Please Freepmail me to be added to the Ollie North ping list.
Posted on 02/14/2008 9:06:56 PM PST by jazusamo
Friday, February 15, 2008
WASHINGTON -- When the Council of the District of Columbia enacted the toughest gun control law in the nation in 1976, the city fathers -- according to what they said at the time -- believed they were making our nation's capital a safer place. The measure failed miserably. Since passage, the murder rate in the District has skyrocketed by more than 200 percent. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has a chance both to make our capital safer and to ensure that the Second Amendment to our Constitution is enshrined as an individual right for every law-abiding American.
No matter how well-intentioned, the D.C. firearms statute has been unfathomable from the start. On its face, the law bans handguns and requires rifles and shotguns to be registered. They also must be stored unloaded and either locked or disassembled. While it allows business owners to use firearms to protect their cash registers at their stores, they cannot use those same firearms to protect themselves and their families in their homes. Individuals who protect federal officials and property in the District with firearms are not permitted to provide similar protection for themselves and their families in their own domiciles.
In fact, the case that the Supreme Court will hear, District of Columbia v. Heller, was brought by Dick Heller, a security guard. In carrying out his duties, Heller carries a handgun on federal property. However, when he sought to register the same weapon to safeguard his home, he was denied. Heller says the D.C. law has it backward: "I can protect (federal workers), but at the end of the day, they say, 'Turn in your gun; you can't protect your home.'" Heller maintains that disassembled rifles and shotguns are no substitute for handguns "any more than the government could prohibit books because it permits newspapers and considers them an 'adequate substitute.'"
Last March, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, 2-1, that the District's prohibition was not only unreasonable but also clearly unconstitutional. Attorneys for the District of Columbia promptly appealed the decision. That is why on March 18, for the first time since 1939, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on whether such a gun ban for law-abiding citizens is constitutional. Their verdict, expected later this year, will have profound implications for all Americans.
The case has generated a flurry of unprecedented action in both the executive and legislative branches of government. On Jan. 11, the Department of Justice filed an egregiously weak amicus -- friend of the court -- brief in the case. The argument, submitted by U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, essentially urges the Supremes to waffle on the issue and send the case back to the lower courts.
The DOJ softball didn't sit well with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. On Feb. 8, she filed an amicus brief on behalf of Heller and the exercise of his individual rights under the Second Amendment: "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."
In her lucid and detailed exposition, Hutchison accurately points out that the Framers never intended that the word "Militia" meant that the right to keep and bear arms was some kind of "collective" right that applied only to a particular group. If that had been their purpose, they would have been satisfied with Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution that gives Congress the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions."
To ensure that firearms possession was recognized by posterity as an "individual right," the Framers included it as part of the Bill of Rights -- an enumeration of every citizen's personal entitlements: free speech, freedom of religion, and a fair trial. The precise location of those famous words -- "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" -- provides strong evidence for the Founders' vision.
To foreclose any doubt where Congress comes down on the issue, Hutchison has introduced a bill to repeal the District of Columbia's ban on handguns; repeal registration requirements; and restore the ability of law-abiding citizens to keep a loaded, operable firearm in their homes. Doing less denies the meaning of the words "shall not be infringed."
Her argument was so persuasive that 54 additional senators and 250 members of the House of Representatives -- including 68 Democrats -- signed on. Vice President Dick Cheney -- apparently at odds with the administration's Department of Justice -- did so, as well. Let's hope the Supreme Court will agree with these enlightened members of Congress -- and Abraham Lincoln, who said, "Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."
Oliver North is the founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance and author of The Assassins .
Please Freepmail me to be added to the Ollie North ping list.
Long live the Fighters.
Heller means so much to American Culture, this decision, though in the Hands of God, means the difference between a little old lady in DC having the Bill of Rights mean something practically, or being beaten and robbed.
I’m sure the FR contingent is too busy hating Mad John to notice the small hobbit feet of this case working it’s way through Mordor and unto the very walls of the Highest Court in the Land.
This is why I even bother...In Sumas Todas Dei...
Are they trying to preclude a ruling on the question?
I don’t know because I haven’t followed it other than to know it’s coming before the Supremes.
They may have been, but they decided not to push the bill. It wasn't going anywhere in a DemonRat Congress anyway.
That’s a good question. Maybe, the legislation reflects concern over the upcoming decision. If that’s so, I guess I am blind.
Supreme Court to the World: “You must see penumbras. You must deny stark reality.”
But, I didn’t like what I heard about the justice dept amicus brief. I only heard part of the report, but it gives me cause for pause.
Could the bill get fast tracked quickly enough to render the issue before the sups moot, i.e, before the court’s decision? Next Constitutional question will be the breadth of the control by Congress over the District.
The best collection of arguments may be found in this indispensable tome:
‘That Every Man be Armed, the Evolution of a Constitutional Right’ by Stephen P. Halbrook, The Independent Institute, 1984 1st ed, 1994 2nd ed
http://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=23
lmao, thanks.
Thanks for the link, it has some impressive comments.
Questions now being raised about the 2nd A. by D.C. v Heller were actually resolved when the 14th A. was ratified, in my opinion. More specifically, John Bingham, the main author of Sec. 1 of the 14th A., included the 2nd A. when he read the first eight amendments as examples of constitutional statutes containing privileges and immunities that the 14th A. applied to the states. So there is no doubt in my mind that the 2nd and 14th Amendments protect the personal right to keep and bear arms from both the federal and state governments as much as any other constitutional privilege and immunity protects other personal rights.
