That’s not what you wrote - that’s what the Miller court wrote. I find any claim that handguns are “usually employed in civilized warfare” spurious at best; I am willing to bet that fewer to 1% of US soldiers have ever fired a handgun in anger. I am also curious to hear what advantageous employment you might find for handguns in the common defense. Are you going to repel an invasion with a citizen army carrying pistols?
Considering that you and your cohorts decried the Miller decision for years, it’s a bit disingenuous to base your argument on it now.
All that is beside the point, though. By agreeing that Congress can restrict firearms ownership based on an arbitrary factors test, you have admitted that the right to bear arms is alienable. In effect, you are saying that if SCOTUS adopts a far more stringent test, or that if the Department of Defense stops issuing sidearms, private citizens can no longer own handguns.
More amazingly, you and I agree on something here!
No, because this thread is about the constitutionality of gun restrictions, not about whether they are sound public policy. There are a zillion other threads to debate that in, and I would respectfully ask that you take these points there.
[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
Aren’t “Three Percenters” an off-shoot of the 9-11 Truther movement?
[/QUOTE]
No, they’re crazy right wingers rather than crazy left wingers. They’re more of an offshoot of the Oath Keeper and militia movements, or the sort of people who rail against Obama coming to disarm them and put them in FEMA camps.
I wouldn’t know. Some posters on some gun boards I frequent go on about being “III Percenter’s”, it isn’t something I have investigated.
So now I thank you for verifying my point and call you out for being disingenuous for adding someting that wasn’t in the “points” that either of us were discussing.
Your #3 there is fluff that isn’t at all connected to the discussion string we were having. The quote function has a purpose and that is to keep “points” segregated. I made my point with the Kelo cite and you substantiated it with 1 & 2, which is all that we were discussing. #3 was I guess residue in your brain from your 95% statement . . . which I addressed separately.
So, let me walk you through this slowly:
Thank you. But in the future, for the sake of intellectual integrity and the rules of civil debate, please try to follow along.
??? I was referring to — the earlier post of mine, #342 — (is that better?) that caused your loins to stir and bless the board with, “Okay, so Congress can ban handguns. Great!”.
And I note that “in common use at the time” is missing from your little dissertation . . . Which means you either still don’t “get it” or you just are choosing to ignore it.
I have never decried Miller but for being poorly written (McReynolds is known for that). It has always supported the “individual right without militia conditioning” interpretation / holding, especially when read in conjunction with Aymette v State which I consider an absolutely necessary primer for understanding Miller.
No, just not absolute.
And you keep “forgetting” in common use at the time as a protection criteria. . . Half a million new ones are purchased a year and over 125 million are in civilian hands.
I’m sure you just HAPPENED to mention an obscure militia movement, and had NO intent whatsoever of tying yourself to their rhetoric.
You’re the one who is lost, sir. The fact of the matter is, both the courts and the voters CAN and WILL take (in the most basic sense–someone with a badge and a gun will do so, and your choice is to submit or die/be jailed) your rights, and they are especially prone to doing so when those rights only exist in the vagueness of the 9th and 10th amendments instead of being specifically enumerated.
Which is the entire point of the thread, too–the fact that the topic is what “well regulated” means indicates that Czarcasm is more correct than you, and we’d all be better off if that clause were to go.
But enjoy your talking points, and your pretending to be Captain Naive about the 3% movement and things of that ilk. There is never going to be a revolution in the United States to take rights away from the government, because all the most visible advocates of same are essentially Chicken Littles screaming in fear of things that mostly aren’t going to happen. The most visible advocates of taking away our rights are also essentially screaming Chicken Littles, mind you, but “Oh no, terrorists!” and “think of the CHILDREN” are generally easier to swallow for the average citizen than “Obama’s gun confiscation squads are coming for you!”
Believe what you need to, it was a throwaway comment to your 95% throwaway comment. . .
Spoken like a true statist.
