By any chance, do they all cry a lot and call him sir?
Those are great words to live by, but sadly, I don’t know if I’m strong enough to live up to those ideals.
I hope never have to learn one way or another.
Menzo
7210
These people are fucking crazy.
The real conspiracy is that by buckling up, you can’t hold on to your hat unless you’re a lizard. Get pwned.
Rward
7213
…the Trump which hunt continues.
The real conspiracy is which trump is the trump which hunts?
It’s the simple things that add credibility to claims.
See, what worries me about that and Flynn & other’s recent rhetoric is the possibility of some militia-based conspiracy to organize an attack on Congress simmering on the dark web and that moron is dumb enough to speak the date of the planned attack.
It’s nuts, isn’t it? I guess if you believe in a secret shadow government like the Deep State you can believe in a shadow government run by the military.
That nutjob has a nationally-syndicated radio show. Good grief.
Notice that she makes sure to state that her wingnuttery is protected by copyright, misspellings and all.
It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.
Chuch and state Wise… render unto ceasar, Many worship Jesus --a quiet man on the shores of some ancient lake in Palestine 2000 years ago. Well around 1984 years ago if you imagine Jesus was 35. Though i doubt any of those dates were accurate.
I think i meant --and i hardly thought i had to explain since our whole government in 1778 (DOI) and 1781 (Constitution) was set up to actually prevent this from happening – that ONE man (whether it is a king, or tyrant, or the best benevolent ruler that ever lived) is the direct anti-thesis of this democracy. oh sry or woman.
It makes me weep that this needs explaining – our whole government was set up, organized and literally supported a government that was by the people and for the people…
I like to argue these self-evident truths here sometimes …it makes me feel better for accepting That Man for 4 years and saying “well he is the president” - its a guilt thing. I am sure.
To me, the simplest explanation of the meaning of the second amendment, is that it was either intentionally or unintentionally ambiguous. The rest of the constitution is really a model of concise writing. There isn’t a lot 250 year old pieces of writing that can still be easily understood by reasonably literate person. Some European on the forum, mentioned the EU constitution as great model. That sucker is 484 pages long, and I fell asleep in 30 minutes. No need for sleeping pills, just get out your copy of the EU constitution and you’ll be snoring in no time, but I digress.
I read Scalia’s, Heller opinion and most of the dissents. The dude is fine writer and his team of clerks did amazing job researching the legislative history of the 1780 and 90. So I figure, the 2nd Amendment is about an individual right. But then Sharpe pulls out the Federalist papers, gosh that makes sense.
Now maybe, its because Timex and I got the same propaganda,but I definitely heard con law professor say the 2nd Amendment is protecting the people from the tyranny of government.
At the end of day, I think the founders couldn’t settle the argument so they left it deliberately vague, and decide to let future generations figure it out.
All I know for sure is that 2nd amendment is what SCOTUS says it means at any point of time.
Don’t we have a thread for gun talk?
Sharpe
7221
So here Is the thing on that. Since that decision there’s been huge pushback by historians on the research relied on in Heller. Turns out not a lot of modern research had been done at that time and most of what Scalia relied on was written by conservative think tanks and a lot of it was based on court rulings from the South during slavery era and Jim Crow era.
More recent scholarship shows a different picture. Here’s a Slate article:
A quote:
Heller* argued that its conception of the right to keep and bear arms rested on a pre-existing English right to have arms and carry them in public. Unfortunately, new work by English historians Tim Harris, Priya Satia, and Lois Schwoerer—three of the most distinguished scholars of British history teaching on this side of the Atlantic—undercut this claim. To support its view Heller relied almost exclusively on the work of a single libertarian scholar, Joyce Lee Malcolm, the NRA’s Patrick Henry Professor, who now teaches at the Antonin Scalia School of Law. Contrary to Malcolm’s ahistorical libertarian view of British history, Harris, Satia, and Schwoerer build on a strong scholarly consensus about the meaning of the English Declaration of Rights. Indeed, at a conference in England cohosted by the Duke Center for Firearms Law and Pembroke College Oxford, leading English historians in attendance were astounded to learn that the Supreme Court had accepted Malcolm’s vision of the past and its views of gun toting Englishmen as gospel truth. Malcolm’s account is beyond idiosyncratic, it rests on claims that few serious English historians would credit as plausible. There simply was no free-standing right of English subjects to travel armed in public under English law. Outside of a narrow list of well recognized legal exceptions to this general prohibition, mostly situations where individuals were expected to assist in preserving the King’s Peace by participating in community-based forms of law enforcement, such as the posse commitatus , traveling armed was a crime under common law.
