Posted on 01/15/2004 5:26:10 AM PST by chance33_98
Federal Court Upholds D.C. Hand Gun Ban
By MARTY NILAND Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal judge on Wednesday upheld the District of Columbia's gun control law that prohibits ownership of handguns, rejecting a legal challenge by a group of citizens backed by the National Rifle Association.
U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton dismissed the lawsuit in which the plaintiffs argued that the 28-year-old law violated their Second Amendment right to own guns. The D.C. law prohibits ownership or possession of handguns and requires that others, such as shotguns, be kept unloaded, disassembled or equipped with trigger locks.
Walton ruled that the Second Amendment is not a broad-based right of gun ownership.
"The Second Amendment does not confer an individual a right to possess firearms. Rather, the Amendment's objective is to ensure the vitality of state militias," Walton wrote.
He went on to say that the amendment was designed to protect the citizens against a potentially oppressive federal government.
He also ruled that the Second Amendment does not apply to the district because it was intended to protect state citizens, and the district is not a state.
A gun control advocate welcomed the ruling.
"It's a big victory for those who overwhelmingly believe that we need fewer guns on our streets, not more," said Matt Nosanchuk, a spokesman for the Violence Policy Center.
Andrew Arulanandam, an NRA spokesman, said the group's lawyers had not seen the ruling on Wednesday night but noted that other courts have taken the opposite opinion.
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On the Net:
National Rifle Association: http://www.nra.org
Violence Policy Center: http://www.vpc.org
Yep. The RKBA has been turned into the PKBA - the Permission to Keep and Bear Arms. We have accepted this as a compromise in order to (mistakenly) "keep guns out of the wrong hands". The problem is, according to MOST AW's (a**wipes, not assault weapons) in government, the wrong hands belong to ordinary citizens and those not associated with a government agency. We can do this the easy way (courts, ballot box) or we can do it the hard way. No tyrant ever gave up power voluntarily.
An aweful lot of Bravo Sierra for such a clearly written Right.
"The Second Amendment does not confer an individual a right to possess firearms. Rather, the Amendment's objective is to ensure the vitality of state militias," Walton wrote.
Which is why we need to start pushing gun rights under the 9th (unenumerated rights) amendment, as well.
We have a "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". A right to life is worthless without a concommittant right to selfdefense (despite what Taxachusettes says). And the right of selfdefense is worthless without arms for that defense.
Historically, the 2nd amendment may have been for protection against a tyrannical government. But RKBA doesn't depend on that argument.
Of course, this is all to simple for a lowly judge to understand.
Also, if a COMPLETE BAN on firearms isn't enough to raise the Constitutional issue, not to mention the direct conflict with the Fifth Circuit, how much more is needed?
My recollection is that the lawyer reresenting the plaintiffs in that case had ever argued a case in the Supreme Court. Now, the same can be said of most lawyers, and that in itself is not a disqualifier. But his papers, as I recall, were not particularly well done and contained typos, incomplete sentences, misspellings, etc., and that is not a good thing. In other words, his inexperience at high level appellate lawyering showed. Silvera was not a case where you wanted an inexperienced hand prone to sloppy mistakes making the argument.
You have all expressed some variation on the theme of "nonsense" in reaction to these 2 sentences. It happens that this idiot judge is correct in a sense, but not because he intended to be. DON'T FLAME ME YET! Here's why:
The 2nd Amendment doesn't confer/create ANY individual rights, it protects those pre-existing rights against government infringement. The less-than-honorable Walton obviously intended to write that "The Second Amendment does not protect an individual...." However, he couldn't even state his Constitutionally INcorrect personal views clearly or accurately. The statement is only correct because he's incapable of composing a sentence well.
The 2nd sentence is also correct, and also not because Walton wanted it to come out that way. The intent of the 2nd - clearly stated by various Founding Fathers in the debates surrounding the adoption of the Constitution - is to ensure that the People will have available and in-hand the arms necessary to overthrow a domestic tyranny, should the Constitution fail to prevent the rise of such a tyranny. It is also intended to be a VERY substantial deterrent to the rise of tyrants, as they would know that they faced the entire body of the People, who would be very well armed. Now, the state militias (the REAL ones, composed of ordinary citizens, NOT the stroke-of-a-pen-and-now-it-is-federalized National Guard) need to have members (i.e. all citizens) that are able to show up bearing their own arms, just like in pre-Revolutionary days. THIS is what is meant by ensuring "the vitality of the state militias." Of course, we all know that this is NOT what Walton meant - he meant that the ability of the state National Guards to acquire arms is what is protected, and that is wrong on several counts, both historically and legally speaking. Walton has to know that the SCOTUS ruled unanimously in 1990 against (extremely Left Wing) Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich. Perpich sued the Fed.gov in the mid-1980's to stop President Reagan's use of the Minnesota NG to train the Salvadorian Army how to kill Commies faster, on the theory that the NG was the state's militia and, thereby, outside of Federal control. SCOTUS tore him a new one, indicating that while a state's NG could be considered the state's militia, it ceased to be so at the exact moment that the President signed an order federalizing it. Besides, if the NG is a militia at all, is really a "select militia," not the "ordinary" or "general" militia of the 2nd, which has been better defined in both the 1792 Militia Act and present law - and Walton also must know this.
