It’s not a question of equal anything. It’s a question of rights explicitly in the constitution and rights that are not. If one can see rights that are not in the constitution, why is it so hard to see rights that actually are there?
a) Your whole objection over the word has absolutely no relevance to the argument being made. None whatsoever. Perhaps, before choosing to proceed with a further argument (or not) as you see fit, you might explain why you are so obsessed over this point and what possible relevance it has to the argument actually being argued!
b) Even if it were relevant, how can my use of the term “granted” be wrong when it’s obviously debatable whether or not certain rights are granted or should be regarded as intrinsic? Cite: you. The unfortunate (for you) pertinent truism, stated by you: “The question of whether there exists inherent rights, or if rights are granted is debatable and not necessarily a matter of fact.” The fact that gun rights are not generally recognized as inherent or natural rights in the modern civilized world is affirmation of that. Unlike, for example, the broadly recognized rights of free speech and religion.
Interesting. Two parallel discussions in the same thread and having the same points. With way more words in the other set (not mine).
Dred Scott was not contemporary with the founding era. We actually have numerous extant documents which discuss the militia and all sorts of issues concerning arms. For instance, in 1833, the legislature of New York petitioned Congress to make administrative changes to the militia system. Within their communication, they discussed their understanding of the right to bear arms and the relationship of that right to the militia:
[emphasis mine]
Clearly, they seem to have understood a connection with the militia as well as a need for training and discipline provided by the state over the course of many years.
The underlying facts and history regarding the current argument are relevant. That you think irrelevant whether or not a right is merely recognized and codified or granted is ridiculous. Of course it has relevance. An overruling of Heller could have fundamentally different outcomes based on how that question is addressed.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue it seems. The claim is not whether or not rights are inherent or granted. That’s not a factual question. The issue is that you claimed SCOTUS has only ever held that the 2nd grants a right. That has a factual answer. **Do you understand the difference? **
SCOTUS could be right or wrong on any number of issues, all of which would be debateable. But it is a factual matter on what they have actually held, rightly or wrongly. You claimed that they held something that they did not. That’s why you’re wrong. You made an incorrect and false statement in General Questions. That is always grounds for correction.
I would further note that I never asserted the usage of firearms was meant to be confined only to the period when a person was actually on duty in the militia. I’ve merely asserted the right to bear arms was connected to the perceived need for the militia as it was envisioned during the founding period.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of english grammar. An independent clause is one which could stand alone as a syntactically complete sentence. This is merely a theoretical exercise which has nothing to do with semantics, however. You can’t simply sever a dependent clause and claim it has no meaning. Eighteenth century grammarians such as Noah Webster, William Ward and Robert Lowth all addressed the particular format in which the 2nd Amendment is written. It’s called the case absolute and it’s clear from 18th century grammars that the independent clause is contingent upon the conditions stated within the dependent clause. For instance, we have examples from Ward’s 1767 grammar which show equivalent forms of this construction clearly demonstrating this (pg. 145 - 146):
[I added the red highlights to show the passages being compared but tried to reproduce the formatting from the book otherwise]
Similar explanations and examples can be found in other contemporary grammars as well. While the case absolute rarely appears in common usage today, it was once quite common and is part of the rules of grammar our Founders would have learned.
And using the 2nd amendment itself:
Per grammars from the latter 18th century, this would be semantically equivalent:
I very well understand the bogus issue you’re trying to create. 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. Your line of argument appears to be a desperate diversionary tactic, and I note that you’ve never answered my challenge (as I answered yours): cite any Supreme Court case prior to Heller when the Court ever made the extraordinary claim that the “militia” clause was irrelevant or, as Scalia so boldly thought it, merely prefatory.*
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- And lest I be the victim of more nitpickery, the exact words, in part, were “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home … The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause.” This was an extraordinary judgment, which many scholars consider completely fabricated from ideological whole cloth and entirely unsupportable in history, in fact, and in precedent.
That’s a completely different argument, and it’s bogus as well. Overruling Heller would in practical terms revert to the former status quo where federal, state, and local governments could pass any common-sense gun laws that they deemed necessary for public safety. Need I remind you for about the ten millionth time that nations around the world that have no equivalent of the Second Amendment allow people to own guns and that many of their citizens indeed do, but that the restrictions are effective in enforcing safe and responsible gun availability, handling, and storage, and enormously cutting down on gun deaths and injuries.
