It would be pretty weird to have a right to bear hamsters...
Only established by the supreme court in 2008.
Abortion is a "constitutional right" likewise. And the american right see no issues with extreme restrictions.
There is no amendment saying either people have an individual right to possess a firearm, nor an individual right to have an abortion. These are inferences.
What the second amendment says is that because the US needs defence (given no contemporary standing army), the right to bear arms is necessary in general.
An individual right in the time of standing armies is not written anywhere in the constitution and was derived, by interpretation, only in 2008.
My point is that what counts as a "constitutional right" is a matter of history, precedent and agreement -- they are conventional not just written in some stone tablet. And it is quite reasonable to contest these conventions.
It was established when the Bill of Rights was ratified. The Supreme Court never held that there was no individual right to bear arms.
>There is no amendment saying either people have an individual right to possess a firearm, nor an individual right to have an abortion. These are inferences.
I'd argue it is the only reasonable interpretation. Interpreting "people" as some sort of collective right is absurd in view of the other uses of "right of the people" in the Bill of Rights, such as the first amendment. Nobody would argue the "right of the people . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" is limited to some collective right. Or the 4th amendment, certainly, you wouldn't say that is a collective right. And the 10th literally distinguishes between the states and the people.
Though I don't agree with it, there is a decent argument that it's an individual right defined in scope in relation to a well-regulated militia. United States v. Miller, the only case before Heller that really discussed the second amendment, seems to take this view. Short barrel Shotgun bans were okay because it wasn't related to a well-regulated milia. But that doesn't imply you have no right to bear arms that are relevant to a milia like handguns and battle rifles.
In other words people did not have individual right to bear arms as the states could take it away. Which is perfectly reasonable in this context as a state could decide to limit some weapons to it’s specific state militia, or have some other laws that provided for mutual defense while limiting weapon ownership.
Over time the supreme court has begun applying the bill of rights to states as well in a process known as Incorporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
I am not saying it’s unjustified, just new.
Most evidence points to the fact that the second amendment was viewed from inception as an individual right. Especially if you look at the state proposals for the second amendment, which allow exceptions for things like individual circumstances (e.g. people who had participated in a rebellion).
McDonald said nothing new, or what wasn’t already obvious.
What that is and why it’s there is debatable. But, plenty of evidence exists that many states did not want this to be unlimited, the language was not direct, and the implementation gave states the option to limit things. That is plenty of room for debate, and in fact this topic has seen plenty of them over time.
The tenth amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Is not about individual freedom, it’s about what freedom the states have and the limitation on the federal government.
There’s also an argument that the 2nd amendment envisages a potential need for the populace to defend themselves from the government, as was considered necessary only a few years prior to its enactment.
Your belief about what the second amendment means and what it was meant to mean when written is incorrect and thoroughly debunked in that decision.
That's what every decision that established a particular interpretation of the Constitution as the official one does, so the “did not establish” part is not only unnecessary, but incorrect.
The fourteenth amendment has been interpreted to mean all sorts of things that weren't actually in it. That's establishing new rights based on inferences about what maybe was supposed to be but didn't quite make it into the document.
The 2nd is a very clear piece of writing. There's no ambiguity about it, and Scalia carefully deconstructs all of the BS that other people have written and tried to make it out to be, in explaining how it has always meant exactly what it said.
I think the debate on abortion is/was on when a life begins.
And not, whether a doctor has a right to perform medical procedure, killing a child at request of a mother.
To make the comparasing work for the debate on 2nd amendment, I would the suggest, a comparable question should be:
Can a person end somebody else's life in an act of self-defense, within the framework of existing legal system?
If the answer is 'No', the rest of the debate on 2nd amendment would have to rest on decision for its next argument:
This is a completely separate argument made for 2nd amendment: is that it is a deterrent against an unconstitutional tyranny of government. But that discussion, does not have an analog in the abortion argument, at least in my view.
