Finally an Issue I can march the streets with the Tea baggers side by side.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

It doesn't say right to a militia. when you have a right it explicitly says you have a right to something in one form or another.

As for the 10th amendment you're right. Which is why HCR and Single payer is completely constitutional. It's clearly mentioned in article 1 section 8.

Ok, "right to bear arms."

And we've had this discussion before. The people who wrote that section clarified what it meant. Second, it has never been interpreted the way you are trying to interpret it. "Congress can do w/e it wants." I'll go back and look at the cases I read so I can be more precise.

[Kyreth]

Bullshit its not.

Conservatives cry about states rights and limited government when it comes to shit they believe in and not things the overwhelming majority of the local population wants in gun control.

Awesome. But the will of the majority cannot be allowed to encroach on the rights of the minority in this case.

Do we get to pick and choose which constitutional rights we allow and which we choke under local laws? The 2nd Amendment says "the right of people to keep and bear arms", not "except for when people get nervous about it".

Should this mean unrestrained use of weapons? No. People should be trained in the use of firearms before being licensed for them, just like we do with motor vehicles and other dangerous machinery, and guns should be registered (again, just like your car) so that if they're used irresponsibly, it's easier to find them and the criminal in question using them. Even decisions like this don't mean the Court is saying "HEY! GUNS FOR EVERYONE!"

But there has to be a point at which the laws go from being reasonable to attempts to ban guns under another name. The court's decided, as it's supposed to that we the people hit that point a while back and the laws need to be redone.

I don't see this as something your average Tea Bagger is going to foam at the mouth about. Quite the opposite. Attempts by the court to trim back laws to hew closer to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are to be appreciated, not cursed.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

Rhino just want's the judges to do what Dem's can't do at the ballot box.

[eunhye]

Everyone male over a certain age in Switzerland has a gun. That should happen here in the US of A as well.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

And reading excerpts from the dissent's opinion should scare the shit out of anyone, left or right.

[Kyreth]

And reading excerpts from the dissent's opinion should scare the shit out of anyone, left or right.

Link for that?

[Zeb]

Everyone male over a certain age in Switzerland has a gun. That should happen here in the US of A as well.

And they have compulsory military service.

[Effluo]

Gunsgunsguns.

I am happy SCOTUS said states cannot ban handguns in the home. Gimme my guns. You can have them when you pry them from my cold dead fingers.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1521.pdf

"'there is no popular consensus' that the right is fundamental"

Didn't realize we were ruled by men.

[Olo401]

Edit: And the 10th amendment means nothing. It's nearly 100% irrelevant to any constitutional discussion.

Then why do the Republicans and their Tea Party surrogates continually bring up the 10th amendment whenever this Congress passes a bill, when you all apparently KNOW that it doesn't even apply? Wait.. never mind I should be asking the obvious question. We already know you're doing it just for partisan political gain.

And we've had this discussion before. The people who wrote that section clarified what it meant.

Really? Do you have a link to this "clarification" made by the people who wrote Article I Section 8?

Second, it has never been interpreted the way you are trying to interpret it. "Congress can do w/e it wants." I'll go back and look at the cases I read so I can be more precise.

No one is saying that - we're saying that the tenth amendment does not apply because the power is already delegated. Congress is grated legislative power by the Constitution - the power to write and enact laws. The scope of this lawmaking power is defined in A1S8, and is further refined by constitutional amendments (in particular the 14th), previously passed acts of Congress that delegate power elsewhere, and judicial review.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

Then why do the Republicans and their Tea Party surrogates continually bring up the 10th amendment whenever this Congress passes a bill, when you all apparently KNOW that it doesn't even apply? Wait.. never mind I should be asking the obvious question. We already know you're doing it just for partisan political gain.


Really? Do you have a link to this "clarification" made by the people who wrote Article I Section 8?
No one is saying that - we're saying that the tenth amendment does not apply because the power is already delegated. Congress is grated legislative power by the Constitution - the power to write and enact laws. The scope of this lawmaking power is defined in A1S8, and is further refined by constitutional amendments (in particular the 14th), previously passed acts of Congress that delegate power elsewhere, and judicial review.

They are mistaking the 10th amendment with the principles of federalism. And I doubt "all" of them know it doesn't apply. I doubt you even know why it doesn't matter. I doubt anyone does really.

A cite, not a link.
"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one...."
-- James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792

With respect to the two words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. If the words obtained so readily a place in the "Articles of Confederation," and received so little notice in their admission into the present Constitution, and retained for so long a time a silent place in both, the fairest explanation is, that the words, in the alternative of meaning nothing or meaning everything, had the former meaning taken for granted.
--James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, elaborated upon this limitation in a letter to James Robertson.

[Acturus]

http://i45.tinypic.com/15q9fo3.jpg

Hey, facepalm all you want, but comparing apples to dumptrucks doesn't really work in logical arguments.