British police manage just fine without guns. Besides, police are not comparable to average citizens. The police use their weapons in a much more offensive manner than the defensive use citizens do (e.g. citizens do not enter a situation guns drawn unless they are a criminal intending to do harm). Further, people engage with police differently. Most people will not get out of their car to go yell at a cop at a stop light or start a fight with one in a bar. Apples and oranges.
I saw one published peer review of that study which seems to be where you got all of your talking points. I have not seen a response from original authors. Hardly a resounding rejection from the scientific community but ok, let’s see if this was an outlier…
It would be interesting if the most powerful lobby group in the US lobbied congress to study gun violence. Surely if guns are such a great means of self defense the studies would show that and put this to bed. But they don’t, do they? I wonder why?
Here’s a guess:
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The number of guns per capita per country was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death in a given country, whereas the predictive power of the mental illness burden was of borderline significance in a multivariable model. Regardless of exact cause and effect, however, the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer.
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The United States has far higher rates of firearm deaths-firearm homicides, firearm suicides, and unintentional firearm deaths compared with other high-income countries. The US overall suicide rate is not out of line with these countries, but the United States is an outlier in terms of our overall homicide rate.
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Among high-income countries, where firearms are more available, more women are homicide victims. Women in the United States are at higher risk of homicide victimization than are women in any other high-income country.
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"The United States accounts for nearly 75 percent of all children murdered in the developed world. Children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the United States are 17 times more likely to be murdered by firearms than children in other industrialized nations.
Children from states where firearms are prevalent suffer from significantly higher rates of homicide, even after accounting for poverty, education, and urbanization. A study focusing on youth in North Carolina found that most of these deaths were caused by legally purchased handguns. A recent meta-analysis revealed that easy access to firearms doubled the risk of homicide and tripled the risk for suicide among all household members. Family violence is also much more likely to be lethal in homes where a firearm is present, placing children especially in danger. Murder-suicides are another major risk to children and are most likely to be committed with a gun.
Crucially, these deaths are not offset by defensive gun use. As one study found, for every time a gun is used legally in self-defense at home, there are “four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” A study of adolescents in California found that there were 13 times as many threatening as self-defensive uses of guns. Of the defensive encounters, many arose in confrontations that became hostile because of the presence of a firearm." SOURCE (there is more there than the parts I quoted)
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The association between firearm prevalence and homicide victimization in our study was driven by gun-related homicide victimization rates; non-gun-related victimization rates were not significantly associated with rates of firearm ownership. Although causal inference is not warranted on the basis of the present study alone, our findings suggest that the household may be an important source of firearms used to kill men, women and children in the United States.
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A higher number of firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of firearm fatalities in the state, overall and for suicides and homicides individually. As our study could not determine cause-and-effect relationships, further studies are necessary to define the nature of this association.
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Access to firearms is associated with risk for completed suicide and being the victim of homicide.
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A gun in the home can be used against family members or intruders and can be used not only to kill and wound, but to intimidate and frighten. This small study provides some evidence that guns may be used at least as often by family members to frighten intimates as to thwart crime, and that other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns.
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Homicides resulting from arguments declined by nearly half from 10,300 homicides in 1980 to 4,696 homicides in 2008, but as of 2008 remained the most frequently cited circumstance of the known circumstances – in homicides resulting from arguments remained relatively stable from 2000 through 2008; about 60% of homicides resulting from arguments involved guns during this period.
So we repeatedly keep seeing that owning a gun is associated with far more bad outcomes than good ones. The NRA often says we need more guns to effectively combat crime but the US already has plenty of guns in the hands of its citizens. Surely the benefits of defensive gun use should be appearing in the data yet form some reason we don’t. I wonder why?
But I am sure to you all those studies are seriously deficient in one manner or another.
So to be clear - you don’t think the issue is substantive, yet you are standing behind your false and incorrect claim? Can’t say I’m surprised. Your approach to smaller issues could be indicative of your approach to larger ones and if you’re unwilling to admit error and continue to make a claim that is obviously false I can’t see how it would be productive to get into more complex issues.
Again - wrong. I did answer your challenge, though in a way that seems unsatisfactory to you. I’ll link it for you in case you missed it:
That was in post #59. I also addressed it in post #47.
Again - wrong. Heller could be overruled saying that the standard of “in common use” and “not dangerous and unusual” are too restrictive. Overruling Heller could take the form of eliminating the presumption of constitutionality for longstanding restrictions on the carry of firearms in sensitive places. In other words, your statement could be true, but it could be false. You assume that overruling Heller would be more restrictive, but it could be more permissive.
