Good historical summary of the 2A

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UpstateSCHokie
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Good historical summary of the 2A

Post by UpstateSCHokie »

The Millennialibtards should spend more time studying & understand history rather than going out in the streets and making fools of themselves by screaming about things that they do not understand.

Seriously though, you must be a real idiot to go out and lobby the government to reduce your freedoms rather than increase your freedoms. Has there been another "movement" where the activists want the government to take away rights?

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You Can Try To Repeal The Second Amendment, But You Can’t Repeal History
If you think the Constitution is antiquated, that’s fine. Your revisionism isn't.
By David Harsanyi
March 28, 2018

This week, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated a position that most liberal pundits and activists have been incrementally working towards for a long time: repealing the Second Amendment. And while many liberal columnists argued that Stevens had only given fodder to gun advocates — because his position was unfeasible right now – not one that I read argued that Stevens was wrong on the merits. Not one claimed that American citizens did, in fact, have an inherent individual right to protect themselves with firearms.

Whether repeal of the Second Amendment is feasible or not, historical revisionism is meant to mangle its meaning into irrelevancy. Stevens claims that his conception of gun rights is “uniformly understood,” yet offers no legal precedent to back the contention up. Stevens claims the Second Amendment’s explicit mention of right of “the people” does not create an “individual right” despite the inconvenient fact that other times the term is mentioned — in the Fourth, Ninth, and 10th Amendments — they have been found to do exactly that.

Now, I’m not a legal scholar, but the idea, as the former justice argues, that the Founders wanted no limits on the ability of federal or state authorities to take weapons from law-abiding citizens conflicts with the historical record. Never once in the founding debate did a lawmaker rise to argue that gun ownership should be limited. Most state constitutions already featured language to protect that right. A number states demanded that the national constitution include such a provision, as well.

The debate over the Second Amendment centered on a dispute over who should control the militia, the federal or state governments. Everyone understood that a militia consisted of free individuals who would almost always grab their own firearms — the ones they used in their everyday existence — to engage in concerted efforts to protect themselves, their community, or their country (sometimes from their own government.)

This might surprise some, but the Minutemen did not return their muskets after Lexington.

In the writings and speeches of the American Founders, the threat of disarmament was always a casus belli. Which makes sense for practical and ideological reasons. For one, none of the natural rights codified in the Constitution, none — not freedom of speech, press or religion, or the ability to vote or to demand due process — had a longer or deeper history in English common law and tradition than the right to defend oneself.

Guns were so prevalent, in fact, that some framers noted that a tyrant would never take the nation because the general public out-armed the state. Noah Webster reasoned that, “The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops …” His only mistake was trusting the whole body of the people would always uphold the Constitution.

Contemporary liberals often view this form of rhetoric against the government as an endorsement of sedition. Despite our many political disagreements, of course, there’s no need or want for armed insurrection today. What contemporary critics fail to comprehend, however, is that founding generation believed those who would undermine the inalienable liberties explicitly laid out in the Bill of Rights were the ones committing sedition.

Even during the 19th century, not a single case challenged the notion that the Second Amendment was an individual right. Again, it was so self-evident that when it was brought it was merely a way to juxtapose American liberty with tyranny elsewhere. In 1823, Charles Sumner, one of the leading thinkers of the American Enlightenment, noted that if the population of the United States “like that of Europe, chiefly consisted of an unarmed peasantry” it would be conquerable. “Here,” he went on, “every house is a castle, and every man a soldier.” Adams, who had argued that self-defense was “the primary canon of the law of nature” when defending a British marine after the Boston Massacre, concurred that an armed citizenry would not be susceptible to despotism.

When Jacob Howard, the Michigan Senator who helped introduced The 14th Amendment to (attempt) to ensure that blacks in the South had their Constitutional rights protected, he specifically noted the “the right bear arms” as a right to insure. The right to self-defense surely terrified the racists of the South more than other.

The collective theory is modern invention. Even the picture of a musket and AR-15 juxtaposed above Stevens’ column to illustrate the antiquatedness of gun rights in the modern age misjudges history. Just as the First Amendment protects modern communication and just as the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, the Second Amendment extends to guns that were not in existence at the time of the founding. Unlike contemporary liberal columnist who’d like to revise the Constitution, the Founders were well aware that the fleeting emotions of the population could corrode rights.

