No Second Amendment = A Disarmed People
QUOTE
”A well regulated militia being necessary to
the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms
shall not be infringed.” (American Constitution Second Amendment)
American liberals have a problem. They wish to remove the constitutional right to bear arms from the American people. Their problem is the Second Amendment. To honestly achieve their aim they would have to amend the Constitution. But such amendments are difficult, going on impossible.
To initiate amendments, either two thirds of both houses of Congress must vote for them or two thirds of the State legislatures must call for a convention for proposing amendments. That is just the proposal process. This is followed by acceptance by the individual States. In the former case, three quarters of the States must ratify the amendment individually: in the latter three quarters of the convention must vote for the amendment.
Those are stringent terms to meet in any political system, but particularly so in a state as vast and diverse as the USA and with such a strong tradition of regional government. Add to those structural difficulties the existence of widespread gun ownership and powerful lobbies such as the National Rifle Association and the mountain becomes practically insurmountable by honest means. So what does the liberal do? What he always does when he wants to ban something which is permitted by the Constitution: he pretends that the Constitution does not mean what it manifestly says.
In the case of the Second Amendment the attack takes the form of pretending that the Amendment was merely meant to provide for a militia rather than affirming and protecting the right of people to arm themselves individually. Happily, there is plenty of ammunition with which to shoot down this claim: in the Constitution itself, in the historical circumstances in which the Constitution and Amendment were drafted, in the very logic of a militia.
The claim that the amendment is simply to safeguard the right of America’s military forces to keep and bear arms is self-evidently absurd. If true all the amendment would mean is that the federal government could not disarm the militia soldiers who represented the majority of its armed forces. It would be practically a redundant clause.
The fact that the Amendment states that the right is not merely to bear but to keep arms might be thought by most honest folk to be a pretty clear indication that the private ownership of weapons was what the framers of the Amendment had in mind. Moreover, what would be the point of the Amendment if it was not to confer such a right to the individual? Any other permission to keep and bear arms must of necessity be dependent upon permission from those with political power and authority. It would thus again be a futile and redundant clause. It is noteworthy that nowhere in the Constitution, amended or otherwise, is any instruction on the exercise of such state power given or hinted at.
When judging the intent of the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (which contains the Second Amendment) it is necessary to know the general social and intellectual backcloth against which they worked. They were heir to the English tradition of liberty and government by consent rather than pure tyranny. The Americans who rose against the England of King George III did so because they considered themselves part of the tradition of English liberty. In seeking independence, they were not repudiating that tradition but in their own minds returning to what they imagined was the true path of English liberty which had become corrupted in England. It is against this ancient English tradition that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be set.
What does the unamended Constitution of 1787 say about the protection of the newly formed United States? Section 8 of Article 1 grants to Congress the right:
To raise and support Armies, but no appropriation of Money for that Use shall be for a longer term than two years.
”To provide and maintain a Navy.
”To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.
”To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.
”To provide for organising, arming and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.
The first point to note is that the Army and the militias are clearly distinguished as separate entities. The second is the time limit on the power to raise money for armies. This is highly significant. There was a very long tradition in England of professional standing armies being heartily mistrusted as the tool of despots. It was the attempt to institute a standing army of thirty thousand men which was one of the main reasons why King James II was overthrown in 1688. Armies were raised for wars, but in peacetime militias were the order of the day. Indeed, until the first world war England never had a great standing army. (The English tradition is also echoed in the absence of any time restriction placed on the funding of a navy by the Founding Fathers. The English never feared a strong navy as such because it could not be used against them).
With this English mistrust of standing armies and reliance on militias went a tradition of not merely allowing weapons to be generally held, but of such a practice being positively encouraged to ensure the defence of the country. Feudal military obligation was in fact built on the private provision not merely of men but of arms and equipment. In late medieval times statutes were enacted to encourage long bow practice. The Spanish Armada which attempted to invade England in 1588 was repulsed by a mixed English fleet of private and Royal ships.
