Adding some detail:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people [states, towns, men serving in the militia] to keep and bear arms [as far as the militia duty goes…introductory clause] shall not be infringed.[by the feds]
The amendment was necessary for those times, with no standing federal army. It simply states the feds shall stay out of the arms business at this point and in peace time. It did not set up national gun policy.
Okay - that is clear, thanks. It’s wrong of course, but at least I understand what you are saying. On its face it makes no sense. If firearms were not effective methods of self defense, we would expect our police force, those that are often faced with a need to defend themselves or others not to carry firearms. Yet they do overwhelmingly in this country. You should tell them that their sidearms are not effective!
Have you actually read the full study, rather than the published abstract? Looking at how you are coming to your conclusion, it’s not hard to see where your error lies. Take for example the Branas study you cited from Philadelphia published in the American Journal of Public Health. Here is a press release talking about the study, which says:
As is the problem with many studies of this nature, this study had fatal flaws:
**It seems to confuse correlation with causation. **
The study itself notes that the potential for reverse causation gun possession and gun assault was not accounted for. This criticism can be levied against much of the flawed scholarship in this field and the fact that it’s not addressed is fatal. Consider we don’t suggest that pace makers don’t protect against heart attacks just because there is a correlation between the presence of a pacemaker and the occurrences of heart attacks. We don’t do that because it would be silly.
The controls that were selected varied in significant ways from the case subjects.
Some of these are reflected in the Flaws of this study that is linked as well. Although the study did attempt to control for several variables several key variables were not controlled for, like location. It treated the location across the entire city of Philadelphia the same which is nonesense. It’s inaccurate to attribute the same level of risk uniformly to all locations within the city. Not only that, a high percentage of the case selections were shot outdoors, while a similarly high percentage of controls at the selected time were indoors:
Not only that, the method of gathering information for the controls consisted of phone calls asking about gun possession. The study showed that that it would take a very low % of controls to not report possession to render the results statistically insignificant. Not only that, you know what else the study also ignored? Training. It’s like they think guns are supposed to be a talisman to ward off evil by themselves. That’s silly.
Maybe your error stems from the fact that you think this isn’t hard to understand, so you oversimplify the analysis and rely on poorly constructed studies to confirm your already held view. In reality, when making the assertion that the cost is higher than the benefit, it would be critical to analyze both components, and gain confidence over each. When putting out studies like this that do nothing do analyze the benefits, it’s shortsighted to claim anything over the effectiveness, or cost/benefit.
I had forgotten that I had read this study when it came out and it was easily disposed of as flawed junk.
The First Amendment says, “Congress shall…”
How does that extend to the states?
That is the first amendment. Not all the amendments were meant to work the same. Many people put wording in vsrious drafts. One talks about “the accused.”
It’s different you see, because it is dontchaknow. The framers obviously used the same word to mean different things though out the same document. And on top of that, interpretations up to this point have been wrong! So glad you could set us straight with your unsupported and unsupportable assertions. Coherence was not required at all for the founding documents, nor for the posts that discuss them.
But the First Amendment clearly says, “Congress.” How is a reader to know that this means the federal government and the states? Especially since some states did have an official religion?
I’m reminded of Posner’s article in Slate, where he said he saw absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, day, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation.
It may be instructive to quote the rest of it. Here, let me finish it for you (emphasis mine):
“… but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress. This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government, leaving the people to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow citizens of the rights it recognizes, to what is called, in The City of New York v. Miln, 11 Pet. 139, the “powers which relate to merely municipal legislation, or what was, perhaps, more properly called internal police,” “not surrendered or restrained” by the Constitution of the United States.”
Why didn’t you quote the whole thing? It’s obvious why you didn’t. Because that second part flies in the face of all subsequent jurisprudence on the 2nd Amendment. Because your cited ruling clearly affirms that any and all gun restrictions including a complete gun ban at the state level or below would be fully constitutional. Do you agree with that, too? It not only contradicts your interpretation of this ruling that the 2nd Amendment supports some kind of natural God-given right, but more importantly, this 1876 case – United States v Cruickshank – is a discreditable one that has been vitiated by subsequent rulings and which, while it lasted, led to the rise of the KKK and enabled nearly a century of virtually unopposed oppression, violence, and murder against black Americans.