The problem with Walton is really not that he's stupid (though he could use some lessons in English composition), but that he is willfully blind to the law. In a criminal one expects such things. However, in a Federal judge who is an attorney, who is supposed to be especially knowledgable in the law (or else be particularly able to look it up and understand it), whose very job is to ensure that the Constitution is protected, and who swore an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution," this willful blindness is utterly unacceptable. I won't be the first to say it, but I'll chime in anyway: he's got an agenda, and it is not an agenda in which any party except the fed.gov has a near total monopoly on power.
Which brings us to the issue of what will happen? My belief is that the anti-gun movement (anti-gun for us ordinary citizens, that is) consists of 2 groups of people: 1) useful idiots like the average inner-city or suburban housewife who has never handled a gun, doesn't know the first thing about them, and has been brainwashed into believing that guns are "evil" and that only the police or army should have them and 2) the very small group of politicians, wealthy businessmen and bureaucrats that view gun control as a means of increasing their power. The 2nd group is, by far, the most dangerous. I am unsure of where Walton is, but I suspect that he's a higher level useful idiot. But he really doesn't matter - what matters is that the 2nd group, the power-mongers, are almost at the point of believing that the American public can be disarmed without too much trouble. Like Saddam Hussein, many of these folks seem to be seriously misinformed about the true state of affairs, perhaps because they are surrounded by yes-men. Anyway, these people are greedy for power. They've been whittling away at our rights for a long time now, and at an accelerating rate, but the job still isn't done - not with 80 million gun owners and 250-300 million guns out there. However, they are clearly getting impatient, perhaps because the real power behind the gun grabbing movement - liberal Democrats - are losing power at an accelerating rate as people wise up to the idiocy of lib-Dem positions. At some point in the not-too-distant future, while they still have the judges accumulated over the past 3 decades on the bench (and now you know why the Senate Dems are so desparately filibustering Bush's more conservative nominees), they'll make a grab, possibly under the guise of clamping down on terrorism. Perhaps it will be under a Dem President in 2009, who was elected only because people want a change in leadership. Whenever that happens, and whatever the excuse, there will be civil disobedience on a scale not seen in this country at any time - not during Prohibition, the inane 55 MPH national speed limit, or the current War on Drugs. People won't register guns, and will lie about having them when questioned, just as they have in Canada, California and New Jersey. I'll bet my bottom dollar that some of the disobedience will not be so civil.
I won't recommend any course of action, nor say what I plan to do in such an event, but I'll give my opinion about what is reasonably likely: Travis McGee's 10 million hunters with scoped deer rifles that can reliably hit "deer-sized" targets at 500 yards, plus a whole bunch of non-hunting, liberty loving, gun owners will be hopping mad. If this combined group comprises 20 million people, and only 1 in 1,000 is ticked off enough to initiate action against the enemies of Liberty, then we're looking at 20,000 people. 20,000 highly-motivated, well-trained, well-equipped people. Many of them would almost certainly be ex-Special Forces. Just so that no one forgets, these folks are among the most fervently patriotic people in the nation, sworn to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution, and who also happen to have been trained specifically to gain access to well-guarded, high-value, targets and terminate them with extreme prejudice, to use a wide variety of interesting chemicals so that various vital or expensive things don't ever work as intended by their design engineers, and to organize and train resistance movements - among many other useful skills. They, and those not fortunate enough to have served the country in such a vital way, will blend in with the population because they ARE the population - it won't just be a bunch of rural white males driving around in pickup trucks with the Confederate Flag in the window - and, as such, they will get close enough to their targets to do what is necessary (I'll leave it to each reader to decide for themselves what is "necessary" in any given circumstance). Suffice it to say that I believe that the timeless wisdom of those who proposed and ratified the 2nd Amendment will be vindicated, and that our Republic will be greatly strengthened as the Tree of Liberty is, as Jefferson said, "refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants".
