At least according to the 10th circuit court of appeals.
Washington Post Article: Federal appeals court says illegal immigrants don’t have right to bear arms.
Link to the ruling (pdf): UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. EMMANUEL HUITRON-GUIZAR.
Doesn’t this overturn previous interpretations of the equal protection clause?
[QUOTE=14th Amendment to the Constitution]
nor shall any State … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
[/QUOTE]
!!! I’ve never worked in or studied immigration law, but it has always been my understanding that U.S. citizens have, broadly speaking, only two sets of rights/privileges that noncitizens have not: Residence/employment on U.S. soil (citizens cannot be deported or exiled even in punishment for crime – of course, naturalized citizens can always be stripped of citizenship and deported); and political participation, in the sense of voting and holding public office (but even noncitizens have free-speech rights and may campaign for candidates or causes). Can anyone (other than the 10th Circuit) correct me here?
Hmm… it will be interesting to see how the right handles this one. Will their dislike for immigrants outweigh their belief that everyone should be armed? I’m betting so since it’s someone else’s rights that are being infringed and not their own.
It started off well, noting that the Supreme Court held that certain classes of individuals do not have the rights granted under the Constitution given the precedent of Heller in 2008 (based on the Gun Control Act of 1968). However, it goes on to discuss whether “people” and “person” are different concepts. Defining an illegal alien as a non-person may contravene article 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I try to imagine reconciling this with claims from the gun-rights crowd that the right to bear arms is “god-given,” and that it exists to ensure the possibility of violent insurrection. If only American citizens (as defined by whom? the government?) have a god-given right to take up arms against the government, then these claims appear at first blush to be undermined. And yet one could claim that there is a category of “real American” who has these rights. The most obvious non-contradictory synthesis I saw seemed pretty racist, I gotta say.
Three posts in, and the only contribution you have is to bash “the right”? And I’m sure it was mere accident that you refer to “the rights” dislike of “immigrants” as opposed to “illegal immigrants”. :rolleyes:
For me, I tried reading the opinion, and got lost. I’ll wait for one of our legal types to explain it. It looks like they are applying intermediate scrutiny and using Heller as the basis of their opinion, but how they actually get to their decision, I’m not sure.
That’s insurrection, not invasion. The purpose is not to enable criminals who have entered the country without the consent of the existing government to overthrow said government.
Get your facts straight. This does not draw the line between citizens and non-citizens - you can be in the country legally without being a US citizen. It draws a line between a particular type of criminal and non-criminals.
I have been under the impression that aside from fraud there is little way to revoke citizenship, certainly not for committing a crime. Permanent residency is another matter.
That’d be unfortunate though, given they were regarded as criminals illegally existing in the colony without the consent of the ruling government not many years before coming up with the Bill of Rights.
So far Fox News is just posting the same press release from Associated Press.
Why would you try to reconcile that? The court does not consider rights to be God-given, so it’s not a factor in its opinion here.
I’ve never understood the practical application of things like illegal immigrants attending school, collecting welfare, or (now) carrying guns. Isn’t it just a lawyerly wank fest? If you see an illegal immigrant doing any of the above, can’t they simply be deported leaving the side issue moot?
At least on the school thing apparently the laws in many school districts are written so that children can’t be refused, I also saw an article that claimed children in foster care sometimes don’t even have a birth certificate .
When did you stop beating your wife?
In order to deny illegal aliens the right to bear arms, they would have to have some sort of legal determination of their immigration status. After due process, such as an immigration hearing, I can imagine all sorts of restrictions may be imposed that limit constitutional rights. But before due process and a finding of illegal immigration status, I think they would have all the rights and privileges accorded legal residents. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that.
Well, we have systematically confiscated guns in Iraq; the Iraqi citizenry had more access to guns under Saddam than they did under American occupation, which is amusing. Given that these are the sort of people the Right wants to harass, assault and kill, I wouldn’t expect them to want their targets to be armed.
This is a right wing issue, and the Right hates brown people, period. “Illegal immigrant” is just code for “brown”; they don’t distinguish between legal, illegal, citizen or non-citizen when it comes to their persecution. We’ve seen that with the way so-called “anti illegal immigrant” laws are enforced, and I’ve personally seen it with such people referring to any brown person they see as a “damned illegal”.
Real human beings aren’t persons, but corporations are. This is how fucked up our system is getting.
Maybe they can apply the 3/5ths rule to undocumented immigrants.
U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 9: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The Constitution, as originally drafted, does not look kindly on rebellion – unsurprisingly, no constitution or government does; and I say the Second Amendment can’t be read as intending to change something so basic as that unless the word “rebellion” or a synonym is actually in it, which it ain’t.
What type of criminal would that be? While there are some crimes that I would expect the majority of unlawfully-present aliens to have committed, I wouldn’t assume that they’ve all committed crimes, or that no lawfully-present people have committed the exact same crimes.
If only the framers had left other writings as to their intentions, like they did with the Commerce Clause.