The “depth of my error” is that I don’t cite obsolete and vitiated 1876 rulings to support my claims, and moreover, the “depth of my error” is shared by Justices Breyer, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg, the legal analysts I’ve extensively quoted, and a plethora of constitutional scholars, all of whom have variously used words like “grant”, “confer”, or “guarantee” to describe what the Second Amendment says about gun rights. The question is, what exactly is it that it grants? Bottom line, again: Heller is an important landmark decision that for the first time ruled that the 2nd Amendment supposedly guarantees an individual right to own guns for individual purposes irrespective of militias. And given the history of the Bill of Rights and the context of the times, many scholars consider this to be a partisan and profoundly wrong interpretation.
It’s easy to underestimate the extent to which this amendment has been taken out of context. Indeed, during the founding period (and for decades after), militia service was a requirement of all white males within the specified age bracket. For all intents and purposes, it was essentially a military draft of limited duration each year. The founders clearly contemplated a system whereby men would be drilled and taught discipline in the usage of firearms using military techniques over the course of many years. They did not contemplate a future period when this sort of universal militia service would no longer exist, nor did they contemplate the situation we have now: untrained and undisciplined people running around with as many guns as they can carry. Clearly, the founders could only have “intended” what they perceived in their own reality and the fact of the matter is their conception of the militia and gun ownership no longer exists.
The amendments were all put in to make the federal government less powerful. They did not want the president to be like the British king. Thus, freedoms and state powers.
2nd amendment in the 1800s
The militia amendment, until NRA and Heller messed with it
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-second-amendment-106856
Let me start by saying that I was surprised at how egregious of an error you made with your false claims. No longer since you’ve still failed to understand, but even have doubled down.
Cruickshank was a terrible fucking ruling. Slaughterhouse was a terrible fucking ruling. But if you claimed for some strange reason that these didn’t exist - I’d correct your error. That doesn’t mean I agree with those rulings. Does that make sense to you?
Just the same as if I claimed that SCOTUS never held that Persons of African descent cannot be, nor were ever intended to be, citizens under the constitution. If you correctly pointed out that that was exactly what Dred Scott held, then you would be correct but that in no way means that you agree with that ruling.
So again, what may seem “obvious” to you is clearly wrong. The rest wasn’t quoted because it isn’t germane to the fact that your claim was false. There is no detailed analysis necessary, no discussion of the goodness or badness of the decision. Your claim was that the ***only established ruling ***was that that the 2nd granted something. That is a factual claim. To disprove it, a single example of a SCOTUS holding that the 2nd amendment doesn’t grant anything is all it takes to render your claim false. Which is what I provided with Cruickshank. Cruickshank is still a terrible decision.
Even if 100% of constitutional scholars believed that the 2nd amendment granted a right, you would still be wrong. Your claim wasn’t about what constitutional scholars believed. It wasn’t about SCOTUS decisions within some time period, nor was it about dissenting opinions that carry no force. That’s why your continual quoting of commentary and editorials is laughably out of place. You don’t seem to understand your own claim.
Your claim was about SCOTUS. But you fail to quote SCOTUS. Not only does your claim fail that the court has “only ever” held your incorrect interpretation, but they have never held it. Can you find any example? I challenge you. You cannot and that is why your claim is false and you are wrong.
And yet afaik nobody at the time or for decades afterwards tried to claim that the keeping and carrying of firearms was to be restricted entirely to militia duty. Even as infamous a SC decision as Dred Scott v. Sandford offered a contemporary view of what were considered the rights of free men (by denying that Negros could be allowed the same):
Huh, that quote is creepy and weird and somehow fascinating.
This verbal gamesmanship you’re playing is verging on the outright ridiculous. But I’ll try to respond by making the most charitable possible interpretation of your silly verbal joustings.
To begin with, the significant thing about Cruickshank isn’t the “terribleness” of it, it’s the multifaceted wrongness of it. Most of what it alleges has been reversed and invalidated, so quoting it as proof of what the 2nd Amendment is supposed to mean seems like an odd strategy. The “granted” business I’ll deal with below.
The claim that I made and further explained several times is that “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.” IOW, to the extent that SCOTUS ever examined the nature of the 2nd Amendment right as it applied to individuals prior to Heller, that right was always linked to the “well regulated militia” part of the statement.
For some reason you chose to focus on the “granted” part of my sentence and use it to completely digress from the point. As you said yourself, “The question of whether there exists inherent rights, or if rights are granted is debatable and not necessarily a matter of fact.” That may be an interesting debate but it’s completely irrelevant in this context; feel free to remove the word “granted” and substitute “secured”, “protected”, or “guaranteed” and the intent of my statement remains the same, namely, that prior to Heller, SCOTUS rulings on 2nd Amendment rights as they applied to an individual were always linked to the militia clause.
