No, you’re confusing my disdain for lame attempts at “gotcha, hypocrite!” tactics with some kind of slippery-slope position that judicial review destroys freedom, or something.
I don’t think I’m confusing anything, other than what we are all confusing-- what this thread is supposed to be about. If you want to continue discussing constitutional interpretation in general, it would probably be best to open a thread dedicated to that topic.
For the record, I don’t believe the arguments in favor of or against same sex marriage and abortion are completely overlapping with those for the right to arms and self defense. They are sufficiently different that the comparison as a gotcha only works at a surface level. Same sex marriage is rooted in equal protection, and abortion is rooted in privacy - the right to arms and self defense are not those (though there are several equal protection causes of action with how firearm law is applied and constructed). I am firmly in favor of the right to abortion and the marriage equality.
If soldiers were forcibly quartering in my house, I’d be a whole hell of a lot more concerned about that than virtually any gun law.
I don’t know how I can explain it any more clearly than I already have, which I reiterate, including in bold the part that you didn’t quote:
The central and substantive point of my argument is that whenever SCOTUS addressed the question of how Second Amendment rights related to the “militia” clause, the “militia” clause was always considered to be inextricably coupled to the right thereby described.
**I’m sure that you’re fully capable of recognizing that it is completely irrelevant to that argument whether one considers those rights to be inherent or granted. **
Instead, you chose an evasive tactic to focus on my use of the word “granted” instead of, perhaps, “secured”, which has nothing to do with my argument but does provide you an excuse to not address it.
Secondly, if I was wrong to use the word “granted”, I see no reason not to admit it and it would not harm my case in the slightest, yet by your own admission such alleged wrongness is at best debatable and not a matter of fact. The only evidence you provided for it is the 1876 Cruickshank ruling which, as has already been shown, was spectacularly wrong on many matters of law, and which moreover is completely irrelevant to both* Presser v. Illinois* and United States v. Miller on which I based my case on how the 2nd Amendment has historically been judged inseparable from the militia clause.
You’re correct in this respect, as obviously I am making assumptions about how Heller might be overruled. What you fail to acknowledge, however, is that those assumptions are based on extensive legal commentary from constitutional scholars and others, and the dissenting justices themselves, on why the Heller majority ruling was deeply flawed, which leads to a highly plausible set of assumptions about how and why it might be overruled in the future. Whereas your “more permissive” scenario has no such analytical support – it is pure fantasy.
That’s some tightly wound circular logic there! That the US is “sufficiently different with regard to firearms” is precisely the problem! What you need to look at is whether the US is intrinsically different than other first-world nations. Your approach seems to be “I’ve looked at other first-world nations and how they’ve achieved low levels of gun violence, and I don’t like it – I’d rather have my guns and put up with gun violence”. Which is, I suppose, one kind of value judgment, but don’t try to pretend that it’s intrinsic, necessary, or even rational.
Where I live I do not, alas, enjoy explicit constitutional protection from forcibly having to quarter soldiers and their horses in my house. Remarkably, despite that dastardly constitutional oversight, I have yet to be invaded by soldiers seeking accommodation. I do however enjoy the protection of strong gun control laws. On balance, I’d say it all seems to be working out.
So you actually don’t understand the difference. You made a claim about what SCOTUS has said, not what is actually true in an objective sense. Do you get that? SCOTUS can say things that we think are wrong, but they say them nonetheless. What they say is a matter of fact. You claimed they said something they did not. **Do you see how those are different? **
As soon as you admit your error or retract your claim, I’d be happy to address the rest of your false statements.
So you can admit when you are wrong, good to know.
Hardly “absurd”. Gun violence statistics – in which the US is a tragic outlier among the developed nations – say that citizens are poorly protected since they keep getting shot. Making laws against something is not necessarily sufficient if the conditions are ripe for it to readily occur.
There’s so much convoluted logic there that it’s hard to know where to begin. You seem to assume that the justices and the numerous constitutional scholars who interpret the 2nd Amendment as a collective right to form militias are all ignorant scoundrels reading it wrong. You provide an absurdly redundant rewording of the amendment showing how it must read if they “really meant” it to be linked to militias, whereas I just showed you an earlier draft where clearly it was always all about militias right from the start. Then you claim that the individual right wasn’t called out more clearly because “it’s so obvious”. Lots of rights in the Bill of Rights are “obvious”, like the right to free speech. The framers still saw the need to explicitly enumerate them.
