Supreme Court rules on gun ownership

[rdret1]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

Rdret1--

I augur that the kinds of historical arguments the anti second amendment crowd will be using in the next ten to twenty years will go far beyond the particulars of the second amendment itself. If these arguments are managed with civility (a long shot if historians are involved), our fundamental understanding of what it means to be Americans may change. If we as a people are up to the challenge, we may be in store for profound political realignment.*

IMO, until some of the historiographical dust settles we may be better off politically by focusing on what works.
__________________________________________
* Never trust a historian's crystal ball, but I project this realignment will lead to the growth and diversification of the Republican party, a resurgence of nationalism, and the regeneration of American liberalism (i.e. the repudiation of Clintonian opportunism).

Agreed. By some of the comments made by Mayor Daley after the decision, he/they are going to try everything from taxes and fees to classes that have little to do with owning and responsibly using a firearm. I am sure they will develop some asanine strategy that will dilute the ruling until the SCOTUS has to revisit Chicago. We will have to wait and see what happens in good ol' Cali.

[Penn]

I think this article may offer some support for Sigaba position.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj

[rdret1]

That was a very pointed article. It shows the liberals don't like their own medicine.

[craigepo]

I would encourage everybody to read this opinion---the ideas contained therein are amazingly important, both for 2nd amendment fans and the run-of-the-mill libertarian.

One note: the facts discussed by the Court's conservatives are rather disconcerting. I knew of some of the violence done to freed slaves immediately after the Civil War. However, I did not realize that so many of these atrocities were enabled by the several Southern States' various refusals to allow black men and women to arm themselves.

As to the 2nd amendment issue, the Court's ruling holds that a state or local government law regarding firearms can now run afoul of the 2nd amendment. This is because the Court, in this case, has "incorporated" the 2nd amendment's guarantees into the list of rights that are mandatory/necessary/judicially cool. The opinions written by Alito, Scalia, and Thomas were very well written and researched, and in my opinion used very solid logic.

For those who haven't read my ramblings before, the "Incorporation Doctrine" is a Supreme Court creation. It allows the Court to hold that certain rights are so important that the Court rules that the states may not wholly infringe upon those rights. Those rights are generally cherry-picked by the Court at its whim; there is no guarantee that a Constitutionally-guaranteed right will be "incorporated", and thus protected from state/local encroachment.

As you read this opinion, you may note that the "conservatives" on the Court are less-than-enthusiastic about the hit-and-miss subjectivity of the Incorporation Doctrine in its present form. In fact, the rule now seems to be that if a right is "fundamental", then it is applied against the states. This is a huge sea-change in constitutional law.

Stated differently, now, if a right is "fundamental", the states must tread lightly, period. No Ivy League banter, no looking to see what other countries do on the issue, no liberal intelligentsia saying "the right to bear arms doesn't really mean the right to bear arms".

I understand Sigaba's worry regarding using historical analysis when construing the Constitution, but do not necessarily agree. Generally, there are three(3) ways to interpret the Constitution: (1) "living document"; (2) Strict Construction; and (3) Original Intent.

The "living document" folks hold that the Constitution is a living, breathing, changing document. Their idea is that the Constitution's meaning changes with time. The liberals on the Court, Sotomayor, Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg generally hold to this ideal. The problem with this technique of construction is that our citizens' rights are always-changing, and may be changed based upon judicial whim.

Strict Construction adherents construe the Constitution exactly as it is written. Pros---the citizens' rights are easily predictable. Cons---what happens when the definition of a word changes over a century or two?

Original intent judges hold that the Constitution's words mean precisely what they meant at the time the Constitution was ratified. In so doing, these judges attempt to ensure that our citizens' rights are what they were intended to be when the Constitution and its amendments were adopted. However, as you can see by reading this 214-page opinion, it takes a hell of a lot of work to determine the proper historical basis for the Constitution and amendments.

