Maybe you’re right about the legal aspects, but I suspect this would just depend on which party happens to have a majority of SCOTUS justices at the moment (i.e. the Republicans own the SCOTUS now, and have for many years, but that probably won’t last forever). I’m less and less convinced that any of this is more than just a house of cards that we all happen to (mostly) agree to avoid tipping over. I don’t think it would take much to expose how truly flawed and vulnerable our system is (and much of that is happening as we speak).
How do you know this? Previous decisions had mentioned it as a right to defense.
No way to read it otherwise, is there?
Of course there is, experienced justices ruled otherwise in Heller and previous decisions.
Unless you think you know more law than a Supreme Court Justice?
…And by resounding unanimous decision, if I recall. :rolleyes:
Like I already said: “It sounds like you took issue with the fact that I agree with Stevens and you disagree with Stevens.”
You know what word doesn’t show up at all in Stevens’ dissent.
Overturned.
He, and I, never once said Heller overturned precedent. There is a world of difference between overturning precedent and misreading and mistakenly distinguishing precedent. Which is what the majority opinion did.
I get that you want to make it seem like Heller wasn’t a shift in the interpretation of the Second Amendment, but it is.
“Overturned” was a poor word choice on my part. The operative phrase was “contrary to precedent” which is the line of discussion that I took issue with. In that sense, I’m not seeing much of a distinction, but I would continue to say that nothing in Heller was contrary to precedent as you asserted in post #252. Heller did carve new ground and made certain things more explicit of course.
No* intellectually-honest *way.
Recognizing a right that, according to precedent, had not been recognized before, is, to my mind, “contrary to precedent”. You are free to think otherwise.
Heck, I think there is certainly a right to self defense, although it is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights. I also think there is an individual right to keep and bear arms. But that should not be the end of the inquiry, just the beginning. But it’s pretty clear that Heller changed the state of the law which, until it was decided, had pretty firmly been established.
I’ve been following this thread because I think it’s fascinating, and I’ve learned a lot from both sides. About your #1, though, I’m curious: would you support higher taxes to “get more counseling and such out there”? I’m not trying to jack the thread, but I’ve heard this line, yet I never hear the people using it say they’d support what it would cost to make this happen. Is it hand-waving, or do you really mean it?
You never see or hear them actually doing anything about it, either.
Roe vs Wade wasnt unanimous.
Lawrence v. Texas wasnt unanimous.
Obergefell v. Hodges wasnt unanimous.
Mapp v. Ohio wasnt unanimous.
Miranda v. Arizona wasnt unanimous.
I guess those are all bad decisions then, eh?:rolleyes:
Sure, or we could just not waste the billions on the “Wall”.
I write my congresscritter, what do you do?
You didn’t say anything about good or bad decisions. You said: “…experienced justices ruled otherwise in Heller and previous decisions.”
Implying what exactly; that the dissenting SCOTUS judges were inexperienced in the law?
I choose not to contribute to the problem by buying guns.
Not implying, sorry I am out and out stating that the posters here on this message board are not experienced justices in Constitutional Law.
No, they were simply out voted, which occurred in all those rather groundbreaking, great and critical cases i posted.
*Roe vs Wade wasnt unanimous.
Lawrence v. Texas wasnt unanimous.
Obergefell v. Hodges wasnt unanimous.
Mapp v. Ohio wasnt unanimous.
Miranda v. Arizona wasnt unanimous.*
So, as you seem to be implying any decision which isnt unanimous is a bad one, which make all of those great decisions also bad. :rolleyes:
I disagree- lack of unanimity seems to be the hallmark of a groundbreaking, great and critical case.
You know, I’m going to rule that an insult, Elvis. Such phrasing has been ruled so before.
Don’t insult other posters, nor even imply that they are lying.
The Second Amendment, if one reads it literally, always applied to state governments as well as the federal government, and the Constitution plainly and clearly gives states the power to make and enforce criminal law. Were the Second Amendment to be repealed it would be entirely constitutional for any state government to simply make it illegal to possess a firearm, just as it is Constitutional for them to make any number of things illegal that are not specifically protected in the Constitution.
Bolding mine. In point of fact, both of the two last sentences are true, and political philosophies differ largely in the extent to which they value the role of government or, alternatively, seek to minimize it. The whole gun debate in essence revolves around that issue – whether it’s government’s role to promote a society that is relatively free of guns so that the right not to be killed by a random lunatic is part of the social contract, or whether possession of such weaponry is an individual right regardless of the societal consequences.
The idea that “the government is subject to the people” is an oft-cited trope in American history, as if true democracies did not exist elsewhere. But in fact they do, and often in a more robust form, free of plutocratic rule, and relatively free of the corrupting influence of money in politics and relatively free of gun violence wrought by an extreme devotion to individualism. To quote a current conservative hero, Neil Gorsuch, making my point albeit no doubt unintentionally:
For Gorsuch, the structure of government is his lodestar even more fundamentally so than the Bill of Rights.
“North Korea has an excellent Bill of Rights,” he offers.
“They promise all the rights we have, and a bunch more. Right to free medical care, right to free education, and my favorite, a right to relaxation.”
“Now, ask political prisoners how is that working out?” he queries.
For Gorsuch, those promises “aren’t worth the paper they’re written on” because there aren’t structures to keep the power “from flowing into one set of hands.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/politics/neil-gorsuch-precedent-north-korea-washington-nationals-trump/index.html
Thus even the libertarian Cato Institute ranks the US #17 in the world on the Human Freedom Index [PDF], behind New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom, Finland, Norway, Taiwan, Germany, Estonia, Luxembourg, and Austria. And according to FreedomHouse.org, the US comes out much worse, way down at #53 on the index of personal freedom. So obviously the principle of government – or societal structures in general – being subservient to the people in America isn’t working out quite as intended.