Perhaps the strongest single circumstantial reason for dismissing the liberal’s interpretation of the Second Amendment are the well attested motives for those promoting the Bill of Rights. Those who pushed for the first ten Amendments did so because they believed that the rights and liberties of the individual were not guarded explicitly enough by the original Constitution. Thus, if we are to believe the liberal, we must accept the truly fantastic explanation that in the case of the Second Amendment the protection of individual liberty was utterly cast aside without reason, public acknowledgement or, most compellingly, any contemporary comment, adverse or otherwise.
There is also a question of simple practicality. When the Amendment was passed (December 1791), the infant federal government simply did not have the means to finance the arming of militias. Thus, they can only have envisaged private arms being put to the service of the state, a tradition which as previously mentioned had a long history in both England and the Thirteen Colonies. Moreover, subsequent history bore this out, for the greater number of troops employed by the American Union in its wars against Britain and Mexico in the first half of the 19th century came from militias. In an age of minimal government, the Second Amendment underpinned the whole scheme of national defence.
Does the Second Amendment allow for any government abridgement of the right to keep and bear arms? It might just be possible to sustain an argument that a register of guns would not breach the Second Amendment provided there was no restriction on the right to own and bear weapons, that is no person could be denied the right either to appear on the register or bear arms. But even here it could be argued with some force that the registration of weapons – particularly if it required complicated bureaucratic procedures – was an interference with the general right to bear arms. Moreover, if a right is general and absolute, it is by no means clear how any procedure initiated by and insisted upon by the state could be legitimate because by definition there can be no legitimate restriction of the right.
Americans produce a multitude of reasons for retaining their guns. They argue on the grounds of personal liberty. They argue on the grounds of deterring crime. They argue on the grounds of personal protection. They argue on a dozen and one grounds. This to my mind is a mistake. Good causes do not need to be bolstered by a battery of arguments. Good causes need but one argument. The only necessary argument for private gun ownership is in the Second Amendment: ”A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.” The key words here are “a free state”. That phrase cannot mean solely to maintain the state in its independence from other states, because that could as well apply to a dictatorship as well as a democracy. In the context of the reasons for the American War of Independence “a free state” must also mean the maintenance of the freedom of the citizens from the oppressive power of the state. That after all was what the whole breach with England was about. Moreover, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are written in a manner which actively extols the individual over the state, viz: “We the people of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” (preamble to the Constitution).
The general motivation for demanding gun control is not the saving of lives. (Its only effect in England has been to leave guns predominately in the hands of criminals and the state). Liberals wish to remove the general right of gun ownership in America for the same reason that they wish to interfere with the lives of their people generally: they are natural authoritarians. They know that their philosophy (such as it is) conflicts utterly with human nature and are thus driven to suppress any resistance or dissent through the intimidation of political correctness and the practical control of public life. The disarming of the American people is part of this oppressive strategy.
The desire to restrict the holding of arms has always come from those who wished to not only monopolise power but to do so on their own terms. When the crossbow was invented, the medieval nobility attempted to ban it because it reduced the effectiveness of the armoured and mounted knight. Failing in that, they attempted to restrict, with some success, its ownership to people they could control. The Samurai in Japan enforced ruthlessly their rule that only Samurai should carry swords. When the demobbed conscripts of British Army returned to Britain after the First World War, the British government passed the first serious laws regulating gun ownership not because they feared that the British would begin to murder one another in great numbers but because they feared Red revolution. [ see the Blackwell Report & The First World Wars Aftermath - Editor ]
If Americans wish to retain what is left of
their freedom, they will do well to keep the Second
Amendment intact. This means
not merely retaining the status quo, but the mounting of legal challenges to
every restriction on the holding and bearing of arms in the United States. The
plain and hideously inescapable fact is that every attempt to restrict both gun
ownership (or indeed any other weapon) and the bearing of arms made since the
inauguration of the United States has been illegal. That applies whether or not
the interference with the Constitutional right was undertaken at the federal or
the state level. I suggest that legal action should consist not merely of
Constitutional challenges, but civil actions for damages against the federal
and appropriate state governments by those actively and personally denied the
right to bear arms.
UNQUOTE
Deny the truth if you want. Argue against it
if you want.