IMHO, the Original Intent technique, while causing the most work for judges and attorneys, is the most likely of the three described techniques of preserving our rights. Moreover, this idea is most likely to ensure that the rights preserved actually resemble those that were ratified by the Nation's citizens, as opposed to some monstrosity dreamed-up by the newest Ivy League justice on the Court.

[Pete]

Originally Posted by rdret1

... By some of the comments made by Mayor Daley after the decision, he/they are going to try everything from taxes and fees to classes that have little to do with owning and responsibly using a firearm.......

If they are put in place to limit gun ownership the taxes and classes will hit the poor and less educated the hardest.

Not long before that one heads to the SC - and the libs will be on our side on that one.

[Buffalobob]

Final DC regulations for handguns look something like this.



Get fingerprinted and FBI background check - $12.00

Have a DD214 or pay for several hours of training-$100.00

FFL transfer fee into DC being as there are not any "stores" - $125

Ballistic test - $20

Registration Fee -$40

Gun must be on Safe Handgun list of Cal, Mass, or Md with minor cosmetic difference allowed. Cal list being goofier than a three dollar bill.

12 round mags max

No open carry nor concealed carry.

Permit for gun must be with gun.


What was not passed into law was an annual permit fee for each registered gun.


************ I did not dig out any of my paperwork so there may be some error in some of the fees but as you can see the miscellaneous costs run pretty high.

[rdret1]

This is a quote by Thomas Paine:

"These people are either too superstitiously religious, or too cowardly for arms; they either can not or dare not defend; their property is open to anyone who has the courage to attack them The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like law, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside. Horrid mischief would ensue were one-half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong"

Even in 1775, the same arguments were there. This applies today just as much as it apparently did then. 235 years and we still have liberals who want to place the populace in a dependant posture. It seems to me, the only justification for their agenda is to attain as much power as possible, then spring the trap on the country.

Fortunately, SCOTUS has prevented that ... for now. Once we see how liberal politicians react in an attempt to counter this decision, more and more of their real agenda will become obvious to the population. They will not take this laying down.

[GratefulCitizen]

We will probably end up with a living, breathing Constitution whether we like it or not.

The reason is the effect information technology will have upon the young.
They will not be inclined to listen to "gate-keepers" of knowledge and expertise.

They will evaluate ideas for themselves, associate (via technology) with others sharing their views (echo chambers), and simply impose their will if power and numbers allow.
Our government will be insufficient if the core values underlying the Constitution are not instilled in the young.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

Without sufficient numbers who have stable core values, the Constitution is doomed.

The future will not be secured by legal opinions.
It must be secured in the hearts and minds of the young.

[akv]

Originally Posted by rdet1

We will have to wait and see what happens in good ol' Cali.

Yes Sir, things should get interesting in the Golden State based on the SCOTUS ruling. In reaction to the Open Carry movement, AB 1934 which bans (unloaded) open carry passed the California State House on June 1st of this year, and now has to make it through the State Senate and Governor I believe. I understand the Dims views, but was surprised to see some local (Emeryville) police support for the ban on the basis of officer safety.

In essence if passed this would seem a de facto pistol ban, since your average law abiding citizens have better odds of winning the lottery than getting a CCW in these parts.

I guess we will see...

Originally Posted by BuffaloBob

Gun must be on Safe Handgun list of Cal, Mass, or Md with minor cosmetic difference allowed. Cal list being goofier than a three dollar bill.

Absolutely, after reading some posts here on the HK45 I was excited to pick one up, nope, illegal for a civilian.

[Streck-Fu]

Originally Posted by craigepo

I However, I did not realize that so many of these atrocities were enabled by the several Southern States' various refusals to allow black men and women to arm themselves.

It wasn't just the Southern states....An unfortunate revisionist perspective is that it was just the southern states that were violent against freed slaves and blacks as a whole. Plenty of Northern states wanted nothing to due with them but that does not blend well with the revision of history that the Civil War centered around slavery.

