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.
U.S. Constitution, 2nd Amendment
In Heller, the Supreme Court held that individuals had a right under federal law to "keep" modern handguns in their home for protection. In McDonald, the Supreme Court extended held that this right extended to the states. But what about the right to "bear" arms outside the home for self protection?
The test case for that was Illinois, the only state with a blanket ban on concealed carry. In December, Judge Posner, in a case on appeal to the 7th Circuit, wrote that the right to "bear arms" means the right to bear them outside the home. He ordered Illinois to craft a constitutionally acceptable concealed carry law within 180 days.
Illinois asked the entire 7th Circuit to revisit the decision - and today, the 7th Circuit, sitting en banc, denied that request. The Second Amendment Foundation is celebrating. The next stop will likely be the Supreme Court, but unless there is a change to the makeup of the Supreme Court between now and when their decision is issued, if they follow the reasoning of Heller, the Posner decision should be upheld.
Two very good posts make the argument that "gun control" is not the "national conversation" we need to be having in the wake of Sandy Hook. At the American Thinker, Randall Hoven makes the point that we are in the midst of declining rates of crime, even as gun ownership in the U.S. has been liberalized in a number of states. Addressing FBI crime statistics, he notes:
. . . the murder rate [in the U.S.] is historically low and is already trending downward. In fact, the murder rate in 2011 was the lowest since 1961: 4.7 murders per 100,000 people. In only 5 years since 1910 has it been lower: 1955-59, when it was only slightly lower at 4.5 or 4.6. . . .
Hoven compares our murder rate against those of Europe. He notes that the U.S. murder rate is not high in comparison to Europe as whole. Moreover, Hoven the decidedly not politically correct fact that when you parse the U.S. murder rate, it shows that over half of all murders are committed by blacks, even though they constitute only 13.6% of the population. Discount for that fact, and the murder rate in the U.S. drops to 2.6 per 100,000 of population, a rate in line with Western European nations. This suggests that any honest conversation about gun violence in our nation would needs to begin with addressing problems unique to blacks in our nation. Lastly, Hoven notes:
[T]here is no evidence here that the availability of guns leads to more murders. Two of the most heavily armed countries, Finland and Switzerland, have murder rates of 2.2 and 0.7, among the lowest in the world. On the other hand, every country with a murder rate at least 5 times greater than the U.S.'s has at least 5 times fewer firearms per person than the U.S.
Bookworm Room takes note of these numbers, and then looks beyond the murder rate to total violent crime statistics, where the most disarmed societies experience are some of the most violent. Ultimately, she concludes:
[I]t’s very hard to avoid looking at the above data (fewer guns and more crime versus more guns and less crime) without coming to the conclusion that, in a nominally Judeo-Christian society with a rule of law, guns add to, rather than subtract from, public safety.
As both Bookworm Room and Mr. Hoven point out, in light of the above, talk of greater restriction on gun ownership is not the conversation we need to be having. As Bookworm Rooms adds:
Do we want to debate gun control, which is the current nomenclature of choice, or do we want to debate lessening violence overall? The former discussion presupposes government restrictions on gun ownership, with the only question being how much restriction the government can and should impose. The latter discussion, however, forces people to confront the fact that the best way to lessen violence would be to arm more law-abiding citizens, rather than to leave guns as the exclusive preserve of the criminal and the insane.
I would add that this should be the last time we have a "gun control" conversation. Unless something happens to change the makeup of the Supreme Court between now and 2016, or unless John Roberts decides to make more political, rather than judicial decisions, the major push of the "gun control" crowd should be foreclosed, assuming the Court continues the logic of its seminal 2nd Amendment decision, Heller.
In the wake of Sandy Hook, the left is pretending that the 2nd Amendment is a nullity. Just the other day, as NY's Gov. Cuomo announced sweeping new restrictions on gun ownership in his state, he attempted to justify it by distinguishing his restrictions from anything that would impact on hunting. But the Supreme Court, in Heller, ignored hunting. As the Court made crystal clear, the 2nd Amendment's purpose, distilled to the modern era, is to allow individuals to defend themselves against “public and private violence.”
With that in mind, when you hear a primal scream from the left that “assault weapons” are only meant for killing people, the correct response ought to be . . . “and your point is?” When one is forced to defend against "public or private violence" with a weapon, the idea is to end the threat as soon as possible. THAT is precisely within the ambit of the 2nd Amendment. And indeed, a strong case can be made that there is no more family friendly weapon for effective self defense in the home than an AR15.
