Aren’t you supposed to be an attorney? How the hell are you not aware that the purpose of speech is relevant to freedom of speech? That, for example, SCOTUS has ruled that speech employed for the purpose of inciting imminent lawless action, or for the purpose of conveying a true threat, is not protected by the First Ammendment, which was intended to safeguard the liberties of free expression & political dissent, not of anarchic public screeching.
Sorry, I forgot there were mentally challenged readers.
Yes, the right to bear arms does not include the right to murder, rob, rape, or such criminal acts using firearms.
Similarly, freedom of speech does not include the right to defraud, slander (with some exceptions), yell “fire” in a crowded theatre, or tell state secrets.
Of course the underlying purpose matters because (1) the 2A has a prefatory clause that qualifies the purpose of the right, and (2) the right has the chance to conflict with other rights (like states deciding for themselves what possession and carry rules they want), which is precisely why I asked the question above re: walking around the streets of New York.
The idea that the 2A is written crystal clearly with no confusion over meaning is horseshit.
Sorry, I forgot there were mentally challenged readers. [/Quote]
Incidentally – and this is only because you’ve invited it so heartily – remember a few days ago when you lost an argument and decided, instead of conceding the point, to lie about what Trump had said? Remember when I supplied Trump’s own transcript, proving beyond the possibility of doubt that you were wrong? Remember when your response to this was to disappear? I do, you fucking worm.
This analogy is wrong and illiterate. When the Court says of the Second Amendment that no Constitutional right is unlimited, the issue is the limitability – in accordance with the purpose – of the right to bear arms itself (i.e., it has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a right to murder/rob; as Scalia put it after explicitly citing the history of arms regulations, the right to bear arms is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever”). It beggars belief that an attorney of any kind would pretend that the purpose of the Framers in codifying a Constitutional right is irrelevant to that right’s application under the law or the Supreme Court’s reading of it.
But if that’s too complicated for you, we can keep it simple: You claimed that the purpose of speech doesn’t matter vis-a-vis the right to speak. It does.
Not sure I’m altogether convinced by the optometrist’s blog post, but my point is that if you’re right - that there was NO question as to whether an individual had a right to own a firearm - there’s no way US v. Miller could have come out the way it did unanimously. An ubquestionable right would have been an outright defense to the law in that case.
Fact is, the question was not settled that people had a right, there was no consensus. That is not accurate.
I could be wrong because I’m not an expert on US legal history so I shouldn’t have been so brash about it, but US v. Miller was not a challenge related to the ownership of the shotgun, but the transport of the weapon, which was a violation of the National Firearms Act of 1934.
A distinction without a difference. Here’s the holding:
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a “shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length” at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.
The defendant challenged the law expressly on grounds that it violated his Second Amendment right.
And re: US v. Miller, before anyone throws at the canard that the court was a bunch of FDR’s liberals attacking gun rights, the Court was unanimous and included the votes of the Four Horsemen, so-called because this bloc of conservative justices stood in the way of much of FDR’s reforms:
Super-duper fun fact? The unanimous opinion was written by perhaps the most conservative of the bloc, Justice McReynolds.
The court didn’t rule that an individual right to arms is tied to participation in the militia. The court ruled that there was no evidence presented that this very specific weapon or type of weapon was necessary to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia. We were literally using this weapon in WWI around the time of the ruling.
Do you honestly believe the founders intended for states to keep arms for each able bodied man that could be called to fight in the state militia under lock and key? I haven’t read anything from any of the founders that supports that.
You’re trying to worm your way out again. Unfortunately for you, it was too simple and clear-cut for you to snivel out of it. Here, I’ll help:
You abandoned an argument you were trying (and miserably failing) to make, choosing instead to pretend that you’d re-listened to the soundbite and discovered that Trump had totally definitely said “there are.”
I proved, via a dispositive transcript that had been supplied by Trump himself, that the phrase had been “they’re.”
You fucked off without a word.
And now you just lied about the whole thing again.
Ok, I’m done. You’re now free to waddle off and pretend this didn’t happen.
The question was never ripe for dispute. The early gun laws in the USA were in the South, part of Jim Crow, designed to disarm the unruly Negroes (and later the Irish and the Italians and Jews) so as to make them easier to oppress by the KKK. They generally kept their heads down and sucked up the loss of Constitutional rights, as they had other things going on.
It’s not until more recent times that the powers that be started disarming white folk, and they got riled up and got lawyers.
So, long way of saying, not a lot of jurisprudence.
And, now, of course Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Cohen (or whatever that fat lady’s name is) will act confused. They are outcome-oriented jurists. They find the result they want and justify it with whatever bullshit of “penumbras of the immination” they can dream up, law or Constitution be damned.
I am not entirely sure that this tepid attempt at a burn is enough to distract from the fact that you’re a dishonest piece of shit – a certainty the proof of which is right here in this thread, for all to see – but time will tell.
But it’s not clear, which is why there has been so much scholarship on it. Saying over and over “it’s clear!” doesn’t change the fact that it’s not and the context matters.[quote=“Jewbacca, post:4088, topic:223365”]
It’s like recitals in a contract. Helpful, maybe.
[/quote]
Nope, because constitutional language is never “mere surplusage.” The prefatory clause is a condition, a qualifier. If it wasn’t, Madison would have left it out.[quote=“Jewbacca, post:4088, topic:223365”]
But irrelevant if the actual terms of the contract are not ambiguous.
[/quote]
It’s not irrelevant because it is a direct part of the clause qualifying the rest. You don’t get to pretend that language was never inserted because it hurts the result you want. Absurd.[quote=“Jewbacca, post:4088, topic:223365”]
And the independent clause in the 2A is very clear
[/quote]
Even standing alone, it’s not all that clear - the BOR didn’t apply to the states. So what does the right entail - walking down the streets of New York your favorite rifle even if New York says you can’t do that pursuant to a law passed on public safety grounds? Did the Framers intend for the 2A to trump state laws?
Does the super clear language answer any of these questions?
