I’m not following you. What point are you making here?
Not just the left. Virtually all lovers of the US Constitution are like that.
Suppose that there was an amendment to the US Constitution reading as follows:
What would change? Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that, after the amendment takes effect, driving would have switched from being a privilege to a right. So, if the courts follow the law, we could no longer infringe on the rights of people with lots of DUI convictions, and the violent mentally ill, to drive.
And yet those are the same class of limitations on gun ownership that most supposed second amendment supporters favor.
Everyone wants gun ownership to be a privilege rather than a right. But not everyone admits it 
If the US Constitution is a necessary attribute of a free society, why it is that the British courts declared the slaves of Virginia – at least those with masters foolish (or decent) enough to take them to England – to be free in 1772? If I was a Pennsylvania resident when Lord Mansfield freed England’s slaves (and nine years earlier, when the Proclamation Line declaration promised better adherence to treaties with the natives), I would have been so proud to be an Englishman. And therefore, a few years later, I would have been so disgusted with those founding fathers, so careless of human life, whom you fellows treat almost as Gods.
I think everyone who takes a gun safety course and demonstrates that they know how to load and unload, shoot, clean, and care for their device, and can pass a written and practical test on using their gun in a responsible manner should be issued a license for it.
The NRA local orgs themselves keep listings of many such courses and do a good referring people to them, last time I had reason to know. I don’t know why the fuck they would have issue with the notion that gun ownership and licensing should require that kind of testing prior to licensing.
I favor “shall issue” laws. I oppose any reference whatsoever to psychiatric diagnosis (any freaking person can get a psych dx, they are handed out like candy to satisfy insurance company requirements, without which you can’t get counseling that insurance will reimburse).
But honestly I don’t see a compelling reason why the average person needs concealed carry.
False. Felony convictions or an adjudication of insanity have always been held to involve a forfeiture of rights, yes for guns too.
ETA: and ignoring cars for the moment, people DO have a generally recognized right to travel. Such things as travel papers and internal passports are held to be unconstitutional in the US on general principle, even though afaik the Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention them.
So why does California honor driver’s licenses from other states? Is it because the requirements are similar enough that they feel comfortable honoring those licenses or is it because theya re legally compelled to by the “full faith & credit” and the “privileges & immunities” clauses?
I don’t know that people are insisting that everyone be able to carry concealed so much as they are insisting that every must be able to carry (open or concealed).
In other words, you regard gun carrying as a privilege to be earned and not a right. Just like all but the most extreme gun controllers 
The second amendment was intended as a limitation on the federal government, not on states. And, AFAIK, the US Congress, in the period of the founders, did not take away guns rights from those legally declared insane, nor did they take them away from felons. If I am wrong, please indulge my curiosity by letting me know.
But if I am wrong, so what? Doesn’t everyone agree that the Alien and Sedition Act (1798) was a plain violation of the first amendment? So we know the founding crowd was perfectly capable of violating their own Bill of Rights parchment promises. And if they did indeed infringe on the right to keep and bear arms, they would have been doing just that.
You made an analogy suggesting that if something is considered a right than it would be absolutely beyond government intervention, leading to absurdities. This is patently false. None of the provisions of the Bill of Rights (or state constitutional equivalents) have ever been construed to recognize or bestow a boundless libertarian immunity from government interference.
The point however is that a right cannot be infringed upon by the ordinary police power of the government to proscribe things by statute. In general a right can only be infringed upon by a more compelling interest, which must be decided by the standard of strict scrutiny.
For example, the Constitution recognizes freedom of assembly as a fundamental right. No one claims that this means that police can’t disperse unruly crowds, or that cities can’t require parade permits for demonstrations. But it means that the right of assembly is a right, not a privilege that the government can bestow or withdraw at will. What gun owners object to are laws that, to continue the analogy, are the equivalent of pre-defining all unauthorized public gatherings as riots.
The gun debate apparently come down to this: gun control advocates believe that guns are just another item which the government can by statute ban or regulate-out-of-existence; while gun rights advocates believe that to own and carry weapons (“keep and bear arms”) is as fundamental a right as free speech. We live in a country today where the vast majority of people can go their entire lives without needing to resort to a gun, and may see no reason to. But there are strong historical precedents why possessing guns was regarded as both a right and a necessity of a free people.
I thought violations of some of the rights were measured against intermediate or heigtened scrutiny. I suspect that the second amendment cases will apply heightened or intermediate scrutiny. Rational basis has never been applied to a constitutional right AFAICT. Strict scrutiny would throw out almost all gun laws, even ones that the NRA would probably support.
I agree with this 100%, and I’m very uncertain that such a measure is constitutional.
I doubt it’ll happen, because the support for the NRA comes mainly from conservatives, who are generally States Rightists. Of course, the national law against intact dilation and extraction (“partial birth abortion”) shows that they can get over this (and also over their dislike of abusing the Constitution’s commerce clause) when they really want to.