But if you think the Second Amendment antiquated, that’s fine. Repeal it. The history of the Second Amendment, though, doesn’t change to comport with your contemporary positions.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/28/you ... l-history/
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“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ― Voltaire (1694 – 1778)
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awesome guy
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Re: Good historical summary of the 2A

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Their March is led by a guy that thinks he's too irresponsible and reckless to own a firearm, that should be a clue how well thought out they are.
Unvaccinated,. mask free, and still alive.
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UpstateSCHokie
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Re: Good historical summary of the 2A

Post by UpstateSCHokie »

John Paul Stevens has a long history of either willful ignorance of the 2A or purposefully misrepresenting what its intent was. His "universally understood" newspeak is pure & utter bullshit. Anyone with an ounce of curiosity would be able to go back in history and discover just how wrong Stevens is.

Again, someone like this never had any business being on the SCOTUS. The fact that he sat on that court is almost as much an abomination as Ginsberg's appointment.

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Justice John Paul Stevens Is Wrong About the Second Amendment, Again
The retired justice wants to claw back parts of the Bill of Rights.
Damon Root|Mar. 27, 2018 11:55 am

Library of CongressLibrary of CongressIn his 2008 dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens insisted that the Second Amendment offers zero protection for what he called the "right to possess and use guns for nonmilitary purposes like hunting and personal self-defense."

Writing in today's New York Times, the retired justice reiterates that losing view. "For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment," Stevens maintains, "it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation." To clear the path for sweeping gun control restrictions now, Stevens advises, activists should turn their energies towards passing a "constitutional amendment" that would overturn Heller and "get rid of the Second Amendment."

One problem with Stevens' position is that he is dead wrong about the legal history. His preferred reading of the Second Amendment has never been "uniformly understood."

For example, consider how the Second Amendment was treated in St. George Tucker's 1803 View of the Constitution of the United States, which was the first extended analysis and commentary published about the Constitution. For generations of law students, lawyers, and judges, Tucker's View served as a go-to con-law textbook.

Tucker was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a colleague of James Madison, and a professor of law at the College of William and Mary. He observed the debates over the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as they happened. And he had no doubt that the Second Amendment secured an individual right of the "nonmilitary" type. "This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty," Tucker wrote of the Second Amendment. "The right of self-defense is the first law of nature." In other words, the Heller majority's view of the Second Amendment is as old and venerable as the amendment itself.

Regrettably, today's op-ed is not the only example of Stevens trying to claw back a portion of the Bill of Rights.

Stevens cast a dissent, for instance, in Texas v. Johnson (1989), the landmark case in which the Court ruled that flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment. "Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable," declared the majority opinion of Justice William Brennan. Stevens rejected that endorsement of bedrock free speech principles.

Likewise, Stevens has said that had he not retired from the Court in 2010, he would have joined Justice Samuel Alito's dissent in Snyder v. Phelps (2011), the case in which the Court recognized First Amendment protections for the rights of Westboro Baptist Church members to stage offensive protests outside of military funerals. "Such speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt," declared the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts. Stevens rejected that endorsement of free speech principles too.

And then there is Stevens' record on the Fifth Amendment, as exemplified by his majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed a municipality to wield its eminent domain powers not for a "public use," as the Constitution requires, but for the benefit of a private developer working with the Pfizer corporation. "The Kelo majority opinion remains unpopular," Stevens acknowledged in a 2011 speech at the University of Alabama School of Law. "Recently a commentator named Damon W. Root described the decision as the 'eminent domain debacle.'" (Guilty.) How did Stevens' justify his debacle? He claimed that "Kelo adhered to the doctrine of judicial restraint, which allows state legislatures broad latitude in making economic policy decisions in their respective jurisdictions."

In sum, John Paul Stevens has a bad habit of shortchanging the Bill of Rights for the benefit of overreaching officials and would-be censors. I'd think twice before taking his constitutional advice.

http://reason.com/blog/2018/03/27/justi ... g-second-a
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“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ― Voltaire (1694 – 1778)
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Hokie5150
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One of the best reads on the Second Amendment out there.

Post by Hokie5150 »

It's a little dated (pre-Heller), but it provides and excellent background just the same.

PDF link:
https://www.azcdl.org/Reynolds_ACritica ... ndment.pdf
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