[Streck-Fu]

More on how the dissenting judges do not support the 2nd Am and constitutional rights in general...built around how Sotomayor lied in her confirmation hearing.


In her confirmation hearing, she stated that she believed and understood the individual right of private firearm ownership. But her joining the dissent in McDonald proves she lied...

The Breyer-Sotomayor-Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissent urged that Heller be overruled and declared, "In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense."

Contrast that with her Senate testimony: "I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller." And, "I understand how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans."

Read the whole article to see how the dissenting judges argued against the 2nd Am itself and constitutional rights in general.

KOPEL: Sotomayor targets guns now
Justice's dissent contradicts confirmation testimony

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the Supreme Court opinions in McDonald v. Chicago was the dissenters' assault on District of Columbia v. Heller. Not only did Justice Stephen G. Breyer vote against extending the Second Amendment to state and local governments, he also argued forcefully and at length for overturning Heller and, therefore, for turning the Second Amendment into a practical nullity. Ominously, Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the Breyer dissent - contradicting what she told the U.S. Senate and the American people last summer.

Regarding the key issue in McDonald - whether the 14th Amendment makes the Second Amendment enforceable against state and local governments - Justice Sotomayor resolutely refused to tell the senators how she might vote. So in voting against incorporating the Second Amendment, Justice Sotomayor was not inconsistent with what she had told the Senate. But regarding Heller, her actions as a justice broke her promises from last summer.

The Breyer-Sotomayor-Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissent urged that Heller be overruled and declared, "In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense."

Contrast that with her Senate testimony: "I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller." And, "I understand how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans."

Yet her McDonald opinion shows her "understanding" that those many, many Americans are completely wrong to think they have a meaningful individual right.

To the Senate Judiciary Committee, Justice Sotomayor repeatedly averred that Heller is "settled law." The Associated Press reported that Sen. Mark Udall, Colorado Democrat, "said Sotomayor told him during a private meeting that she considers the 2008 ruling that struck down a Washington, D.C., handgun ban as settled law that would guide her decisions in future cases."

So by "settled," she apparently meant "not settled; should be overturned immediately."

In the McDonald case, the Breyer-Sotomayor-Ginsburg dissent recapitulated various arguments that had been made in Heller by the dissenting justices. The dissenters also said Heller should be overturned because some law-review articles had criticized Heller. If criticism by a handful of law-review articles were the criterion for overturning a precedent, almost every major Supreme Court precedent would be overruled.

Besides, there also are plenty of law-journal articles that praise Heller and point out serious logical and historical errors that the anti-Second Amendment dissenters made in Heller.

Another argument that Breyer-Sotomayor-Ginsburg made for getting rid of Heller pointed to a McDonald amicus brief by some legal historians. That brief discussed the 1689 English Declaration of Rights, which was enacted by Parliament after the despotic Stuart monarchs were ousted in the Glorious Revolution. The Declaration guaranteed "[t]hat the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law." This guarantee was an ancestor of the Second Amendment.

According to the historians, the declaration didn't actually mean that Protestants (98 percent of the population) could have arms for their defense. It meant that Parliament could arm the militia.

Those English parliamentarians apparently had great difficulty in straightforwardly expressing what they meant, as they forgot to say "Parliament" and "militia" in their new law about Parliament arming the militia.

It's a creative argument, but it's not new. The same theory had been presented to the court in the Heller case.

Justices Breyer and Ginsburg should be free to rail against Heller all they want. They never promised anyone that they considered Heller to be "settled law." To get confirmed to the court, they never touted their understanding of "how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans." Sonia Sotomayor, however, promised to do one thing and then did the opposite.

The Sotomayor switcheroo highlights the necessity for the Senate to conduct a serious inquiry into Solicitor General Elena Kagan's views on the Second Amendment. Later this week, I will testify to the Judiciary Committee about Ms. Kagan's record on guns during her service in the Clinton administration. That record hardly inspires confidence that she has any respect for the rights of gun owners, but perhaps she has changed.