I’m well aware of your comparisons to ‘all other developed nations’ schtick. I’ll remind you again, in case you forgot. I don’t care one bit about the laws of other countries and whatever other countries choose to do is their own business. The US is sufficiently different with regard to firearms that comparisons to other countries are wholly unpersuasive.
Do you have links to the actual studies rather than the abstracts? I clicked through a few and found one that had the full text available, but the others did not.
I am unsure how to access the complete, published studies. Perhaps some other poster here would know.
Ah, now it’s “high income country”. It was First world, but of course there are quite a few nations with higher homicide rates, then it was “western” but again, so we make up a new category “high-income countries” which we cab define as whatever we want and put the cut-off whereever we want to the skew the results.:rolleyes:
That’s not the question - the question is why are some posters are playing such a pathetic “gotcha, hypocrite!” game. So some people believe that some parts of the constitution are important and should be interpreted broadly, while others parts are less important (or even potentially harmful in their application) and should be interpreted narrowly. It’s unclear to me why anyone would be “amazed” or even surprised by this, if they thought about it for a few honest seconds.
This borders on the absurd. Every state has laws against shooting people randomly so citizens are protected against this. There is no need for the Supreme Court to recognize this “right”
It is only “intensely debated” because people not only want to do mental gymnastics to get around the plain words of the amendment, but to deny the pre-existing right. If the right was only meant to be for militia purposes, it would have been trivially easy to draft: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms for militia purposes shall not be infringed.”
They question then becomes why they didn’t make the individual right more clear. It is because at the time, the right of individuals to keep and carry arms was so obvious to anyone that it was not necessary.
There is a hell of a lot of opinion in there that many people disagree with. But for the purposes of argument, lets assume it is all true. That is why the Constitution can be amended. If it is so glaringly obvious that the Second is so outdated, then it should be easy to get 75% approval, no?
More opinion. One person’s “evolved” standards are another’s oppression. In any event, the English are free to give and take away basic rights at the whim of any Parliament. We don’t do that here; we require supermajorities to take away basic rights, and your side does not have the numbers.
Four conservatives disagreed. Four liberals and the newest liberal Kennedy wrote that opinion.
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
That’s not the question - the question is why are some posters are playing such a pathetic “gotcha, hypocrite!” game. So some people believe that some parts of the constitution are important and should be interpreted broadly, while others parts are less important (or even potentially harmful in their application) and should be interpreted narrowly. It’s unclear to me why anyone would be “amazed” or even surprised by this, if they thought about it for a few honest seconds.
[/QUOTE]
Thinking certain provisions are “important” and others “less important (or even potentially harmful in their application)” and interpreting those provisions differently based upon one’s own person value system is exactly the sort of subjective analysis that conservatives believe that judges should not be making.
When judges do that, they are little different that legislators. A judge is in favor of same sex marriage so he strains and twists the Constitution to find that “right” there when all of the best jurists from 1789-2003 missed it. A judge is against carrying handguns so he strains and twists direct words in the Constitution out of existence so that his own policy preference regarding guns can become law. That sort of stuff is untenable in a democracy no matter how positive or negative same sex marriage or carrying guns objectively are. We become no longer a government of laws, but of men.
If we have truly “evolved” to where limiting marriage to opposite sex couples or carrying handguns in public is so archaic as it needs to be eliminated, then that evolution should show it at least 75% of states, no? If not, then maybe we have not so evolved?
Then conservatives are even sillier than I’d thought. Until the invention of the ConstitutionBot 5000, there’s no alternative to.judges performing subjective analyses.
But even putting that aside, can you honestly claim that all constitutional provisions are equally important, or should robotically be treated as such? Is, say, the third amendment in need of as much scrutiny as the first or second? Is it hypocritical to.be less concerned about soldiers being unwelcome houseguests than, say, someone casually obtaining the means to mow down a kindergarten?
It’s hypocritical to apply different methods of analysis to the two provisions, chosen to create desired outcomes, yes. Of course.
You are confusing how often an issue comes up with how much scrutiny to give the issue when it does come up. Frankly, if a SCOTUS justice thought a part of the constitution was “harmful” (your words), and ruled accordingly, that justice should be removed from office. That judgement is up to the American people to make-- and to correct when they do.
What’s so different about the methods?