In what is expected to be a decision that will have significant political impact in an election year, the Supreme Court announced on November 20ththat it would hear an appeal by the District of Columbia on the striking down of its ban on handguns.
The announcement represents the potential, given that there are four Federalist Society pro-NRA justices on the Court (Alito, Scalia, Roberts, and Thomas), that for the first time in United States history the Supreme Court may declare an individual - as distinct from a collective right - to own firearms.
The decision that the Supreme Court will render will affect the entire country. As the most heavily armed nation in the world--with 90 guns for every 100 citizens--and consequentially the most violent industrialized nation on earth, the last thing the USA needs is for the Supreme Court to open the flood gates of anarchy on this issue.
300,000 Americans have been killed by guns in the past decade on US soil. Let's hope the Supreme Court does right in their honor by upholding the collective right to bear arms interpretation to stem the deadly toll from guns in this country.
Urgent: FSA Needs Your Help!
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Freedom States Alliance (FSA) is an outside the D.C. beltway project working to reduce gun injury and death in the United States. Much of our focus is on public awareness campaigns intended to change the way Americans think about guns, gun violence and the gun industry. Our online resources serve to inform and update citizens in a timely manner about key developments. We also provide web-based and capacity-building resources for statewide grassroots organizations and others working to address this important public health issue. For more information about the groups we work with, see http://www.freedomstatesalliance.com/mission.php.
Exactly what part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" does the FSA not understand? Instead of contributing to a left-fringe, socialist organization like the FSA, my money goes to the NRA. You to may join or renew your NRA membership at https://membership.nrahq.org/forms/signup.asp
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Carl Lot (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments)
on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 9:18:15 PM
The militia is comprised of individuals. Even in the Revolutionary war you had the Regulars (Government funded and trained troops) and you had the Militia (Individually recruited individuals that fought with whatever firearm they owned). People say we have a militia in the National Guard, except the National Guard is exactly that…NATIONAL. It is funded and run by the government.
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Carl Lot (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments)
on Thursday, November 22, 2007 at 7:18:32 AM
COLONIST DID NOT VIEW BEARING ARMS AS COLLECTIVE RIGHT
This 1939 Supreme Court decision that the right to keep and bear arms is a collective and not an individual right is another example of how judges and lawyers can use legal sophistry to define away peoples rights guaranteed by the Constitution and perform the verbal equivalent of redefining white to mean black. The Constitution was written at the end of the colonial era and the colonists could not have survived if they had had to run to some central community repository whenever they needed guns to defend themselves. Instead, they either lept their guns in their homes or carried them on their persons.
Of course, the main reason the colonists needed guns for self defense was because they were encroaching on the territiry of the original inhabitants of this continent. But that does not change the fact that they COULD NOT have meant by the right to keep and bear arms that the community could keep a central storehouse of guns to which the colonists could have run when they needed them. They could not have survived if they had kept their guns that way. And since that means that they MUST have had an interpretation of the second amendment that allowed them to keep and bear arms in their homes and on their persons, in what sense could this right not have been an individual right?
Secondly, it is mantmatically impossible to provide everyone, or 100% of the people, with squads of police to provide 24 hour guard service. Even today, it you are confronted by a criminal, you need to have a gun on your person to protect yourself. There is usually no squad of police on the scene at all times to protect you.
And finally, if there is ever an attempt to establish a dictatorship in this country, it is preferable for the citizenry to be armed. In fact, there seems to be an attempt to establish a dictatorship currently underway, given the Supreme Court's ordering the people to stop the official vote count and appointing Bush in 2000, the massive vote fraud and stolen elections in both 2000 and 2004, the de jure abolition of habaeus corpus (although the de facto abolition has not been fully implemented), the Military Commissions Act, the legalization of torture and the executive orders giving Bush the power to give himself complete judicial, executive, and legislative power whenever he choses.
This middle class, liberal horror of those terrible, icky GUNS is totally divorced from reality.
My position on gun controll may cause most readers to assume I am a right winger, I am in fact a socialist, but being a radical socialist does not mean I have to take leave of common sense.
Even liberals should be concerned about a flat ban on handgun ownership in the privacy of one's own home, like the one that Washington DC imposed.
Improving the safety of guns with trigger locks is reasonable. Banning the taking of guns into crowded public areas is also reasonable. But what you choose to keep inside your home, for your own personal enjoyment, is not the Government's business, whether it's marijuana plants or a 9 mm handgun, properly secured and cared for.
Whether it's the consenting adults whom you freely choose to sleep with, what substances you choose to put into your body for recreation, or what items you choose to collect in your home for your own enjoyment, the Government shouldn't be able to have you arrested for the choices you made.
The fact that gun control advocates are lamenting a legal challenge to the Washington DC handgun ban proves, once and for all, that they are NOT just interested in reasonable regulations on firearms. They want to ban private ownership of firearms altogether. And there is no justification, either in jurisprudence or in the American political tradition, for such an extreme position. Only their own personal moral code which they seek to impose on the rest of us. And imposing one's own personal moral code on the millions of Americans who don't share it can hardly be considered a "progressive" position.
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RightSide (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Saturday, November 24, 2007 at 10:58:20 AM
