In the sense that people debate them, sure. But I find that many people (including Scalia) often “discover” that the constitutional principle that’s “true” happens to coincidentally be the one that matchs what they wanted to be true. I, at least, have avoided that. While I believe that the Second Amendment guaranteed individual gun ownership, I strongly wish that wasn’t true and the Second Amendment didn’t exist. But honesty forces me to conclude that my desires and reality don’t coincide here.
And more people have been killed by smallpox than polio. Does that mean we shouldn’t give out polio vaccine?
People being killed by privately owned guns is a seperate issue from people being killed in wars. What’s the point in saying we shouldn’t try to solve one problem because we can’t solve a different larger problem?
The question is whether individual gun ownership causes more deaths than it prevents. A comparison of societies with individual gun ownership to societies without indivual gun ownership is strong evidence that the answer is yes.
Armed populations rarely have mass murder perpetrated on them, is what I’m trying to get at.
As to your last point - Switzerland has the highest gun ownership rate in the world, and has almost no violent crime.
Not at all. It is a lot simpler. In the SC judgments there is the majority opinion which states the law and there are the dissentients, who get it wrong. How did Scalia manage to get the Guantanamo cases wrong, 3 times, particularly with the authority of the 2 previous cases known to him? Baffling.
It must be said that he is a curious thinker: Based on its considerations of public safety, the government sets up a tricky legal work-around to a constitutional guarantee of rights. Breach of the rights lead to commotion and outcry for the affected. Yet Scalia green-lights the scheme, deferring to the executive. It is a struggle to see how his reasoning will come down tomorrow though.
Can we not turn this into Generic Gun Argument #51925? This always happens. Someone wants to discuss a particular law or idea, and it quickly generates into “MURDERING TODDLERS!” this and “SWITZERLAND!” that.
Let’s discuss the particulars around the Heller ruling.
What, I’m just trying to refute the arguments put forth by Der Trihs. If a dog comes in and craps in the room, I’m going to clean it up, not just sit there and do nothing. I think we’ve all accepted that any gun thread in great debates is going to turn into a - surprise - debate about guns.
Anyway I’ll re-state my question which I asked earlier and was unanswered: If they rule against Heller - i.e. deciding that gun ownership is NOT an individual right - can that result in massive gun bans across the country, citing that case as precedent?
Most populations, armed or otherwise, don’t have mass murder perpetrated on them. So what’s your point?
And while armed citizens might have made some sense as a check on governmental tyranny back in 1789, those days are over. A modern army cannot be defeated by a bunch of individuals with their personal firearms. Private guns might make some sense in terms of self-defense against criminals but you’re not going to overthrow the government or fight off an invading army with a 38 or a deer rifle.
Once again, you’re confusing an anecdote with data. Should I cite an example of somebody who was shot by some mugger to “prove” that all guns should be banned? Rational people form conclusions by looking at all the evidence not just cherry-picking the evidence that supports their pre-existed beliefs. And if you look at all of the evidence, you’ll see a pretty indisputable connection between the amount of private gun ownership and the amount of gun crime victims.
The problem, Argent, is that in assuming they rule for Heller, we have the advantage of the oral arguments to look at. Even Justice Kennedy was pretty up on Heller, discussing milita weapons and all that. They seemed to be suggesting that Heller’s lawyer wasn’t going far enough.
We, ah… don’t really seem to have anything to go on contra Heller, from the Justices.
Regarding the Swiss- perhaps their economic demographics have a lot more to do with their low crime rate than their gun ownership. If you have no large economic underclass then one of the factors in crime rates isn’t there. Sort of like having gasoline and a match but no oxygen.
This will be remembered as a dark day in American history. This will also mark the extreme rightward movement of the Supreme Court pendulum. I am firmly convinced that Bush will be the last Republican president in my lifetime and that Democratic presidents will appoint justices who have a better grasp of justice. So when a few of the knuckle-walkers on the court start to die off and President Obama appoints wiser men and women, the pendulum will start swinging back, for good. All we can hope is that the Neanderthals on this Court don’t make the ruling so sweeping as to negate any controls. In time, it will be overturned. Dred Scott didn’t last forever.
A dark day in American history?
How on earth do you figure that? How could expanding one of the freedoms of the Bill of Rights ever be a dark day in American history?
Because they’re handing down a death sentence for countless victims of gun violence.
Holy Jesus H. Christ on the Cross. You really think that licensed concealed-handgun carriers are going to be committing violent crimes? Let me tell you something - felons don’t bother applying for carry permits. And “gun control” doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in D.C. which has a shit ton of crime despite having a handgun ban. Why? Because, uh, criminals don’t care about the law. Jesus, why is it SO hard for people to understand this. Law-abiding citizens get legal handgun permits to protect themselves and their families from criminals. Criminals get illegal handguns in order to commit crime. And they will get them no matter what the law says.
Anyway, weirdly enough, I can’t find a single thing about Heller on the CNN website.
I must be missing something big here. How could the decision possibly be anything other than a pro-gun victory? I read the oral arguments (PDF) and kept expecting that the case would hinge on some “the District of Columbia is not a state” technicality, but nothing like that showed up.
I can’t even see the debate, and I’m amazed that it took thirty years for this to reach the courts. The second amendment, whatever you may think of it, is pretty clear. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, period. The DC act, equally clearly, is infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
There seems to be two main arguments against this position, and I don’t get either one. The first is the “militia” thing, the first clause of the second amendment. It doesn’t change what the second clause says. If there were an amendment reading “Heroin being harmless, the right of the people to use heroin shall not be infringed” no-one would argue that the right to use heroin vanished by itself the moment heroin was found to have harmful effects; that amendment would be repealed instead.
The other is the argument that the world has changed, the framers couldn’t foresee the crime wave, they couldn’t know about rocket launchers and so forth. Well, so what? If the world changes so a law needs to change, change the law, don’t pretend it means something other than what it plainly means. If the second amendment causes trouble in the modern world, repeal or amend it. The tools are right there. If you say that will never happen because of popular opinion and whatnot - tough. That’s the price you pay for democracy; sometimes you won’t like the decisions made.
I’m not grinding my own axe here. I’m a European commie pinko gun control advocate. If an equivalent of the second amendment were proposed here in Sweden, I’d be against it. Still, if we make the two key assumptions that a) the Constitution matters and b) the guys who wrote it weren’t idiots, I can only see one reasonable outcome here.
Am I missing something?
T-1 hour and counting…
Heller has been affirmed.
AFFIRMED!!!
The Supreme Court affirmed the decision!
You may be on to something here.
Joking! Joking! For god’s sake don’t shoot!
Actually, I wonder if I am joking. What if there was enough support to actually get the second amendment repealed? Many of the gun debates I’ve seen revolve around interpreting the Second Amendment, but I must admit the fervor on both sides seems to transcend legality at times, at least in my eyes. Would those strongly (I don’t want to say fanatically, but I guess I am in this parenthetical) in favor of maintaining private ownership of guns abide by the law?
Of course it could never happen, as I’m pretty sure the majority of Americans support the right to own guns. Still, it’s an interesting thought experiment, though probably best suited for another thread.
Wow, 5-4? I didn’t think it would be that close. One majority opinion, two dissents.
More to come…
Congratulations. Now maybe you guys can fixate on something that actually matters in this world.