Moreover, the Heller decision directly addresses what type of weapons are within the ambit of the 2nd Amendment. Heller explicitly gave its approval to continuing restrictions on machine guns and sawed off shot guns. But as to other weapons, Scalia characterized the argument that the 2nd Amendment applied only to 18th century weapons as “bordering on frivolous.” As he explained,
Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, . . ., and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, . . ., , the Second Amendment extends, prima facie,to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”
Given that semi-automatic weapons have been around in the U.S. for over a century – and given that the AR15 has been in civilian circulation for half a century – it is questionable indeed whether any limitation on ownership of semi-automatic “assault rifles” would be held constitutional by the SCT.
Lastly, as to states that give government officials the power to subjectively deny concealed carry permits for reasons other than a criminal background or mental illness, we await a future Supreme Court decision. The operative language of the 2nd Amendment gives a right to “keep and bear arms.” As the Heller decision explained, to ”bear,” in 18th century parlance, meant to “carry.” Being forced to leave your weapon at home, thus limiting your ability to defend outside of the home, conflicts with both the language and intent of the 2nd Amendment. This surely points to the fact that “may carry” laws are likely to be held unconstitutional.
We do need to have a conversation about violent crime. And it needs to be one that includes all the relevant facts, whether politically correct or not. Hopefully, we will soon arrive at the point where the contours of the 2nd Amendment are fleshed out, and a tragedy like Sandy Hook serves as an impetus and oppurtunity to discuss actual solutions to such problems, not as an opportunity to be exploited by a ghoulish far left bent on making of the 2nd Amendment a nullity.
The slaughter at Sandy Hook has unleashed the left, who see it as an opportunity to disarm the law abiding. From David Gregory today, we get a mocking diatribe against the suggestion that every school have armed guards - even as he sends his children to an elite private school where, in fact, his children are protected by armed guards. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a man protected 24 hours a day by armed security, has talked about confiscating assault weapons from the people of his state. And then there is the NYT editorial board, who opine today on "the scourge of concealed weapons."
Scourge?
Your welcome to read through the NYT's idiocy. Concealed carry is only implicated in the Sandy Hook massacre in as much as the school was a "gun free" zone where none of the staff were allowed a weapon. That gave the shooter 20 minutes of free fire time once he entered the school to accomplish his carnage. He could have done it with a couple of muskets in that amount of time. All of those critical relevant facts are simply ignored by the NTY.
So what is it that the NYT's want? They certainly don't hide it. The NYT editorial board is using Sandy Hook to request that Obama use federal law to trump those 39 states that either have laws allowing concealed carry without permit (4) or those with "shall issue" permitting (35). They want concealed carry permits to be rarely, if ever issued. They want a re-institution of the scary looking weapons assault weapons ban. And lastly, they want Obama to greatly expand the "gun free zones" so as to include "public places like parks, schools and churches."
Though we still await further Supreme Court decisions, if the right to "keep and bear arms" means anything in terms of self defense, then it means that the right to possess arms in defense of self and others travels with the person. It means they should not be unilaterally disarmed by the designation of free fire gun free zones. It means that all people not specifically disqualified, such as by prior criminal record, should be allowed concealed carry. And it means that people need to have access to weapons that would be effective against a tyrannical state actor - and that means at least semi-automatic rifles.
The left's reaction to Sandy Hook is anything but a measured one. They are unhinged and unleased. For the left, the 2nd Amendment simply does not exist, and the Heller decision is to be devoutly ignored. Sandy Hook is nothing more than an excuse for them to stop people from being armed. Guns are simply too dangerous to be allowed in the possession of the unwashed masses, and every trick that can be used to disarm them should be used. The mind numbing hypocrisy of those calling for disarmament is surreal.
In the prior landmark Second Amendment case, Heller, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that the Second Amendment provided an individual right to keep and bear arms, at least on land subject to direct federal control. Left unanswered was the question whether the Second Amendment also applied to the fifty states. That question was answered the other day in McDonald - yes.
The decision did not identify the precise contours of the Second Amendment right, such as, for example, whether concealed carry is part of the right, or to what extent the full faith and credit clause requires jurisdiction to honor gun permits issued in another state, etc. Nor did the decision adress directly to what degree the right can be regulated by government. For example, immediately after the McDonald decision was announced, Chicago's Mayor Daley announced his intention to place onerous restrictions on gun ownership within Chicago - a city where "homicide victims during the current year equaled the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq."
The McDonald decision, authored by Justice Alito, was notable for several reasons beyond just the holding of the case. One, the decision was again 5 to 4, with Justice Stevens writing the dissent in which he argued for applying tests that would allow the activist wing to make of the Second Amendment a nullity. Justice Scalia responded to Justice Stevens in a separateconcurrence. The arguments by Stevens and Scaliaframe the battle ongoing between originalists and liberal activists. The McDonald decision was one largely based on the original intent of the drafters of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. The Stevens dissent proposes alternative theories to undermine the Second Amendment that, as Scalia points out, are wholly subjective and, in reality, are nothing more than legal cover for the personal opinions of the activist judges.