It’s not an “opinion” that national security today is based on a modern military, and not on a bunch of guys grabbing rifles out of their root cellars because Redcoats are invading. Gun fatality numbers are not an “opinion”, they are statistics, and statistics can be compared with other similar countries.
And no, it would not be easy to get a constitutional amendment despite these facts, not after three-quarters of a century of NRA propagandizing entrenching a gun culture and deeply held but deeply wrong beliefs that a plethora of guns somehow helps rather than undermines public safety.
Except that no one is advocating “taking away basic rights”. That is purely a rhetorical fiction. What Heller did was create a brand new “right” that never existed before in previous interpretations of the 2nd Amendment. Rolling back Heller isn’t taking anything away.
I agree with the last sentence. Except it’s patently obvious that this is just what’s been happening, and patently obvious that the Supreme Court is at least as divided and partisan as Congress itself, and along much the same lines. The egregious misreading of the 2nd Amendment in Heller, or the 1st Amendment in Citizens United, are stunning examples of that very fact, both being split decisions with a vigorous and eloquent dissent from the other side.
Yes, it is good to know. I’ve been wrong several times in GQ and readily admitted it.
Would have been nice, however, if you had quoted the rest of what I said that provided, you know, context, in that they were assumptions but not arbitrary assumptions:
What you fail to acknowledge, however, is that those assumptions are based on extensive legal commentary from constitutional scholars and others, and the dissenting justices themselves, on why the Heller majority ruling was deeply flawed, which leads to a highly plausible set of assumptions about how and why it might be overruled in the future.
Are you trying to further a real argument or are you trying score points on a spectacularly irrelevant piece of digressionary minutiae? I understand the above difference just fine, thanks. What you apparently don’t understand, or find it convenient to pretend you don’t, is what argument I was actually making.
The argument I’m making is crystal clear from my statement in post #12 and then clarifying further in post #15; putting the two key statements together, we get:
One of the decisive aspects of Heller was that, for the first time, the 2nd Amendment was ruled to be an individual right for individual purposes, something that many constitutional scholars believe has no historical justification and is just plain wrong … the term “individual right” has several interpretations, and until Heller, the only established ruling was that the Amendment granted an individual right to keep and bear arms for militia purposes.
The phrase “the only established ruling” is very clearly supposed to be a reference to ruling(s) that addressed the above-stated question about individual rights versus collective rights to a militia. I later corrected myself to say that “ruling” should have been plural, because there were two such rulings, Presser v. Illinois and United States v. Miller, both of which I cited. Do get that? Are you able to comprehend that those are the only relevant SCOTUS rulings, and therefore the only SCOTUS rulings, that I was referring to? Are you able to comprehend that this is the only rational, non-insane interpretation of my statement?
It was, and remains, inexplicable why you ever brought up the discreditable Cruikshank case and what you imagined it could possibly add to the discussion, and why you continue to bicker about it. But suit yourself. I’m done.
First of all I have to thank Whack-a-Mole for taking the time to compile that comprehensive set of links, it’s much appreciated.
The full articles don’t seem to be that hard to find. I just went through the first five, and found the full papers for all five. Some like the first one need some navigation to get to the full article and others may need to be Googled separately.
I don’t have time to go through all of them but as an example, here are direct links to full papers for the first five:
http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00444-0/fulltext
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44695809_Homicide_Suicide_and_Unintentional_Firearm_Fatality_Comparing_the_United_States_With_Other_High-Income_Countries_2003
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11379728_Firearm_availability_and_female_homicide_victimization_rates_among_25_populous_high-income_countries
And once again you’ve got nothing.
If there is something wrong with the methodology and/or conclusions then point it out rather than complain about word choice.
The most important reason why it’ll be hard to overturn the right to own a gun as a right of individual I believe is that it requires a state government to pass a law that blatantly violates that law. Sort of like its hard to overturn gay marriage or abortion because until a state actually passes and enforces a law which challenges those things. I can’t as a private citizen sue to remove a right from you and neither can the government without a law which takes away the right and an attorney general willing to enforce it.
Thanks. To be fair another article on the web had done most of the footwork for those links. I’ll post the article if I can remember how I found it and can find it again if anyone cares.
States do this sort of thing all the time on a variety of topics (recently abortion and election laws).
