since his case is still the binding law of the land.