Hardly what I would ever expect to hear from a “gun rights” supporter (“take rights away from the government”??? :smack:).
Please, just accept what you are and stop the fake claim that you respect or claim rights of any kind. What seems very clear is that you will rationalize with enthusiastic political pragmatism the removal of rights and accept, with profuse thanks, whatever privileges government wishes to give you.
shrugs Government has a defined set of rights, as laid out in the Constitution, and appropriates more for itself as much as we (the people) let it do so. That you don’t like the turn of the phrase doesn’t make it effectively true.
Er, no. Please stop with your empty rhetoric. If you’re not prepared to go to the barricades, then do your part to make the system more resistant to usurpation of rights–and that includes things like “advocate for a clearer definition of rights in the various amendments”. It seems clear to ME that you’ll rationalize counterproductive tactics and never actually getting around to revolution until you’re already in whatever camps you might fear the government will put you in.
In all seriousness, disagreement with tactics does not indicate disagreement with ideals–I recognize, unlike you and many other “gun nuts”, that a miniscule percentage of you are actually prepared to open fire on government agents. Unlike you, I recognize your heart’s in the right place–but your talk is out in left field.
That’s reality. That’s the world you live in. It’s parlor pinks, 3%ers, and maybe one guy a year has the stone-cold guts to open fire in the imagined hope he’ll stop the so-called “tyranny” of government–usually when there’s a Democrat in office, because 95% of the people who talk like you do are not interested in rights, they’re interested in the political football game.
Pragmatically, that leaves politics, Somalia, or suicide-by-cop as my options if I wish to retain the rights that are supposedly “inalienable”. Or, I could spout empty rhetoric and accomplish nothing, I suppose.
Is it “statist” to recognize that I live in the United States, which militarily alone outnumbers me a few million to one?
Is it “statist” to recognize that there are 300,000,000 other people who live here who also get a vote on things, and therefore my only peaceful path to getting the government I want is to convince them to alter the forms of that government’s self-constraints to better serve those ends?
Is it “statist” to understand the difference between my rights in theory and the reality of how far those rights will get me if said state decides to crush me down?
Well, fuck me and brand me a statist, then. It’s called “pragmatism” where I’m from, though.
And for the hat-trick, I want you to point out where I “rationalize with enthusiastic political pragmatism the removal of rights”. Surely with THAT kind of rhetorical flourish, you should have some actual evidence that’s not me simply citing places where your strategies have failed to prevent bad law from being made in this country.
Under this interpretation, this amendment would not allow for any restrictions whatsoever. Does this mean anyone, without restriction, should be able to own any kind of weaponry and ammunition? Does this mean that anyone, without restriction, can store their weaponry and ammunition anywhere they please, and transport it anywhere in any fashion they wish?
None of the articles of the Bill of Rights has ever been held to recognize a boundless libertarian immunity from government interference. But that doesn’t mean they can be violated at will. Take for example the Constitutional guarantee of the right to peaceably assemble. No one claims that that means it’s unconstitutional for police to break up an unruly crowd, or for cities to require parade permits for public demonstrations. But it does mean that the right of assembly is a right, not a privilege that the government can grant or withhold on a whim. And to carry the analogy a little further, the gun laws in places like DC, NYC and Chicago are as if the city had passed a crowd control ordinance pre-defining all unauthorized gatherings as riots. IOW, gun proponents hold that constitutionally, any restrictions on firearms should pass a “strict scrutiny” test.
The Wikipedia article sums it up pretty well: a proposed law that would infringe on a fundamental right must serve a compelling government interest, be narrowly tailored, and the least restrictive means to the end.
We don’t know what sort of scrutiny will be applied to facially neutral gun regulation. Neutral restrictions on free speech have generally been subjected to intermediate scrutiny. Intermediate scrutiny - Wikipedia
Who knows how how SCOTUS would apply this to the second amendment but I suspect that registration and licensing would be constitutional while restricting a particular type of semi-automatic rifle based on how scary it looks would not.