Gad, first you say that the 2nd doesn’t guarantee gun ownership of the private citizen and that the Framers never intended it to do so. Then you say that they only meant to protect militias right (stating that to bear arms only refers to doing so in a military capability.)
then you say that the Framers actually felt that the right of individual citizens to bear arms was indeed a God given right.
“the right of the people to keep and bear arms will not be infringed.”
In other words, government shall not infringe upon this right. The 2nd protects the right of the individual.
I gather that you argument is that even though the Framers felt that this was a God given right, they didn’t feel it necesary to protect it in the 2nd. Which strikes me as odd because they felt that the other rights were exactly that: God given rights that the gov’t had no business taking away.
I said it before, I’ll say it again: Cecil’s wrong on this one. Happens to the best of them.
Look, Zambezi, there are quite a few natural rights which the Framers felt were obvious but which were not enumerated in the Constitution. The right to property, for instance. Do you think that we don’t have the right to buy a piece of land, just because the Eleventh Amendment doesn’t say “A landed gentry being necessary to the prosperity of the state, Congress shall make no law prohibiting the purchase and ownership of property by private citizens”? Of course not.
Furthermore, I submit that there are some amendments whose purpose is now largely arcane. The Third, for one. Sure, if a soldier ever comes to your door and demands to be quartered, you’d be within your rights to turn him away, but somehow I don’t think that’s a very common occurrence.
Similarly, the Second Amendment, in its original incarnation, would have little relevance today. For the longest time, the Second Amendment was barely acknowledged in constitutional law texts, and it was seen to be a “dead amendment” very much in the way of the Third. Laurence Tribe’s treatise, long considered the standard in the field, had until recently a single footnote dealing with the Second Amendment–in which, to quote Sanford Levinson,
Then, about half a century ago, the NRA and other political organizations raised the amendment from obscurity, and bestowed upon it the veneration and focus it today receives.
Well, this would change constitutional law quote a bit. Just ignore amendments that don’t seem to be on-point anymore. That would make Supreme court decisions pretty interesting. Just ignore the inconvenient portions and pay attention to the one’s that are useful for the current political agenda.
So, according to you, the Framers said: “well, we see a whole bunch of rights that are obvious so we are not going to include those. Instead, let’s concentrate on protecting some rights that aren’t really that important.” ?
Apparently we will, since you seem hell-bent on misapprehending everything I say.
The acknowledgment that some amendments are more practically applicable than others won’t change constitutional law at all. What on earth prompted you to make such a bizarre statement? Running out of rhetorical steam? Are you seriously arguing that the Third Amendment is not, for all intents and purposes, “arcane” when evaluated in a current context? That’s not to say it’s invalid, or should be ignored–who knows, we may have an epidemic of involuntary soldier-quartering in the near future–but it’s certainly not been a burning issue, nor has it been addressed by the courts terribly often (if ever).
Gonna provide me with reams of Third Amendment case law? Good luck. All I’m saying is that some amendments are more relevant than others to present circumstances. As I noted on the other thread, the First, Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth have by far the broadest scope of any amendments; others are more particular, like the Third and (I’d argue) the Second.
Another thing that you should know if you’re gonna talk about the Bill of Rights–it wasn’t intended to be an enumeration of every single right possessed by citizens, or even just all the important ones. You must keep skipping over the parts of my posts where I discuss the (unenumerated) right to property, or else you’d know this already. The Constitution was setting out a framework of the government; the Bill of Rights was proscribing that government from legislating against certain freedoms that people had. Why did it explicitly protect some rights and not others? You can read Madison’s account of the Constitutional Convention, if you like–the delegates protected those rights which were deemed most needy of protection at that time, and which could be agreed upon by sufficient of the convention. Don’t discount that last part; there were significant differences of opinion over what should be contained in both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and compromises a’plenty.
They did not explicitly address the right to privacy, though it can be argued that many amendments are informed by that right.
They did not explicitly address the right to property, though clearly most amendments are dependent on that right.
And they did not explicitly address the right to private ownership of firearms, or oranges, or pitchforks, though the Second Amendment almost assuredly stipulates the former while conveying its protections.
Danielinthewolvesden, do you have a cite on this? HCI is keeping this stance well hidden from their own membership.
On another thread, someone quoted one officer of HCI who, in 1976, advocated banning all handguns. Needless to say, I would hope you’d be basing this claim on something a bit more substantive than that.
Thank you. I was under the impression that you were arguing otherwise. And that is my point. Regardless of your ranking of the amendments, they are still amendments, still law, and still applicable.
I would argue that they are not arcane as long as the threat exists. I am not sick now, but I keep medicine in my house anyway. No one is trying to kill me right now, but I don’t think that it makes laws against murder any less important.
This argument has gone from stattistics to you diatribes on the relative importance and scope of the constitution, the many amendments and the drafts thereof. I think it is time the hijackers surrendered.
Thank you. I was under the impression that you were arguing otherwise. And that is my point. Regardless of your ranking of the amendments, they are still amendments, still law, and still applicable.
I would argue that they are not arcane as long as the threat exists. I am not sick now, but I keep medicine in my house anyway. No one is trying to kill me right now, but I don’t think that it makes laws against murder any less important.
This argument has gone from stattistics to you diatribes on the relative importance and scope of the constitution, the many amendments and the drafts thereof. I think it is time the hijackers surrendered.
As to the statistical issue, most gun deaths are self inflicted. Gun deaths make up a minor portion of all deaths. Guns are not a major problem, constitutional or not.
In what way am I “ranking” the amendments? I’m saying that some are broad, and some are general; that some are practically applicable today, and some are less so. That hardly seems like a controversial or normative statement. The part of my argument with which you disagree is apparently the assertion that the Second Amendment, in its original incarnation, bears more resemblance to the Third Amendment than the First. Historical evidence bears me out–not because the Second is useless, but because the First is exceptional.
So, you ever gonna talk about the right to property, and why it’s not explicitly conferred by the Constitution? Feel free to open up a new thread.
Diatribes? Hardly. I will point out, though, that you’re one of the most terminally misinformed people it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter. Don’t have very good reading comprehension skills, either. And, as I’ve said, I only brought the constitutional argument to this thread because you insist on bringing a faulty interpretation to the table after I’d refuted your points. If you make an unfounded assertion on one thread, and someone corrects you, you can’t then make the same assertion in another thread without expecting a friendly reminder.
Conservative contradiction alert. Most gun deaths are self-inflicted, therefore there’s not a major gun problem. So the prevalence of something which facilitates suicide can’t be judged on that basis. But when states pass physician-assisted suicide measures, that’s sufficiently execrable for the right wing to forget their hallowed tradition of states’ rights and advocate the intervention of the federal government. Suicide–not a reason to act when it comes to guns, and more than enough of a reason to act when it comes to the results of a democratic initiative process. O-kay.
neither do you. I said I was done debating you. This little insult shows the true nature of your skills. I would have more to say about that but this is not the pit.