I should also mention that, as easy as it was to find the full papers for the first five links, I had much less success with the next five. IIRC, one was readily available, two looked like they were available free on request (but I didn’t complete the request process), and the other two seemed to be strictly paywalled.
So judging from this total sample of ten, it looks like many of the papers are available in full but not all. The abstracts in fact provide adequate summaries for those seeking to understand the basics, except of course for those whose sole objective is to try to refute the findings. This seems to overlook the fact that the literature offers a massive amount of peer-reviewed literature with a chillingly consistent set of findings on gun hazards, of which this is barely scratching the surface. Gun advocates would have us believe that all such papers are wrong and all politically motivated, much as climate change deniers try to persuade their audience that virtually all climate change papers are wrong and politically motivated. I’ve seen the “refutations” offered by deniers in both fields, and said refutations tend to be consistently dishonest and often laughably inept – represented by mendacious charlatans like John Lott.
I think I’ve been very clear - I’m trying to help you understand and admit your error. Again, from the very beginning I’ve emphasized the idea about granting. Bold text, red text, etc. Yet you keep dodging that issue. It’s a factual matter and very easy to dispense with, but it is a threshold item. The reason it is that way is because if you make obviously false factual statements and yet refuse to acknowledge them, what hope is there you would be able to have a forthright dialogue?
Yes, I understand what you are saying. I also see that you avoid addressing the falseness of your statement about “granting”. SCOTUS has never held “that the Amendment **granted **an individual right to keep and bear arms for militia purposes.” Never, not once. In this, you are spectacularly wrong. Why bother with the rest of your so called argument if you are so wrong on the basic fundamentals about what constitutes a fact?
It was brought up to rebut and directly contradict your claim that SCOTUS has only ever held “that the Amendment **granted **an individual right to keep and bear arms for militia purposes.” You made a statement in the absolute. Only ever. A single example is sufficient to prove absolutely that your claim was false. It is directly responsive to the term “grant”.
A different person may have tried to salvage their false argument by saying something like, “Actually, the term “grant” wasn’t key to my argument, and the way I phrased it was incorrect. I’d like to restate my argument to …” and that would be done. But no, for some reason you just can’t bring yourself to do that. Keep dancing, this is amusing. But wait, you’re done right?
So no addressing of the criticisms of that study you offered. We’ve disposed of it then?
Let’s move on to the other studies, truly the gamot so I may have to take them in chunks. But before we do that, we have to identify your actual claim you are trying to support. I’m going to summarize, so correct me if I’ve misinterpreted. I’m drawing it from post # 140:
Essentially ‘Guns are not an effective means of self defense because they do more harm than good’ Now that’s my paraphrase, so feel free to adjust or tweak it. Now onto the studies that you’ve linked to which the full studies are available.
Gun Ownership and Firearm-related Deaths. This study compares different countries, and as surprising as bears shitting in the woods, countries with more guns have more firearm deaths! Of course, that’s completely uninteresting and not responsive at all to your claim. Like I said above, other countries are sufficiently different that comparisons to other countries regarding firearms are useless. But we can look further at what the study did.
They used crime rate as a nation as a proxy for the safety of a nation. Does that seem like a good method to you? The US has widely disparate laws regarding firearms, and vastly different rates of crime depending on area, yet the nation as a whole is grouped together, along with the overall firearm ownership rate. And know what is missing? No mention of defensive use of firearms. Again only considering costs and not benefits. So far, this study is unresponsive to your claim. If you think this is showing something, feel free to flesh it out.
More cherry picking countries, and comparisons to other countries. Yawn. This one is also a Hemenway study so there’s that. This study has no mention of defensive firearm use so again, it’s not at all relevant to the claim I think you’re making. The US has higher firearm deaths than other countries. Ok, that’s uncontroversial. If you think this is showing something, feel free to flesh it out.
Next up,
Firearm availability and female homicide victimization rates among 25 populous high-income countries
More cherry picking countries, and comparisons to other countries. Yawn again. The item that is most relevant from this one was the following:
Ok, at least it gives passing mention of self defense. Let’s look at the citation for this claim:
Two studies by Hemenway again. I don’t have high hopes but I don’t have time right now to go further so I’ll have to pick it up again later.
You of all people should not misuse that word. Hypocrisy refers to claiming one rule for others and a different one for yourself.
However, unlike Bone, I’ll simply say that you meant to say “double standard” or similar, and agree with you. Though I’m not sure if that is the situation at hand. Dude could be proposing the same system both times.
