The Right To Bear Arms

[Dubya]

If you spy on the east coast, you can't communicate what you have discovered. Transmissions were limited in those days.

Yeah, you couldn't possibly communicate with those German submarines off the East coast. Are you trying to make yourself look as stupid as possible? You're doing a bang-up job.

The Japanese on the west coast weren't set up to communicate with German submarines. The few that were left on the east coast had restricted areas.

 

[Unkotare]

If you spy on the east coast, you can't communicate what you have discovered. Transmissions were limited in those days.

Yeah, you couldn't possibly communicate with those German submarines off the East coast. Are you trying to make yourself look as stupid as possible? You're doing a bang-up job.

The Japanese on the west coast weren't set up to communicate with German submarines. The few that were left on the east coast had restricted areas.

Holy shit you're stupid. And, your juvenile attempts at spin are only making you look worse.

 

[Dubya]

Yeah, you couldn't possibly communicate with those German submarines off the East coast. Are you trying to make yourself look as stupid as possible? You're doing a bang-up job.

The Japanese on the west coast weren't set up to communicate with German submarines. The few that were left on the east coast had restricted areas.

Holy shit you're stupid. And, your juvenile attempts at spin are only making you look worse.

Spin my ass, the attempt to spy on the United States by the Japanese during WWII was foiled, because the Japanese were easy to spot and were removed from communication range! In critical areas like Panama and the west coast, they gathered up the Japanese and put them in internment camps, whether they were American citizens or not. In Hawaii, I believe they fed the Japanese misinformation to help break their codes, while keeping them away from the limited places of strategic importance.

 

[Unkotare]

The Japanese on the west coast weren't set up to communicate with German submarines. The few that were left on the east coast had restricted areas.

Holy shit you're stupid. And, your juvenile attempts at spin are only making you look worse.

Spin my ass, the attempt to spy on the United States by the Japanese during WWII was foiled, .

What attempts were those? You and your little boy wonder could only come up with the name of one actual spy and he was white dude from Maryland.

 

[Unkotare]

the Japanese were easy to spot

Were they really? Is that why Chinese and Korean Americans at the time were beaten or had their businesses destroyed by fucking idiots like you?

 

[Unkotare]

In Hawaii, I believe they fed the Japanese misinformation to help break their codes.

There it is again. "I believe" = you are talking out your ass and can't back up what you say. How many times are you going to perform the same act, you un-American scumbag?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Ok, name one of these Japanese American spies. Go ahead.

so you think the Irish spied for the Japanese??????????

That's not what I said (obviously ). Try to concentrate. I said, name one of these Japanese American spies. Go ahead. Don't change the subject, just name one.

there were very few and largely because the effort to prevent the spying was so effective, not because the Japanese did not wish to have intelligence as you seem to imagine.

Do you think the Japanese looked among the Irish, Polish, or the Japanese to recruit spies?

 

[Lakhota]

By Jeffrey Toobin

Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”

But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)

The re-interpretation of the Second Amendment was an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation, inside and outside of government. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a gun-rights enthusiast to the White House. At the same time, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of an important subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he commissioned a report that claimed to find “clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The N.R.A. began commissioning academic studies aimed at proving the same conclusion. An outré constitutional theory, rejected even by the establishment of the Republican Party, evolved, through brute political force, into the conservative conventional wisdom.

And so, eventually, this theory became the law of the land. In District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court embraced the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment.

More: So You Think You Know the Second Amendment? : The New Yorker

 

[Lakhota]

It was a triumph above all for Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of the opinion, but it required him to craft a thoroughly political compromise. In the eighteenth century, militias were proto-military operations, and their members had to obtain the best military hardware of the day. But Scalia could not create, in the twenty-first century, an individual right to contemporary military weapons—like tanks and Stinger missiles. In light of this, Scalia conjured a rule that said D.C. could not ban handguns because “handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”

So the government cannot ban handguns, but it can ban other weapons—like, say, an assault rifle—or so it appears. The full meaning of the court’s Heller opinion is still up for grabs. But it is clear that the scope of the Second Amendment will be determined as much by politics as by the law. The courts will respond to public pressure—as they did by moving to the right on gun control in the last thirty years. And if legislators, responding to their constituents, sense a mandate for new restrictions on guns, the courts will find a way to uphold them. The battle over gun control is not just one of individual votes in Congress, but of a continuing clash of ideas, backed by political power. In other words, the law of the Second Amendment is not settled; no law, not even the Constitution, ever is.