I sincerely hope and pray that I am wrong, along with a lot of those on FR and many other like-minded websites, and that sometime soon those governing us or the people themselves come to their senses and restore our Republic to its former state as a necessary evil, limited in its power and scope - but I fear that I am not wrong. I feel like those in the pre-Civil War era must have felt, hoping against hope that the storm they foresaw coming wouldn't come, but knowing in their bones that it couldn't be stopped.
FWIW, Gorsky's papers were sloppy and did contain a fair number of errors - I'm just a plain old Estates & Trusts lawyer and I spotted them. HOWEVER, the case needed to be brought and he made some pretty good arguments. The fact that Reinhardt had to write a 100+ page opinion to twist the 2nd into a collective right speaks volumes; we also now have Kozinski's brilliant dissent on the books - someday a more objective SCOTUS will quote heavily from it when it overturns some gun law.
Yep. The RKBA has been turned into the PKBA...
You guys might be interested in Post #91. Sorry, forgot to ping you when I wrote it.
...and restore our Republic to its former state as a necessary evil, limited in its power and scope...
should read:
"...and restore our Republic's government to its former state as a necessary evil, limited in its power and scope..."
I'm not sure when the NRA got involved in this D.C. case, but with the Silviera case, the NRA did file an amicus brief once the SCOTUS granted cert. even though they punted back to the 9th Circuit, IIRC.
Your analysis is very much correct. This group and their sycophants in the media (another level of useful idiot) are living in a fantasy world, much of it created by 30 years of wishful thinking fueled by drug use. They actually believe that they can create some kind of socialist/egalitarian state in which everybody is perfectly happy to be mediocre. They are seriously misguided and in some respects ignorant of their own history, much less the history of the human race. They think they are to be the ancestors of a 'ruling elite'; a class of permanent kings, the torch to be handed down the family line forever.A graduate thesis could be written on this topic.
Most people would say that their ideas are completely insane, yet it is their agenda that is taking shape in America as we write. They have been getting away with it since the time of the Great Depression and FDR's New Deal; part of it is they have almost successfully fooled people into thinking they only want "freedom and social equality for all." Part of it is that as a nation, we are too fat and too happy with our standard of living to give them too much thought; as long as the cars are new, the mortgage is being paid, the TV is full of an abundance of sporting events and the beer is cold, we don't much care. We take our liberty for granted; we cannot conceive of a society in which we are all slaves of a central power. Yet, in some ways, we are already those slaves; our tax burden is 50% of our income; our property rights have been seriously eroded; the protections of the Bill of Rights exist only on an old piece of parchment - the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 10th amendments are subject to government approval and have been seriously compromised. Yet, we do nothing - or we go to the polls every few years and punch the ballots for those "lessers of two evils" and think we have at least done our civic duty - which we have - but to what end?
The two major parties have a monopoly on authority, and while there are differences, and while the Repubos at least have some members who are not too far off the Constitution, for the most part, the ends are the same: soft communism from the RATs or soft socialism from the Pubbies. No one can give serious consideration to a third party, because the Electoral College assures that they cannot gain a significant representation on a national scale. (I am fore-square for keeping the Electoral College, by the way)
So many people now have a vested interest in keeping up the Welfare State that to suddenly dissolve it would also mean Civil War; There seems to be no way around it: we are riding a juggernaut to some sort of small "d" democracy and the dissolution of the Republic.
I fear the only way to effect a change for the better (as defined by basic conservative political views) is to allow the whole thing to collapse in some catastrophic manner; a major economic meltdown followed by a serious factional uprising or a national disaster in which government ceases to be relevant. Just what form such a thing will take is beyond my comprehension. The Great Gun Turn In that occurred in Australia does not give me hope that there will be than a handful of hotheads who refuse to cooperate; the prevailing thought is its better to live "with the devil you know" than to strike out in a major fashion for the "unknown". I think we are basically hosed as far as any real liberty is concerned and I hold no illusions about regaining it or really scaling back government authority without resorting to some large-scale unpleasantness. The only thing is, how much are we prepared to lose? Do we value liberty above all else? I think for most people, the answer is clear.
Those people who live in the D.C. area who understand the meaning of the Second Amendment should arm themselves and march on the courthouse. They should demand that their rights be recognized or that the police come and try to disarm them.
The entire load of gun control malarkey could be ended in one day if there was an organized effort to recover our rights from the tyrants who have stolen them. The Constitution isn't negotiable unless we are willing to negotiate from a position of weakness.
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