Two, the McDonald opinion was notable for the concurring opinion of Justice Thomas. He would find the Second Amendment applicable to the states on the basis of the 14th Amendment's "privileges and immunities" clause - something of great interest to academics and likely as boring as a rock to everyone else. Were the Court were to revive the "privileges and immunities" clause of the 14th Amendment, something rendered a nullity since shortly after the Civil War, it would open a potential Pandora's box of litigation as the Court struggled to outline the contours of the clause. All that said, from a layman's point of view, most interesting about Thomas'sconcurrence is his painstaking recounting of the origins of state and local firearms restrictions. The regulations arose largely out of an effort by Democrats to control blacks in the post civil war period. One need only to look to Chicago's Mayor Daley - or most other liberal state and local leaders - to see that, at least in terms of ultimate goals of controlling the unwashed masses, nothing has changed.
While the McDonald decision represents a good decision reached on the basis of judicial interpretation rather than activism, the polar opposite is presented in Hastings Christian Fellowship v. Martinez. In that case, the activist wing of the Court held that a college may refuse to certify a Christian student group that limited admission to individuals willing to certify both to their belief in God and to their adherence to a sexually moral life - i.e., sex only within the confines of a marriage between a man and a woman. As Justice Alito points out in his dissent, the activist wing began by twisting the facts of the case and ignoring the issues that relate to freedom of association and freedom of religion. Indeed, the facts of this case were truly appalling:
As Hastings stated in its answer, the Nondiscrimination Policy “permitted political, social, and cultural student organizations to select officers and members who are dedicated to a particular set of ideals or beliefs.” App. 93. But the policy singled out one category of expressive associations for disfavored treatment: groups formed to express a religious message. Only religious groups were required to admit students who did not share their views. An environmentalist group was not required to admit students who rejected global warming. An animal rights group was not obligated to accept students who supported the use of animals to test cosmetics. But CLS was required to admit avowed atheists. This was patent viewpoint discrimination. “By the very terms of the [Nondiscrimination Policy],the University . . . select[ed] for disfavored treatment those student [groups] with religious . . . viewpoints.”
And yet still, the liberal wing of the Court, through smoke, mirrors and very selective recitation of facts, was able to find this direct attack on Christianity to be constitutional. It is not a major decision, but just one more in a line of such decisions dating back to half a century ago when the activist Court began to strip religion from the public sector.
And on that note, let us hope and pray that none of the originalist members of the Court are forced from the bench between now and 2012. If so, we will soon become gunless as well as Godless.
Krauthammer expresses his amazement at the chalkboard that is Obama. Several months ago, Obama was a tabula rasa - a blank slate awaiting definition. No longer. We now know much more about Obama, though it is not written on a permanent slate. Rather, it is written on a chalkboard that Obama is ever erasing and rewriting before our very eyes, sometimes "inartfully" so. Charles Krauthammer captures the reality perfectly in his column today and even the NYT is sputtering over it all. ________________________________________________________
This from Charles Krauthammer:
You'll notice Barack Obama is now wearing a flag pin. Again. During the primary campaign, he refused to, explaining that he'd worn one after Sept. 11 but then stopped because it "became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism." So why is he back to sporting pseudo-patriotism on his chest? Need you ask? The primaries are over. While seducing the hard-core MoveOn Democrats that delivered him the caucuses -- hence, the Democratic nomination -- Obama not only disdained the pin. He disparaged it. Now that he's running in a general election against John McCain, and in dire need of the gun-and-God-clinging working-class votes he could not win against Hillary Clinton, the pin is back. His country 'tis of thee.
In last week's column, I thought I had thoroughly chronicled Obama's brazen reversals of position and abandonment of principles -- on public financing of campaigns, on NAFTA, on telecom immunity for post-Sept. 11 wiretaps, on unconditional talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- as he moved to the center for the general election campaign. I misjudged him. He was just getting started.
Last week, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the District of Columbia's ban on handguns, Obama immediately declared that he agreed with the decision. This is after his campaign explicitly told the Chicago Tribune last November that he believes the D.C. gun ban is constitutional.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton explains the inexplicable by calling the November -- i.e., the primary season -- statement "inartful." Which suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary -- "Inartful: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial."
Obama's seasonally adjusted principles are beginning to pile up: NAFTA, campaign finance reform, warrantless wiretaps, flag pins, gun control. What's left?
Iraq. The reversal is coming, and soon.