From the OP link.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

By Jeffrey Toobin

Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”

But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)

The re-interpretation of the Second Amendment was an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation, inside and outside of government. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a gun-rights enthusiast to the White House. At the same time, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of an important subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he commissioned a report that claimed to find “clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The N.R.A. began commissioning academic studies aimed at proving the same conclusion. An outré constitutional theory, rejected even by the establishment of the Republican Party, evolved, through brute political force, into the conservative conventional wisdom.

And so, eventually, this theory became the law of the land. In District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court embraced the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment.

More: So You Think You Know the Second Amendment? : The New Yorker

Gotta love the way racists ignored the 14th Amendment to justify gun control. Ever wonder why progressive Democrats want to firce anyone who gets a gun to have an ID, yet refuses to require an ID for voting?

 

[tjvh]

Hey Lakhota...How many threads on the same thing are you going to post idiot? Perhaps you might try responding in the last thread you created about the same subject.

 

[Lakhota]

But it is clear that the scope of the Second Amendment will be determined as much by politics as by the law. The courts will respond to public pressure—as they did by moving to the right on gun control in the last thirty years. And if legislators, responding to their constituents, sense a mandate for new restrictions on guns, the courts will find a way to uphold them.

Exactly.

 

[PaulS1950]

The arguments surrounding the inclusion of the bill of rights in the constitutional document are neither hard to find nor a matter of fiction. They are included in every copy of the "Federalist Papers" that are recorded in the early records of our country.

These rights were so commonly held that it seemed rediculous to have to include them in a document which was written to provide a limited number of powers to the federal government. The founders believed that these rights extended from birth and that it was inconceivable that any government would attempt to assume powers over them. The second amendment doesn't provide us with the right to keep and bear arms - that which is given by the Creator can't be taken by man - but the second amendment was put in place to say that it was a right that the federal government had no power to touch and must defend and protect.
Not just the second but all ten of the amendments in the bill of rights was put in place for this reason. The defense of such rights was unlimited so long as you are willing to accept the responsibility for each of them. You are free to say anything you like as long as it doen't infringe on the rights of others. Libel, slander and yelling "FIRE" in a dark movie theaters are not infringments on your rights it is just that you must be willing to accept the punishment for your actions when they incite injury to others.
You have the right to worship, or not, as you please so long as you don't threaten the right to worship, or not, to others. It is not a limit on your right but the extension of those same rigts to others. You are free to keep and bear arms as long as you do not endanger another with your acts. That would infringe on their rights. Since I have never injured or even threatened someone with my guns I am protected by the letter of and intent of the second amendment. You have no power to restrict my personal right because of the illegal acts of others just as no one can limit your freedom of speech because of the slander or incision to riot by others.

Our rights are forever our rights - each and all of them - and they can only be taken away by our own individual abuse of them.

 

[Lakhota]

Dead Or Alive: Originalism As Popular Constitutionalism In Heller

 

[Avorysuds]

Obama is destroying himself on this issue... So please keep it up.

 

[LordBrownTrout]

We've now learned that editorialists at the new yorker have no idea of what the second amendment means. No surprise there.

 

[williepete]

18th century parlance isn't that hard to understand. It was not ungrammatical for the time.

To have a well regulated militia, you need shooters.

If you want an airline, you must have pilots.

If you want a functioning hospital, you must have doctors and nurses.

 

[Ernie S.]

Hey Lakhota...How many threads on the same thing are you going to post idiot? Perhaps you might try responding in the last thread you created about the same subject.

And when the hell are you going to grow a pair of nuts and turn your rep back on?

 

[Lakhota]

We've now learned that editorialists at the new yorker have no idea of what the second amendment means. No surprise there.

The 2nd Amendment means whatever SCOTUS says it means - and that will continue to change over time...

 

[williepete]

Who belongs to the militia you ask?

No need to ask. It's not a matter of SCOTUS opinion or anyone else. It's a matter of law:

Article 10, US Code - Section 311: Militia: composition and classes

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied
males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section
313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a
declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States
and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the
National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are -
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard
and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of
the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the
Naval Militia.