See the 2nd A. in the middle column of the following page from the Congressional Globe, a precursor to the Congressional Record.
http://tinyurl.com/y3ne4nNote that the referenced page is dated for more than two years after the 14th A. was ratified. So Bingham was evidently reasurring his colleagues about the scope and purpose of the ratified 14th Amendment.
That’s a bloody shame.
Give me a break.
Heller has been the topic of numerous threads, going back to the original Parker case. The "FR contingent" has proven itself to be quite aware of the importance of this case, and has commented intelligently on the possible outcomes and their ramifications.
And we still don't like Mad John.
Thanks for the link, that’s an eye opener. It should be required viewing for the complacent.
“Are they trying to preclude a ruling on the question?”
Looks like they are..When 68 Democrats sign onto a Republican bill anytime, it means they are in a near panic..for good reason: The SCOTUS could narrowly rule and have the ruling only be specific only to the DC...BUT- if the Court rules very broadly to say every individual citizen in the country has the right to keep a gun in his home, that would crush the Dems hopes of banning guns nationally...They still hope in their rotten little communist hearts to ban and seize our guns...That isn’t going to happen...
The he-double hockey sticks with poor old mother England, look at CALIFORNIA!! You had to register certain firearms, and then those same tools were declared “unlawful”. AND, it expanded, several times. Now you need to be on REALLY friendly terms with your local sheriff just to APPLY for a long gun LICENCE!
Most Californians laugh aloud at the requirements for Canadians to acquire a firearm, and many make derisive comments about how “controlled” we up here are.
To those ID10T’S i CAN ONLY SAY:
I carry LEGALLY. On BOTH sides of the border.
Please pardon the grammar, but some of our co-posters need a reminder as to how fragile rights truly are.
How the heck do you do that?
Now I will admit that I don't really know squat about Canada gun laws, but every time I watch a hunting show that goes there they always admonish "Handguns are illegal".
My son is a hundgun hunter and if he goes to Canada could he get his handgun in to hunt?
So Congress [Constitution ] trumps local gobmint if it chooses eh ???
Open this bill up for the other anti-2A cities and hear the wailing...
LFOD...
BTW...IBrp...
IMO the supremes arent gonna paint targets on their backs and will rule 'honestly' in an effort to distance themselves from the likes of the loon dems...
Maybe only a self-preserving powergrab, but there are alot of congress critters that prolly see the writing on the wall as well.
An un-Constitutional ruling may just make the 'use it or lose it' possibility on the hill as a reality in their minds...
LFOD...
Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
—Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment (1764).
Yesterday seven people lost their lives to a madman. It is tragic, but equally as tragic is the sheeple have abandon their responsibility for their own safety and outsourced that responsibility to a government that is not legally bound to protect them!
As hard as this may sound, they were complicit in their own deaths by the inaction not to secure their own safety.
Another shooting in a “gun free zone”. The folly of it all, if it were not so tragic.
IBrp.
hehe
http://www.centerfiresystems.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1083
Think we’ll be having another guns-n-buns event next weekend! (that’s a day at the range followed by a BBQ at the park afterwards). The ladies love ‘em and in return for us providing the artillery, ammo and then cleaning the artillery afterwards, they agree to prep and provide the food. Works out for a great opportunity to get new shooters into the RKBA movement...and some tasty vittles!
That's quite a concept. :<( You must live in a very strange place.
Semper Fi
An Old Man
There are always exceptions. Generally speaking, Canada is not gun friendly by any stretch.
http://www.mcrkba.org/w19.html
Courts have held that governments are not liable for their failures to protect. Specifically, “A State’s failure to protect an individual against private violence…
You might want to consider moving to Galts Gulch.
Semper Fi
An Old Man
Who was that reporter who was against guns then one day shot a teenager in his D.C. home’s pool with a revolver?
That was well known black syndicated columnist Carl Rowan, a hypocritical gun control activist.
In June 1988 he used an unregistered pistol in his possession to shoot and wound a teenage skinny dipper in his Washington, DC backyard pool.
Prosecutors charged the skinny dippers with unlawful entry.
Rowan was charged and tried for owning and using an unregistered firearm but was let off by a hung jury.
At the time many people felt that the cut and dried case was nullified by the black members of the jury sympathetic to Rowan.
More here:
Op-ed reporters/gun ownership/urban crime
Excerpt: "In his autobiography, Mr. Rowan said he still favors gun control but admits being vulnerable to a charge of hypocrisy."
"Many people charged Mr. Rowan with hypocrisy because he has been a longtime advocate of strict gun control.
In a 1981 column he advocated 'a law that says anyone found in possession of a handgun except a legitimate officer of the law goes to jail -- period.'
In 1985 he called for 'a complete and universal federal ban on the sale, manufacture, importation and possession of a handgun (except for authorized police and military personnel)."
.
Glad that IM posted, it rang a bell but couldn’t remember any details. Rowan was most definitely a hypocrite.
This decision by the courts is dangerous to all gun owners. Everybody has tried both pro and con to stay clear of the Supreme Court on this issue. Their liberal rulings of the past leave alot to chance.
The case against Washington DC has another problem and that is it is not a state. A bad ruling here could remove the states decision making power and give it to the Federal Government. Washington DC is controlled by the government it has no state status, we would be 51 states if it did. That means this ruling will determine if you as a citizen have the right to keep and bear arms of if the government has the right to restrict or eliminate that right. That is why the NRA, GOA etc have avoided this move, a hell of alot is at stake now!
One of the most important rights we have is in the hands of a liberal court!
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