Second Amendment
- ex Wiki
QUOTE
The Second Amendment (Amendment
II) to the
United States Constitution is the part of the
United
States Bill of Rights that protects the
right of the people to keep and bear arms. It was adopted on December 15,
1791, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights.
In 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court issued two Second Amendment decisions. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm, unconnected to service in a militia and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Additionally, the Court enumerated several longstanding prohibitions and restrictions on firearms possession that it found were consistent with the Second Amendment. In McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Court ruled that the Second Amendment limits State and local governments to the same extent that it limits the federal government........
As passed by the Congress:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
UNQUOTE
StoneToss shows us that the whole American judiciary are corrupt, that they
ignore the Constitution when they want.
The Wiki manages to sound honest on this one.
Ninth Circuit Gun Decision Says As Much About The Court As It
Does About Firearms Rights
On Friday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth
Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals handed down a
decision of immense importance. In Duncan
v. Becerra, the Court struck down California’s ban on firearm
magazines of more than ten rounds, holding that the ban violated the
Second Amendment.
It was a major legal battle, with the Democrat attorneys general of no less than seventeen states weighing in on California’s side in support of the ban. The NRA, the National Shooting Sports Federation, and a host of local gun groups argued against the ban.
The decision was not unanimous; it was a 2-1 vote. But for court-watchers, it was an astonishing thing to see it come from the Ninth Circuit. Six other circuits, specifically the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Seventh, and D.C. Circuits, had previously sustained large-capacity magazine (LCM) bans against Second Amendment challenges.
The two judges in the majority of the Ninth Circuit panel were Judges Kenneth Lee (a Trump appointee) and Consuelo Callahan (a George W. Bush appointee). The dissent was written by Judge Barbara Lynn, a district judge from the Northern District of Texas (appointed by Clinton), who was sitting on the Ninth Circuit panel by designation. In decisions involving politicized issues like gun control, the name of the president who appointed a judge often speaks volumes.
As has been noted of late, the once left-leaning Ninth Circuit has changed a great deal during President Trump’s first term in office. President Trump has appointed no less than ten of the court’s 29 active-status judges. Combined with the three active-status appointees of George W. Bush, they are approaching the 50% mark. If President Trump wins a second term and gets to fill two more vacancies, the majority of Ninth Circuit judges will be Republican appointees. Already, in any given cases, there’s a decent chance that two of those thirteen Republican-appointed judges will land on the same randomly-selected panel. Duncan v. Becerra illustrates that fact perfectly.
The decision also sets up future battles in the U.S. Supreme Court. There is now, finally, a circuit-split on the issue—where there is a disagreement among the circuits on the same legal question. Under such circumstances, it is much more likely that the Supreme Court will take the case when it is offered.
When and if the case goes to the Supreme Court, one can only hope that the high court echoes the Ninth Circuit majority opinion written by Judge Lee.
Judge Lee’s opinion makes clear that the Second Amendment protects the magazine of semi-automatic firearms, as well as the firearms themselves. Importantly, the opinion holds that such restrictions must be subjected to “strict scrutiny” in the courts—the highest level of scrutiny. Under that standard, a law can only be sustained if the government has a “compelling state interest” and if the law is “narrowly tailored” to advance that interest. That is the same standard that applies to most other rights found in the Bill of Rights.
Judge Lee also destroys the progressive notion that law-abiding citizens don’t need more than ten rounds to defend themselves: “[I]t does not take a wild imagination to conclude that citizens may need LCMs to defend hearth and home. … In [rural] places, the closest law enforcement may be far, far away — and it may take substantial time for the county sheriff to respond. And it is no guarantee that the things that go bump in the night come alone; indeed, burglars often ply their trade in groups recognizing strength in numbers. … And in incidents of mass chaos and unrest, law enforcement simply may be unable to protect the people, leaving them solely responsible for their own safety in a seemingly Hobbesian world.”
Indeed. Let’s hope that at least five justices of the Supreme Court analyze the matter in similarly sober terms when the case gets there.
Kris W. Kobach was a professor of constitutional law during 1996-2011 at the University of Missouri-KC. He served as counsel to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft during 2001-2003, and he served as the Secretary of State of Kansas during 2011-2019. He is currently General Counsel of We Build the Wall