In my mine, this has nothing to do with the commerce clause or state’s rights. It’s about civil rights. Just as everyone enjoys free speech, they also enjoy the right to carry for self defense.
It’s an infringement on a state’s police power.
You’ll have to elaborate. The state has no police power to violate civil rights.
OK, I’ll say clear of your mine. But it’s definitely about states’ rights. It may be defensible on constitutional grounds, but it’s still a states’ rights issue because it would remove a state’s ability to enforce certain kinds of laws, which they currently have and can enforce.
It’s NOT a commerce clause issue, but that’s never stopped Congress from using it to pass legislation that would otherwise be unconstitutional! The case I cited above should be a pretty clear example: what do medical procedures have to do with interstate commerce? Yet that is the only constitutional basis for the law, according to the language of the law itself. (And a host of others, including many liberal ones – this trick is not limited to one party!)
My mind, damn typo. Once the 2nd was incorporated it was no longer an issue of state’s rights. Earlier in the thread **Doors **mentioned correctly that SCOTUS currently hasn’t recognized this right. However, the 7th and 9th circuits have recognized a right to carry (other circuits have not). In those jurisdictions, it is recognized as a civil right and has nothing at all to do with state’s rights. States are not permitted to violate fundamental incorporate civil rights. Each may currently have their own scheme, but all within those jurisdictions must provide for some form of carry.
Is it?
Is the Second incorporated against the states?
Does the Second include a right to carry?
It doesn’t lead to absurdities because judges ignore the plain meaning of the platitudes. I don’t condemn them for this, and mostly bring it up because of annoyance at second amendment supporters who claim to be the true adherents of constitutional government, while everyone else is a scofflaw.
I’m not a big Jefferson fan, but he was more honest than later Americans in being willing to admit that he was violating the Constitution when he did it:
Of course, the Louisiana Purchase wasn’t required for self-preservation, but Jefferson was right that he was violating legal platitudes limiting federal power.
Well, one hook could be that
They use, a lot of commas in sentences that include the word militia.
There’s ample evidence that as far as the 2nd Amendment goes, the federal and state governments have been scofflaws for over a century. The overwhelming impression one gets from researching the history of firearms and the law is that the Framers really did mean to recognize the private possession of weapons as a fundamental mark of freedom; Our own Cecil came to much the same conclusion:
So what happened? Well apparently later governments simply began to regret the largess the Founders had bestowed and began to look for legalistic workarounds to justify it. This picked up steam after the Civil War when the powers that be realized that a fundamental freedom to keep and bear arms would have to include Negroes, immigrants, leftist radicals, poor people, striking workers and others whom the WASP majority simply didn’t trust with guns.
The major breaking point was probably Presser V. Illinois, in 1886. A german immigrant, Herman Presser had organized an armed self-defense cadre to resist the armies of armed private security guards that were brutalizing strikers and protest marchers. He was convicted under Illinois law of forming an unsanctioned militia, despite his protests that this both violated his Second Amendment rights and elevated the Illinois State Guard- strictly limited in membership to selected trustworthy individuals- to a virtual state army in violation of the Constitution’s Compact Clause. The SCOTUS largely dodged these questions by reasserting it’s loathing of any attempt to incorporate the Bill of Rights under the 14th Amendment’s Privileges and Immunities clause.
The subsequent legal history of guns in the USA follows a similar pattern: laws effectively restricting owning and carrying firearms were passed, and their legality was upheld by hair-splitting legalisms that payed lip service to the idea of the population at large being the “reserve militia”. The 1903 Militia Act and subsequent revisions essentially turned the Guards into a branch of the US Army Reserve. The 1934 National Firearms Act didn’t actually ban machine guns but threw expensive stamp taxes and regulations in the way of anyone who wanted to buy them. City ordinances beginning with the 1911 Sullivan Act in New York and later endorsed by “A Uniform Act to Regulate the Sale and Possession of Firearms” enshrined “May Issue” (=may arbitrarily refuse) carry permits as the national standard. Both “liberal” progressives and lawnorder conservatives pushed gun control, abetted by a public that largely saw gun restrictions as applying to “those people”. For example, when the Black Panthers vowed to resist police brutality by force and started carrying guns, the result was the swift passage in CA of restrictions on carry.
In short, the liberty to own and carry went through a long, slow erosion similar to the shining ideals in the story “Animal Farm”; and this was actually praised by the “Living Constitution” school of legal thought, which held that the Constitution was “flexible” enough to accommodate almost any expediency. By the 1990s the situation had gotten to the point where one famous pro-gun analysis was titled “The Embarrassing Second Amendment” because any rational analysis of it’s history suggested a purpose completely at odds with the gun control agenda. The trend was only finally turned around by a growing distrust of the government and a general disappointment with ineffective anti-crime measures.