Just from the teaser part of the link:
Does anyone seriously think the answer to that question is “yes”?
(Sorry, I know this is tangent to the points being made here.)
Timex
7223
To be clear, I’m not even arguing for or against the notion of an individual right to bear arms.
I was merely pointing out that the notion that the 2nd amendment was put into the constitution to support militias with the purpose of replacing a standing army for the federal government just doesn’t really make sense, given the federal government already had a standing army. That even within the context of a prefatory argument, the purpose of the militias was not to support the Federal government, but was rather to keep the federal government from using its standing army (which already existed) to do whatever it want and stomp on the sovereignty of the States.
From the section on the 2nd amendment from Cornell Law’s writeup on the issue, it suggests that the mainstream legal argument is between whether we have the right to bear arms to support individual defense, or whether we have the right to bear arms to support the States… but it’s not to support the federal government.
That is, even within the context of a prefatory interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, you STILL have the position that arms are held with the purpose of putting a check on the federal government.
We actually see this, explicitly, within Stevens’ dissent in Heller vs. DC:
The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia. It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States.
That is, even while dissenting with the ruling, Stevens’ dissent still held that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to check the federal government’s power.
Also, as an aside, I think the Slate articles focused on English history are presenting something of a biased perspective in attempting to suggest that Heller was entirely based upon an argument of English common law dating back hundreds of years. It really wasn’t, as there are a number of other sections providing other support for their ruling with a more contemporary basis.
Southern men thus carried weapons both “as a protection against the slaves” and also to be prepared for “quarrels between freemen.”
George Mason expressed a similar fear: “The [slave patrol] militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practiced in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretenses, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution].”
Henry then bluntly laid it out: “If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress. Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia.”
Owning a gun meant keeping slaves in line.
Sharpe
7225
I only quoted part of the Slate article, due to length. The article does in fact address the issues you raise. Here is another quote:
Another major problem with Heller that will now confront Gorsuch and Barrett was that it relied heavily on a small body of legal cases from the slave owning South and ignored the rest of America’s legal history. In part, Heller’s historical blind spot reflected the paucity of scholarship about the history of gun regulation, an omission that has been rectified in the decade since the case was decided. The expansive libertarian vision of gun rights that Heller found in parts of the antebellum slave South did not encompass other parts of the new nation. Outside of the Slave south a tradition more favorable to gun regulation emerged and took hold. This new American legal theory limited armed travel to individuals who had a good cause to arm. Traditional English common law relied entirely on community-based law enforcement to address such threats, but the new American model recognized that there would be some situations in which individuals had to have a right to armed self-defense.
In contrast to modern gun rights ideology, the new American approach was not libertarian, but an adaptation of the of the Founding generation’s idea of well-regulated liberty. This new American approach to self-defense law and the right to bear arms first took hold in Massachusetts. The state’s distinguished jurist, Peter Oxenbridge Thacher, one of the new republic’s most esteemed authorities on criminal law, made this observation about his own state’s limits on public carry. “In our own Commonwealth,” he wrote authoritatively, “no person may go armed with a dirk, dagger, sword, pistol, or other offensive and dangerous weapon, without reasonable cause to apprehend an assault or violence to his person, family, or property.”
It’s a long article but worth reading in its entirety IMO.
Timex
7226
But, again, Heller was an argument of whether the 2nd amendment was intended to preserve individual freedom to bear arms, or whether it was limited to bearing arms within a State militia.
But NEITHER side was arguing that the purpose of the 2nd amendment was to allow people to bear arms to support the federal government and negate the need for a standing army. That’s just not a mainstream view of the second Amendment at all.
Even the side of Heller arguing AGAINST an individual right to bear arms, argues in favor of a right to bear arms in State militias to secure their sovereignty against the Federal government.
Matt_W
7227
On this point: Madison’s original draft of Constitutional amendments was presented to the new Congress in July of 1789. It was debated, modified, forwarded to the Senate, condensed, sent to conference, and approved as a joint resolution in September 1789. Ten of the twelve amendments were finally ratified two years later, in December 1791, when Virginia passed them.
The Continental Army was totally disbanded in 1784. There were a couple of temporary regiments formed between 1785 and 1791 to fight Indians. Those regiments suffered terrible losses (triggering the first ever Congressional Special Investigation) and Congress authorized a professional standing army in March 1792.
