Er… BTW, I don’t think I’ve ever said that dicta doesn’t mean squat.
I may have said somewhere that dicta doesn’t compel squat. If the Emerson reasoning is dicta, as it appears to be, it means that the conclusion is not binding on the Fifth Circuit. Even if it were a substantive part of the decision, of course, it wouldn’t be binding on other circuits.
What it is, as I suggested earlier, is persuasive reasoning, extensively researched, and a good read.
In point of fact:
What you DID was willfully misconstrue the law to the point where you created a conflict where none such exists. You refused to examine your assertions and stuck to your conspiracy theory. You began from flawed premises and accused others of hypocrisy. When the flaws were pointed out, you refused to change your stance. Eventually people decided that arguing against your willful ignorance was not productive and left you alone.
I guess you call that a decisive victory for your position. It wouldn’t be your first example of sloppy reasoning.
Enjoy,
Steven
Maybe he/she is a man. A man who worships at the alter of feminism.
Anyway, all you and he/she did was chase your tail in defense of little more than fairy-tales that make you feel comfortable with hypocrisy.
Gee, Razorsharp you’re not really gonna hijack your own thread, are ya?
I don’t believe you understand the term “inalienable”.
Votes won’t do it, only subjugation can remove an inalienable right.
KellyM, good point. However, my personal legal philosophy (as opposed to my being willing to deal with the law as explicated) is for a total incorporation (allowing that specific examples of procedural due process guaranteed in the Federal courts may not be mandated on the state ones so long as the render equivalent procedural due process) – SCOTUS has been feeling its way towards this for something like 80 years. Otherwise you get the question, “what’s a fundamental right? what are examples of non-fundamental rights? why are they different?” Sorry, but if I’m arguing for a hypothetical decision on the Second Amendment’s guarantees, I can include along with it a hypothetical lemma that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates it . 
Senor Beef: Preach it, brother! Although I do have one suggestion on phrasing: The Constitution guarantees specific rights against governmental intrusion, at least without substantive reasons for such intrusion (see the “degrees of scrutiny” discussion in any good legal reference, or numerous posts in Con. law threads on this board).
Bricker – paraphrasing your post to the following:
you may have composed yourself a new .sig line!
No, I’m sorry, I mischaracterized your position. You were only defending a Supreme Court decision that facilitated an ideological agenda by hearing a case on a false pretext.
Razorsharp, legally, a right is only inalienable to the extent that we, as a people, choose to make it inalienable. You have to go outside the legal system and into philosophy to create (or find) truly inalienable rights, and such arguments are only viable to the extent that you can convince others of their truth. And that is the domain of politics.
If you think that subjugation cannot be accomplished by vote, you’re a bigger fool than you appear to be.
Bricker, if a writing doesn’t compel squat, then legally it doesn’t mean squat either, as far as I can see.
If the Supreme Court has ruled one way, and a lower-level judge has expressed a nonbinding opinion to the contrary, which one constitutes the law of the land? Even I know that one.
It’s unclear to me what you know, ElvisLives.
As I said above, the Emerson ruling DOES NOT CONFLICT with the Miller ruling. I even quoted a little piece of Emerson in which this statement is made. And I linked to the entire opinion, so you could read it yourself.
So why, in light of that, would you now offer a post that says, “…a lower-level judge has expressed a nonbinding opinion to the contrary?” It’s not to the contrary, and you knew that - or should have known it.
Now, there is no doubt that a Supreme Court decision is the law of the land, and very little doubt that the Emerson opinion’s reasoning concerning an individual, non-collective right to bear arms is dicta. I agree it’s probably not binding precedent anywhere. But it is instructive and persuasive. It leaves little doubt that, were a case on point to come before the Fifth Circuit, they would rule in a manner consistent with the reasoning expressed in Emerson.
On the other hand, they don’t have to, and no federal district court in the Fifth Circuit would be bound to adopt that reasoning at the present time.
Do ya get it now?
Emerson - not in conflict in Miller.
You have a lot of nerve to call someone a fool after demonstrating a total lack of knowledge on the subject at hand.
Inalienable rights do not exist at the whim of “we the people”.
As far as subjugation vs. votes, evidently you are one of those, who after being shown the error of your ways, resort so semantics as a defense.
Actually, I was not complete by only referring to subjugation. It also takes one’s own submission.
You can vote until the cows come home. Life’s too short to submit to subjugation.
If guns are outlawed, how will we shoot the capitalists?
Rick, it has been clear to me since learning of it, perhaps incorrectly, that Miller decided that the right to keep and bear arms was a collective one, with no other rights implied if they weren’t related to the existence of a militia.
If the judge in Emerson found a way to reason that they really meant something other than what they said, that’s interesting, and it’s even “instructive persuasive” to those who are inclined to think so. Constructing a chain of reasoning to lead to a desired predetermined conclusion is a familiar process to denizens of GD, after all. It’s more simply and therefore persuasively argued, though, that Miller means what it says it means, no more and no less.
But that doesn’t mean objectively, as you claim, that the ruling isn’t in conflict - it only means that you are persuaded by it, and that others may be. But, as you pointed out, being dicta (and not “arguably”), it doesn’t compel squat. Meanwhile, the the SCOTUS ruling in Miller is the law until SCOTUS says otherwise or the Constitution is amended.
I don’t think I’m missing anything here.
Well… very true.
I am persuaded - others may not be. And until it’s tested in a stronger forge than dicta in one circuit, I agree that it doesn’t compel any… er, “squat.”
Having just read Harry Browne’s latest book, I found myself agreeing with Everything he believes.
What of the many instances where -if citizens had been armed- they could’ve stopped a mass murderer from shooting up a bunch of people?
Everyone should be armed, the criminals will be no matter what, anyway.
vanilla, a libertarian
An excellent one-line summary of your conspiracy theory. Still a conspiracy theory though. Your belief in it does not make it fact.
Enjoy,
Steven
There may be many sound public policy reasons to arm the citizenry, vanilla, but that has little to do with whether there is an individual federal constitutional right to keep and bears arms.
Nor does it make it out of the realm of possibility.
Ah the realm of possibility. Lovely place. I was taking a stroll through there the other day. I saw Bigfoot, the Loch Ness moster, and they were packing a picnic lunch for an afternoon at the Elephant Graveyard. I passed a clump of people heatedly discussing the moon landing being a hoax and JFK having planned his own assassination.
Lovely place.
Enjoy,
Steven
At the risk of being confused for Dewey Cheatem Undhow, Razorsharp, I must disagree.
This is true in a metaphysical sense on which you and I seem to agree, though perhaps for different reasons. But in point of fact, the rights guaranteed as inalienable are set forth in the Constitution explicitly (plus whatever the Ninth Amendment means, a debatable proposition indeed, and the nearly equally nebulous “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States” in the Fourteenth).
And the rights guaranteed in such amendments are in fact the product of the “will of the majority” as expressed through their elected representatives in Congress and the State legislatures, who must adopt and ratify amendments defining them.
I agree wholeheartedly that some rights are truly inalienable – that the people of this country would object to a degree that would be political suicide for the advocate thereof if their removal were attempted. But they nonetheless derive from the people’s will (or from the gift of their Creator, a sidebar we need not pursue, since the practical effect is the same).