It’s not as if gun control advocates will stop. There will be plenty of work to do. Unfortunately, I expect the real effect of this to be fairly minor for reason I stated earlier.
It’s ironic that you should put it in those terms - gun control advocates are the ones who are making this an issue. They’re proactively putting forth the effort in this case - gun rights advocacy is generally defensive in nature. So for you to attack, and then we defend, and you criticizing us for not taking up (in your eyes) more productive pursuits is somewhat hypocritical.
For what it’s worth, to me there may not be a nobler and more productive pursuit than the advocacy of human rights.
What significance, if any, is there to the fact that it was 5-4? Given that this is the first time in decades the SC has looked at the second amendment (AFAIK), and given that it seems to overturn a key doctrine of the earlier decision (Miller?), it seems pretty landmark to me. On the other hand, I don’t know whether such closely-split decisions tend to be landmark decisions or not. Maybe they do.
Does this suggest a floodgate opening of cases to define second amendment rights?
I’d like to celebrate, Yosemite Sam-style. Can someone recommend a make and caliber for the pistols, sufficient to levitate a 170-pound male when fired at the ground?
B) I’m at work, so I don’t have time to read it right now.
C) I was just clicking here to see the latest news.
With that in mind, I don’t know if this has been addressed. Forgive me if it has. IMO the anti-gun crowd by and large claims that the number of guns in American society is why our crime rate is so high compared to other countries who have stricter gun laws. The pro-choice crowd point out that American society is different from Japanese society or German society or whatever, and say that it’s the culture of violence that causes violent crime and not the number of firearms.
Here, it looks like BobLibDem agrees that demographics have ‘a lot more to do with their low crime rate’ than the number of guns.
In effect: ‘Guns are not the problem, so we need to regulate them more.’
Can someone who is actually a lawyer and not a pro/anti gun advocate comment on the ruling. I find the logic baffling. Scalia, the textualist, looks at the historical context to see that the 2nd ammendment applies more to hunting and self-defense than the militia - even though it is the militia that is in the text!
Also, from the news report it seems like automatic weapons can be restricted. I 'm not sure what the legal reasoning behind that is. I have no seen the dissents yet.
And yet it has served to run our body politic for a couple of centuries. Imagine that.
Furthermore, I don’t think it poorly written at all. Everything in that single sentence had a clear meaning well understood by the people who wrote it, and they went so far as to comment extensively upon it.
Some people with agendas in opposition to this sentence have tried over time to muddle its meaning. That has led to our present confusion, thankfully clarified by this decision.
And now we can debate what constitutes “well-regulated.” It is clear that firearms laws in general are perfectly constitutional, so long as they do not infringe too much on this individual right.
I don’t think guns affect the crime rate as much as the number of murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. I would not be surprised if crime rates would be higer overall in a society with stricter gun control.
All things being equal, I’d trade some rise in crime for lowering the rate of murder.
Well, they had to be linguists too. Keeping in mind that the amendment reads “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”, here’s some of the analysis:
“The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense.”
What about machine guns? Couldn’t we use the same argument? Perhaps the only reason that Americans don’t “overwhelmingly” choose them for lawful purposes is the fact that the federal government has an outright prohibition on new ones…
So even the dissent agrees that guns are an individual right. 9-0 AGAINST the collective rights nonsense. Hopefully this puts a nail in the coffin of that argument…
I haven’t gotten through all of the opinion yet, but I think this is the key part on the types of weapons protected (minus citations, which I’ve deleted for brevity):
This isn’t crystal clear, but it sounds like automatic rifles and heavier “military” weapons can still be prohibited. This has some common-sense appeal to me, but I think it raises a couple of logical problems. First, as someone said above, it’s quite possible that automatic rifles aren’t in common use only because they’re illegal. If there’s a constitutional right to bear arms, it seems odd to let the type of arms permitted be determined by what the government has decided to ban.
The second problem is the one conceded by Scalia in the second paragraph above – if the point of the Second Amendment is to ensure an available body of men for military duty, it seems like the amendment has to protect those weapons which are carried by the typical foot soldier, which today would presumably mean a military-issue M-16 or something similar. Scalia’s response, in the form of the last setnence above, seems like mere hand-waving to me.
