Watching the movie Tombstone the other day I noticed they forbade guns in the city unless you were a law enforcement officer. What about the second amendment? Was this constitutional?
Have you told Charlton Heston about this?
I’m sure that anyone who wished to try to seek relief in the Federal courts (and Arizona was a territory at the time) could have tried, but people weren’t in the habit of doing such things back in the late 19th Century.
Many laws are not constitutional. That doesn’t mean they magically go away, or even that they can be successfully contested in courts. It’s not right, but it doesn’t look like it’s fixin’ to change anytime soon, either.
Curiously Wyatt Earp’s no-carry law was in effect for many years. It was only struck down less than ten years ago IIRC as being contrary7 to the state constitution which forbids any political subdivitions from restricting gun rights.
There are laws prohibiting or restricting gun use (for example, the Sullivan law in NYC). Courts have upheld them in the past (as the NRA well knows – if they truly believed there was an absolute right to own guns, they’d allow a law to pass and get the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional. But they know that the court won’t rule that way.)
The Supreme court seems relunctlent to even address any gun law on 2nd Amendment grounds at all.
Come on, kids, are we trying to get kicked out of class here?
stoyel hit the nail pretty squarely – there have been a great many laws passed that are prima facie unconstitutional. Some have to do with gun ownership, but most don’t. Some have been challenged, but I’d say that most haven’t.
RealityChuck, you’re showing your ass, son. You know better.
HPL, learn two things: (1) NO POLITICS in GQ, even when Chuck is showing his ass, and (2) spelling counts. Really. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word ‘reluctant’ brutalized to quite that degree…
As to the OP, Tombstone is truly a kick-ass flick, but not exactly pure history on videotape.
At the time of the shootout in Tombstone, none of the guarantees against federal action in the Bill of Rights had been “incorporated” so as to apply against state and local governments. The Second Amendment still has not been so incorporated today, which is why many cities still have gun bans or restrictions.