Gun Rights - What's the Story?
If you found the arguments of the two sides in yesterday's gun-rights case confusing - who to believe? One side says the Second Amendment is clearly about individual rights, the other insists it is obviously only intended to protect state militias - and you are one of the 3 or 4 readers of this blog who don't come here via the iSteve blogroll - Steve Sailer provides the most straightforward and accurate analysis you'll find anywhere.
Bottom line - the notion that anyone in 1789 thought that people shouldn't be able to have guns in their homes is preposterous - that concept wasn't even on the table. The concern was that the new Federal government would try to suppress state militias by disarming the population. The whole point of the Bill of Rights of course was to restrain the Federal government. But the Constitution is now a hollow shell of its former self - it's a senseless exercise even attempting to interpret in today's world.
Bottom line - the notion that anyone in 1789 thought that people shouldn't be able to have guns in their homes is preposterous - that concept wasn't even on the table. The concern was that the new Federal government would try to suppress state militias by disarming the population. The whole point of the Bill of Rights of course was to restrain the Federal government. But the Constitution is now a hollow shell of its former self - it's a senseless exercise even attempting to interpret in today's world.
posted by ziel | 6/27/2008 09:12:00 AM
3 Comments:
The cop I used to room with in my twenties told me once that "the constituion is just a piece of toilet paper that nine idiots in black robes wipe their asses with".
He also told me the joke (one of my all-time favorites): What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 60?
Answer: Your honor
He had a few drug busts overturned because of "expectations of privacy" and similar gobbleygook of some professional dealers who did nothing else for a living and had been at it for a long time that still rubbed him raw at the time.
Funny story: Back in the day, when cordless phones were new, the task force he worked for would send suspected dealers "free" phones as if they "won" them. Of course they were bugged and listened to. The dealers couldn't figure out for the life of them how the DTF in Tennessee kept guessing right about where and when their shipments were being brought in and transported and who their street sellers (even the newest ones) were. It lasted almost two years before some of them got wise to it......funny times.
The "story" is this: you have the right to keep and bear arms until Justice Kennedy changes his mind.
But the dissent in Heller did not argue primarily that it was not an individual right. It argued that it was an individual right that the government could infringe.
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