You ask for a cite for my “incorrect” interpretation. I can give you two.
[ul]
[li]Presser v. Illinois held that “A state cannot prohibit the people therein from keeping and bearing arms to an extent that would deprive the United States of the protection afforded by them as a reserve military force.”[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]United States v. Miller held that a sawed-off shotgun wasn’t protected by the 2nd Amendment because it didn’t have “some reasonable relationship to any preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia” and that it could not be said that “… its use could contribute to the common defense”[/li][/ul]
Furthermore, you laughably claimed here that “It is a fact that SCOTUS has said [my interpretation of Miller] is wrong” and you cited the following: “Had the Court believed that the Second Amendment protects only those serving in the militia, it would have been odd to examine the character of the weapon rather than simply note that the two crooks were not militiamen”.
I never claimed that “the Second Amendment protects only those serving in the militia”. This is typical of how you digress and distort and then accuse your opponent of being “wrong”. My statement was that “… the Amendment granted an individual right to keep and bear arms for militia purposes” and also that “Suffice to say that Miller and Presser both extensively based their decision on the militia question”. My belief, supported by many constitutional scholars and directly contrary to Heller, is that the Second Amendment means just what it says, that it reflects the belief of the Founders that in the interest of national security citizens must be able to own firearms and be in a state of readiness to form militias as and when needed. Which was fine in the 18th century, and obviously a ridiculous anachronism today.
SCOTUS has traditionally overturned prior ruling in order to expand rights.
No one should relish them setting a precedent of rolling back rights.
Even if the framers intended to limit gun possession to militia members acting in official capacity, they did not do so by the plain words of the amendment. It is simple English, independent and dependent clauses.
Suppose a state passes a provision that says “Since reading is very important for education, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed.” Would anyone argue that only people enrolled in school or only educational books were protected? Even if it was a drafting error, it cannot be denied what is stated in the independent clause.
Further, people read the Second Amendment as if it says something like “the people are hereby granted the right to keep and bear arms.” The Amendment reads as if it is simply reaffirming an already existing right. It comes from the English Bill of Rights of 1688 whereby no freeman can be deprived of arms.
IMHO, this is the proper role of the Ninth Amendment and substantive due process. Recognize rights which are deeply rooted in history and tradition and implicit in our concept of ordered liberty. Carrying arms is clearly one of those long held rights. The right of fit parents to the care, custody, and control of their minor children is another.
It amazes me how the left can say in honest debate that the Constitution mandates same sex marriage and legal abortion, yet does not protect the right to keep and bear arms. And as was said earlier, this position does not require that we always and forever are ruled by 17th Century English law. There is an amendment process.
Actually, it said that Protestants could not be deprived of arms.
Some would like to see SCOTUS expand the right of ordinary citizens and innocent children to not be shot by random gun-toting lunatics.
If it was “simple” it wouldn’t have been so intensely debated for the last hundred years or so. Furthermore, earlier drafts of the Second Amendment very clearly confirm the militia connection – for example:
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.
Let’s examine that analogy, making adjustments for the actual facts surrounding the actual Amendment. The first adjustment would be how we should treat books if the central justification – education – was today a ridiculously outdated anachronism, the way that informal militias are to national security. The second adjustment is how we should treat books if, not only was the justification a ridiculous anachronism, but the books themselves turned out to be so physically dangerous that they killed an average of 86 Americans every single day, and that studies of the epidemiology of book violence confirmed that they caused far more problems than they solved. What then?
New flash: the English themselves evolved from this outdated anachronism a long time ago, and have long abandoned any pretext of such “rights”, and today have some of the most restrictive gun laws anywhere. Americans who pat themselves on the back for being more freedom-loving and enlightened are also being shot in record numbers.
Another news flash: the Roberts court that affirmed the right of same sex marriage wasn’t “the left”.
Know what never ceases to amaze me? Conservatives.
So to clarify - are you retracting your claim about granting? That is what I identified as my objection to your false claim when this was in GQ. I want to be clear, that the idea of SCOTUS holding that the 2nd granted anything is false and wrong. Do you agree? You’ve so far refused to cite, tried to redirect, and above even say that I can remove the word “granted”, but you haven’t gone so far as to retract your claim or to say it was in error. My very first objection was about this point so I find it quite odd that you have taken this long to notice that. It’s pointless to proceed unless the factual items are resolved. Those factual items are what you keep getting wrong.
Then your amazement is an overreaction. Are all elements of the constitution of exactly equal utility, importance and relevance? If not, why are you amazed if some assigns priorities?