The Senate should not let itself by pacified with non-answers, platitudes and evasions.

Heller is one vote away from being overruled. Many senators from both parties strongly support the Heller decision and the right to bear arms. That's why 58 of them joined an amicus brief in McDonald urging that the Chicago handgun ban be declared unconstitutional.

With four justices over the age of 70, President Obama may have several more Supreme Court appointments in the next two to six years. The Sotomayor experience shows why it's crucial for senators to demand serious answers about where a nominee stands on the Second Amendment.

[Streck-Fu]

A little more on the dissenters: LINK

Gun Shy
Four Supreme Court justices make the case against constitutional rights.

On Monday the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities as well as the federal government. Judging from their objections, the four dissenters were still reeling from the Court's landmark 2008 decision recognizing that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.

In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If "the people" want to ban handguns, they say, "the people" should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives.

What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church, or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.

Likewise, Stevens defends "state and local legislatures' right to experiment," while Breyer is loath to interfere with "the ability of States to reflect local preferences and conditions—both key virtues of federalism." Coming from justices who think Congress can disregard state decisions about the medical use of marijuana because a plant on the windowsill of a cancer patient qualifies as interstate commerce, this sudden concern about federalism is hard to take seriously.

Another reason to doubt the dissenters' sincerity: They would never accept federalism as a rationale for letting states "experiment" with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or due process protections. Much of their job, as they themselves see it, involves overriding "local preferences" that give short shrift to constitutional rights.

Second Amendment rights are different, Breyer says, because "determining the constitutionality of a particular state gun law requires finding answers to complex empirically based questions." So does weighing the claims in favor of banning child pornography or depictions of animal cruelty, relaxing the Miranda rule, admitting illegally obtained evidence, or allowing warrantless pat-downs, dog sniffs, or infrared surveillance.

When they decide whether a law or practice violates a constitutional right, courts cannot avoid empirical questions. In cases involving racial discrimination or content-based speech restrictions, for example, they ask whether the challenged law is "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest" and is the "least restrictive means" of doing so.

But unlike equal protection or freedom of speech, Stevens says, "firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty." How so? "Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders," he explains, "they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims."

Every right can be abused, with results that are immoral, illegal, or both. Freedom of speech can be used to spread hateful ideas, promote pernicious political philosophies, slander the innocent, or engage in criminal conspiracies. If there were no potential for harm from exercising a right, there would be no need to protect it, because no one would try to restrict it.

The dissenters' most frivolous objection is that making states obey the Second Amendment "invites an avalanche of litigation," as Stevens puts it. Every day we hear about cases in which people argue that the government has violated their rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, or Eighth amendment. Neither Stevens nor Breyer wants to stop this "avalanche." Only when the Second Amendment is added to the mix do they recoil in horror at the prospect that Americans will use the courts to vindicate their rights.

Stevens warns that "the practical significance of the proposition that 'the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States' remains to be worked out by this Court over many, many years." But that's because the Court for many, many years ignored the Second Amendment while gradually defining the contours of its neighbors in the Bill of Rights. There is a lot of catching up to do.

[J8127]

Originally Posted by GratefulCitizen

...
The future will not be secured by legal opinions.
It must be secured in the hearts and minds of the young.

Made me think of this video,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNUc8nuo7HI

[akv]

Originally Posted by BrushOkie

It is NOT illegal to have one in CA. You just have to find a used one since it is not on the safety list and can not be bought new or imported into the state.

That would be good news, the multiple sources I checked, state gun rules website, and the officer I asked who gave me "careful on the intent of the law" advice, led me to another impression. So, what I think you are saying is I need to find someone who moved here with one from another state.

On the main topic, folks are spot on, the Scalia opinion is worth the read, particularly the other democracies paragraph.

[J8127]

So are there any potential repercussions to Sotomayer? I know they would never happen but couldn't she be impeached or something for perjury or conspiracy or something? Or is she free to just "changer her mind" right after being appointed?