The founding fathers wrote the bill of rights specifically to cover these things that British rule had done to the people who left Britain.
Consider rifling was invented and society made a choice was that allowed? Yes. Various types of ammunition for example have failed this test. Explosives similarly evolved over time and have been curtailed even if people can significant amounts of black powder.
*Not flawless, of course, but what is?
More people are imprisoned in the United States than were in the Soviet gulags or Nazi Germany.
More black people are in the prison/parole system than were enslaved before the passage of the 13th Amendment.
Temporary detainment for example is perfectly legal for a wide range of things, as long as an appeals process exists it’s not seen as a major issue.
Why is the bearing of arms protected? Because the founders sought distributed defense instead of centralized authoritarianism.
(Historical examples of such abuse include people having the wrong religion, the wrong sexual orientation, and the wrong political beliefs.)
I realize that's a common position, but it strikes me as strange. It seems to assume that crazy people are the ones committing violent crimes. If that was actually the case though we would have huge numbers of mass murders and killings resolved with the defendant being declared not guilty by reason of insanity. That's not the case though, a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity is an extremely rare situation, almost unheard of in the court system.
The reality is that overwhelmingly it is not the crazy but the sane who commit the violence and the mass murders.
It makes more sense, based on not guilty by insanity statistics, to allow crazy people to have guns, and disallow the sane from having them.
Someone who commits mass murder can be legally sane if they are cognizant of the concept of right and wrong, are not severely mentally handicapped, are capable of understanding and responding to questions, etc. Yet I doubt anyone would consider a person capable of shooting up a synagogue to be sane. I don't think it would be "strange" to consider that someone with suicidal thoughts or someone in the heat of passion should be trusted with a firearm simply because they can also sign their own name.
> someone with suicidal thoughts
I don't think someone with suicidal thoughts is crazy. In fact I've never heard of anyone that doesn't have suicidal thoughts at some point in their life. That's a normal part of human existence. Different from an attempted suicide though. And someone attempting suicide is also not insane simply because of that.
> or someone in the heat of passion
That doesn't sound like insanity to me either. I don't even know how something like that could be evaluated. How would a gun seller know someone is in the "heat of passion"? The phrasing suggests a temporary emotional state of some kind. Perhaps the idea is if they are ranting and screaming at the gun seller and claiming they are going to use the gun to commit a mass shooting. And in that case gun sellers don't sell guns. Someone who in this heat of passion who intends to commit violence presumably is going to act normal while buying the gun. Not insanity, not something that can be determined at point of sale.
> I doubt anyone would consider a person capable of shooting up a synagogue to be sane
Antisemitism is pretty common among those known to be sane. No physician would diagnose madness simply based on antisemitic beliefs. There have been groups in history that mass murdered Jews, and other groups, who were the predominant people and majority of their society. They were not insane in the general case so it's not correct that someone capable of committing atrocities, including genocide, is not sane.
Is a previous diagnoses of madness by a qualified medical professional using accepted standards of practice a common or even not-infrequent attribute of mass shooters and murders? Not that I can see. So we're back to someone not known to be insane - a sane person - doing this crime and the label only being applied after the fact.
Again, I propose that the insane are more responsible gun owners than the sane because so few murder convictions involve those actually determined at any point to be insane by anyone qualified to make such a determination. It's easy to say killers are crazy. How does that help prevent crime? It is counterproductive in fact because it suggests that restricting civil and constitutional rights of people with diagnosed mental illnesses (about 1/5 the US population is on psychiatric drugs which require a diagnosis to be prescribed) is a solution when this group is not in fact the group that is committing these crimes and therefore there is no reasonable premise for restricting said rights.
All of those examples are clearly terrible, right? If merely "questioning" someone's state of mind is enough to strip a fundamental right, then a bad actor could trivially strip that right from people when they need it most.