I for one say that both are about reading more than the text, and that the implication of the Second Amendment is not about the individual rights.
I’ll also point out that I see the right to abortion in the Fourth Amendment, though an implied right to privacy that prohibits the government from finding out that someone had one. Only then can you apply the Ninth, reserving the right to the people, and the Fourteenth which mentioned privileges and immunities and only then to the due process clause. But I would have preferred an Amendment, seeing how far you have to go to see all that. This makes it quite weak–easy toppled if any of those links gets broken.
Thank the Lord or what gods exist, Zeus, Athena, and Apollo and all the others, for that one small blessing. The tiniest smidgeon of progress.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said that and tried to get you to acknowledge it – certainly here, and here, and again here. To no avail. Because, apparently, you are such a stickler for absolute literal accuracy that the fact that a word like “secure” or “guarantee” could be substituted and the entire essential argument remains exactly the same is of no matter to you at all.
OK, but before we proceed further, please explain a few things to me and the other readers. Please explain the following:
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If all it would take is for me to acknowledge a word substitution that you just finished saying “wasn’t key to my argument at all” and then “that would be done” and we could cheerfully move on, please explain why you repeatedly, incessantly characterized it as “how egregious of an error you made with your false claims”. Please explain how an essentially irrelevant word that doesn’t change the central argument at all is somehow “egregiously wrong” in the context of that argument. (Point #3 offers a clue, however!)
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As an incredible stickler for perfect accuracy, please tell everyone why you stated the following, which is not merely inaccurate but totally wrong in light of the fact that I never made the statement you are refuting, as I already previously noted, and therefore your “refutation” is deceptive and irrelevant and attacks a non-existent strawman. Why was I allegedly “wrong” once again, since I never made the statement you are refuting. Will you acknowledge that your accusation was in error? …
As to your interpretation of Miller - It is a fact that SCOTUS has said your interpretation is wrong.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19578071&postcount=25
- Please tell us all about this gem, too:
This is wrong too. The court had not held nor did it hold that the 2nd amendment granted an individual right for militia purposes.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19577654&postcount=21
That one is a real beauty and should be studied closely by those interested in the art of deceptive persuasion. What would one naturally conclude from a reading of it in the context of a conversation about individual vs collective militia 2nd Amendment rights? A reasonable person would of course conclude that the statement means that the Court never associated 2nd Amendment rights with militias. But of course they did, at least twice, in the cases I cited. But they used words like “guaranteed” instead of “granted” in affirming this critical point about the essential militia connection with 2nd Amendment rights. Let me put it this way. If you used this kind of obfuscation and verbal sleight-of-hand in public broadcast advertising, you’d end up in jail.
That’s not a right, any more than you have a “right” not to be eaten by alligators while visiting Florida.
And here I thought you were done.
The key is acknowledgement of the error. Keep in mind this was in GQ as well. You still can’t seem to bring yourself to do that.
Did you notice the red text word “granted” there? I explained this explicitly in the post you are responding to. I’ll restate in case you didn’t understand:
I bolded the part that responds to your question - Is that clear now?
You’ve written this question in a way that I can’t understand what you are asking. Can you rephrase it? I see one question mark but it’s not clear what the actual question is.
This was my first response to your error. The entire paragraph (1 additional sentence):
This is wrong too. The court had not held nor did it hold that the 2nd amendment granted an individual right for militia purposes. Any SCOTUS that looked at the matter recognized that the 2nd amendment codifies a pre-existing right - it does not grant anything.
It’s clear I was referring to the word “grant”. Other posters in post # 24, 26, 27 and 48 understood this point easily. But in case you were unable to catch on, I made this statement in post #39:
See the bold text? That was in the original quote. The phrase “The key is granted”. Pretty clear, no? Well, to everyone else that isn’t you. Then a bit later we moved out of GQ and into GD where you continued digging with your false claim. I highlighted again in post #59, making the term “grant” in bold and red text.
You mean, SCOTUS didn’t ever only hold that the 2nd amendment granted something? Is this the closest you’ll get to an admission that you were wrong? Here again, you are trying to equivocate on the word “grant”. It is a critical difference in SCOTUS interpretation and I know you’d like to gloss over it but alas, no. So are you still clinging to the false idea that SCOTUS has only ever held the 2nd amendment granted something?
About the whole jail thing, this gives great insight into your views on free speech and your opposition to Citizens United. Go Canada!