Proposed change to second amendment
Posted by xthinker88 10 years, 6 months ago to Government
I think the author just doesn't get it.
The founders pretty much botched the 2nd Amendment when they added the preamble. As a legal principle, a preamble to a law only ever comes into play for interpreting the law when the main clause of the law is not clearly written. You cannot get more clearly written in the English language than: The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Thus the preamble to that clause should never come into play. Just as the preamble to the Constitution is irrelevant to analyzing constitutional issues.
The Pennsylvania Constitution actually did it better:
The right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned. (Pa. Const. art. I, ยง 21) (1790).
Of course PA's gun laws violate its own constitution but that is a different issue.
The founders pretty much botched the 2nd Amendment when they added the preamble. As a legal principle, a preamble to a law only ever comes into play for interpreting the law when the main clause of the law is not clearly written. You cannot get more clearly written in the English language than: The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Thus the preamble to that clause should never come into play. Just as the preamble to the Constitution is irrelevant to analyzing constitutional issues.
The Pennsylvania Constitution actually did it better:
The right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned. (Pa. Const. art. I, ยง 21) (1790).
Of course PA's gun laws violate its own constitution but that is a different issue.
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I'm sick and tired of these people control freaks. I don't refer to them as gun control freaks because their actual intent is to control people, not guns.
His figure of 30K deaths -- almost 20K of those deaths are from suicide. I didn't bother looking up the number of people killed due to hunting and other accidents, so for the sake of convenience I'm going to consider the remaining 10K deaths to be homicides of some sort or another. Big. Frigging. Deal. In a nation with over 300 million people and almost as many guns, 10K people a year is way down towards the bottom of the list of how people die in this country. (Not that any murders are ok, but let's get our priorities in order here)
One of the problems with the US v Miller case is that the members of the Supreme Court at the time were grossly ignorant of the types of weapons used by the infantry in the army. One of those weapons was, in fact, the sawed-off shotgun. So, even limiting the scope of the second amendment "to the uses of arms that were related to military activities" should allow for both sawed-off shotguns *and* automatic rifles.
All of that aside, who cares what the Supreme Court has ruled. Regardless of what the original intent and purpose of that branch of government was, for over the past 100 years it has served mainly as a rubber stamp for the actions of the other two branches of government. Yes, they've rules some things unconstitutional, but that's been for the sake of decorum. The Citizens United case was the death knell for the last vestige of legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
Since the organization was mentioned in the article, I want to add that I'm not a supporter of the NRA. Their position for supporting gun rights in the interest of sporting and hunting is disingenuous. Maybe their stance is the politically expedient one, but I would rather support JPFO -- Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownwership. They understand the real purpose to the second amendment. See the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to understand why.
I hope this doesn't step on anyone's toes or violate the rules of engagement, but I'm going to recommend that y'all look into JPFO. For one, they understand the real purpose of the second amendment. But just as, if not more, important, is that no one messes with the Jews. You tell someone that you're a member of the NRA and they're gonna label you a gun nut. Tell them that you're a member of JPFO and now you're bringing up the Holocaust and all of the Nazi atrocities and anti-semitism. It throws the libtard off balance, gives them pause to *maybe* think.