I suspect what you're getting at is that you disagree with gun ownership being treated as an important right like "not being thrown in prison for no reason" or "being able to criticise the government" or "voting", but given that it is a protected right in the US, it's nonsense to suggest that a right should not be protected, or that merely having a right temporarily removed is not a significant infringement.
Are we to just throw our hands up in the air and say "oh well"?
Would you still think that if you were among those shot, as you lay there bleeding to death?
Let me tell you this - I'm politically liberal, and I support 2nd Amendment rights. Reading the various arguments presented in this article's thread, I agree with many of the 2nd Amendment viewpoints addressed about the nuances and such of the right.
Even so, I feel that something needs to be done to get our current out-of-control situation under control.
The problem is, I'm not sure that circle can be squared, so to speak. The consensus seems to be that if you want an intact 2nd Amendment, then you have to be willing to be among the dead victims in a shooting.
I'm not sure that is what the Framers intended the 2nd Amendment to be about.
In fact - just thinking about the wording of the 2nd Amendment right now - isn't it more focused on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, for the protection of country (or State?), being part of the militia - against internal or external threats to it?
That is, again thinking about it, it doesn't seem to indicate that such people are free to carry or use their weapons at just any time they wanted to, but for when there was a perceived threat against the collective, not the individual? Of course, they would need to always have access to their weapon, so they should be able to carry it, in case that threat arrives when they are away from home or something...
This is more a exercise in reading the wording of that particular amendment - the nuances of the words, comma placement, etc. Maybe my above "re-interpretation" is not compatible; I know it certainly isn't the interpretation of the courts today.
It feels like I want to have my cake and eat it, too. I don't want to be the victim, or my loved ones to be victims, of potential future random gun violence.
At the same time, I want to keep the 2nd Amendment intact. For me that would mean the ability to hunt, the ability to shoot predators or varmints on my land, the ability to protect myself and my fellow citizens if needed, the ability to practice (ideally in a controlled range), and the ability to own the guns I want and keep them in a safe manner, with proper training.
Is it possible for both to be accomodated? I certainly hope it can - but maybe I'm just nursing along a fantasy...
You do not present a compelling (or even coherent) argument for simply ignoring our list of protected rights.
> I feel that something needs to be done to get our current out-of-control situation under control.
There are a lot of things that can be done that are completely consistent with the 2nd Amendment. If we need more than that, we'll need an amendment. For good or ill, that's how the system works.
> Are we to just throw our hands up in the air and say "oh well"? [...] I want to keep the 2nd Amendment intact
I mean...if you want to do something that violates the 2nd amendment, but you want to keep it intact even more, then yes, you'll just have to give up on doing anything. If you don't want to do anything that violates the 2nd amendment, there's no point even discussing this.
A couple people swear that person C has questionable state of mind and their free speech is taken - social accounts frozen, ability to address city council, publish things, use the mail.. do this 6 weeks before an election or council votes for example. Before an IPO?
I believe that almost half of those on fbk would get almost half of people kicked, and vice versa..
If search and seizure rights could be suspended groups could go door to door finding something to remove entire populations from the voting block.
just a couple of people saying they are concerned, what things could happen with the other rights?
How groups in power could use these things is an interesting consideration.
And sure in some cases it works but if you have no way to fight the claims, there is nothing stopping it being abused.
This just makes it easier for whoever happens to be in power to deny rights to [disliked or marginalized group]
Also the connection between gun violence and mental health is extremely tenuous, and I would add that firearm homicides in the states are at a multi-decade low right now, though the media would have people believe otherwise
Have you a good source for that? I seem to find lots of unclear sources. I found a source that they are down from their peak in 1993 (this source was 2013: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate...), but that the last 10 years has been a climb back up (https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/13/health/gun-deaths-highest... which I sourced from wikipedia, and granted is overall deaths rather than just homicides)
Also, lazy family law attorneys often include requests for protection orders as a matter of course in divorce filings. These often have similar firearm restrictions as so-called red flag laws.