[antihero]

lol

[Gregorio]

I might have missed this in b/w this post and my last, but that sentence reads like a list. 1) Right to a miltia 2) Right to keep and bear arms, neither of which should be infringed.

You're a little bit off here. I actually left this out in my earlier post...but the Anti-Federalists for many reasons did not want the ratification of the Constitution. One of them being that they feared that without listing an actual the Bill of Rights, those rights would be usurped, and so many of the fears of their fears came into play in this amendment.

Anti-Federalists argued that Congress might neglect the militias or fail to provide weapons for them. This position was odd because militia members possessed their own weapons in the first place, also since it was not the norm for the government to provide weapons to militia members. And since the Anti-Federalists reasoned that the militia may be neglected by the Congress, they maintained people should be able to keep and bear their own private arms. Again this argument was odd, but Anti-Federalists would make any argument in an attempt to stop the ratification of the Constitution. The two (militia and right to bear arms) gradually came together in part because of this.

You can see proponents of the Constitution attempt to appease Anti-Federalists through rewrites of proposed amendments which drew from state constitutions as well. Pennsylvania, drawing from its own state constitution which we already mentioned did not link the right to bear arms with the militia (because they had no militia) proposed: "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own State, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals."

It doesn't say right to a militia.

Seeing as the militia was made up of ordinary citizens, and it even mentions in Article 1 section 8 that Congress has the power to call upon the militia, I'd say we have the right to a militia if people decided to form one. What's to stop ordinary citizens from gathering together and practicing military tactics with guns if they aren't hurting anyone?

Also...

when you have a right it explicitly says you have a right to something in one form or another

Not quite.

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_A...s_Constitution

[Kyreth]

Thanks for the link to the syllabus there. I found it enlightening from the first few pages alone:

(1)The Court must decide whether that right is fundamental to the Nation’s scheme of ordered liberty, Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145, 149, or, as the Court has said in a related context, whether it is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 702, 721. Heller points unmistakably to the answer. Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present, and the Heller Court held that individual self-defense is “the central component” of the Second Amendment right. 554 U. S., at ___, ___. Explaining that “the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute” in the home, ibid., the Court found that this right applies to handguns because they are “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family,” id., at ___, ___–___. It thus concluded that citizens must be permitted “to use [handguns] for the core lawful purpose of self-defense.” Id., at ___. Heller also clarifies that this right is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and traditions,” Glucksberg, supra, at 721. Heller explored the right’s origins in English law and noted the esteem with which the right was regarded during the colonial era and at the time of the ratification of the Bill of Rights. This is powerful evidence that the right was regarded as fundamental in the sense relevant here. That understanding persisted in the years immediately following the Bill of Rights’ ratification and is confirmed by the state constitutions of that era,which protected the right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 19–22.

(2) A survey of the contemporaneous history also demonstrates clearly that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers and ratifiers counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to the Nation’s system of ordered liberty. Pp. 22–33.

etc, etc.


It's a lot of reading (and somewhat dense) but it certainly gives you a solid idea as to why the SCOTUS went the way they did here. This also:

(b) The Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, originally applied only to the Federal Government, not to the States, see, e.g., Barron ex rel. Tiernan v. Mayor of Baltimore, 7 Pet. 243, 247, but the constitutional Amendments adopted in the Civil War’s aftermath fundamentally altered the federal system.

That is, post-Civil War changes to the law applied the Bill of Rights and other amendments to the Constitution more strongly to the states, as opposed to the more limited scope of the federal government itself.

The 14th Amendment holds that the rights in the Bill of Rights are part and parcel of those for every American citizen, and that since the right to self-defense (including in this case, arms in the form of handguns) is part of that (2nd Amendment), the states cannot legislate away that right as it is one of the American citizen, and hence above the state's power to do away with- much like Georgia can't go back and roll out a new book full of Jim Crow laws or re-start segregation because it wasn't happy with treating all races equally.

[Feedmenow]

Guns are fucking awesome.

Why would we want to ban them again? I'm confused. Killing people is already against the law.

We could solve this whole issue by declaring that killing anti-gun people is not a crime!

[Kyreth]

From the majority argument for the decision:

First, while §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment contains“an antidiscrimination rule,” namely, the Equal Protection Clause, municipal respondents can hardly mean that §1 does no more than prohibit discrimination. If that were so, then the First Amendment, as applied to the States,would not prohibit nondiscriminatory abridgments of the rights to freedom of speech or freedom of religion; the Fourth Amendment, as applied to the States, would not prohibit all unreasonable searches and seizures but only discriminatory searches and seizures—and so on. We assume that this is not municipal respondents’ view, so what they must mean is that the Second Amendment should be singled out for special—and specially unfavorable—treatment. We reject that suggestion.

[Correction]

I voted "GunsGunsGunsGunsGunsGuns" because it made me laugh. What's this thread about again?

[isladar]

Seriously you guys, srsly.

http://slashangry.net/callisto/verbottern.jpg