Two weeks ago, I predicted that by Election Day Obama will have erased all meaningful differences with McCain on withdrawal from Iraq. I underestimated Obama's cynicism. He will make the move much sooner. He will use his upcoming Iraq trip to finally acknowledge the remarkable improvements on the ground and to formally abandon his primary season commitment to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops.
The shift has already begun. Yesterday, he said that his "original position" on withdrawal has always been that "we've got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable." And that "when I go to Iraq . . . I'll have more information and will continue to refine my policies."
He hasn't even gone to Iraq and the flip is almost complete. All that's left to say is that the 16-month time frame remains his goal but that he will, of course, take into account the situation on the ground and the recommendation of his generals in deciding whether the withdrawal is to occur later or even sooner.
Done.
And with that, the Obama of the primaries, the Obama with last year's most liberal voting record in the Senate, will have disappeared into the collective memory hole.
. . . As Obama assiduously obliterates all differences with McCain on national security and social issues, he remains rightly confident that Bush fatigue, the lousy economy and his own charisma -- he is easily the most dazzling political personality since John Kennedy -- will carry him to the White House.
Of course, once he gets there he will have to figure out what he really believes. The conventional liberal/populist stuff he campaigned on during the primaries? Or the reversals he is so artfully offering up now?
I have no idea. Do you? Does he?
Read the entire article. Even the NYT is sputtering over the incredible cynicism of Obama. They were choking on their cornflakes this morning over the rapidity at which Obama is tossing principles, positions, and his base under the bus:
Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes, promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders, promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics.
Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings. First, he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election. His team explained that, saying he had a grass-roots-based model and that while he was forgoing public money, he also was eschewing gold-plated fund-raisers. These days he’s on a high-roller hunt.
Even his own chief money collector, Penny Pritzker, suggests that the magic of $20 donations from the Web was less a matter of principle than of scheduling. “We have not been able to have much of the senator’s time during the primaries, so we have had to rely more on the Internet,” she explained as she and her team busily scheduled more than a dozen big-ticket events over the next few weeks at which the target price for quality time with the candidate is more than $30,000 per person.
The new Barack Obama has abandoned his vow to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it includes an immunity clause for telecommunications companies that amounts to a sanctioned cover-up of Mr. Bush’s unlawful eavesdropping after 9/11.
In January, when he was battling for Super Tuesday votes, Mr. Obama said that the 1978 law requiring warrants for wiretapping, and the special court it created, worked. “We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend,” he declared.
Now, he supports the immunity clause as part of what he calls a compromise but actually is a classic, cynical Washington deal that erodes the power of the special court, virtually eliminates “vigorous oversight” and allows more warrantless eavesdropping than ever.
The Barack Obama of the primary season used to brag that he would stand before interest groups and tell them tough truths. The new Mr. Obama tells evangelical Christians that he wants to expand President Bush’s policy of funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations — a policy that violates the separation of church and state and turns a government function into a charitable donation.
. . . On top of these perplexing shifts in position, we find ourselves disagreeing powerfully with Mr. Obama on two other issues: the death penalty and gun control.
Mr. Obama endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. We knew he ascribed to the anti-gun-control groups’ misreading of the Constitution as implying an individual right to bear arms. [Hardly.] But it was distressing to see him declare that the court provided a guide to “reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.”
. . . We were equally distressed by Mr. Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s barring the death penalty for crimes that do not involve murder.
We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games. . . .
There are still vital differences between Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain on issues like the war in Iraq, taxes, health care and Supreme Court nominations. We don’t want any “redefining” on these big questions. This country needs change it can believe in.
Read the entire article. (H/T Rhymes With Right). Change we "can believe in?" The only thing Obama seems to offer is change at 'light speed.' As to something to "believe in," that is a rather difficult task with Obama - a man who is rarely "inartful" in his pronouncements.
Unfortunately, I think the NYT need have little fear. The Obama of which the NYT complains is of no more substance than a wraith. The reality is that Obama is a true product of the left. Obama's history, his associations, and his comments during unguarded moments do give a window into Obama. That picture is at complete variance with the carefully constructed persona that is being presented to the public on any particular date, particularly since the end of the primaries.
I conclude with a joke a friend e-mailed me, which I retell here in the first person:
The Divine Comedy of Obama
In place of Dante, it was I traversing heaven, hell and points in between with Virgil as my spirit guide. At one point, as we moved through the seventh level of hell, we entered into the Great Hall of Politics. I was amazed to find that it was filled with clocks, each marked with the name of a politician and each displaying a different time. When I questioned the demonic curator of the hall about them, he said that each time a politician did a flip flop, the hands of the clock would spin about. I saw McCain's clock, and it showed a quarter to three. I saw Kerry's clock, it read midnight. But, look as I might, I could not find Obama's, so I asked Virgil if he could see it. Before he could respond, the demon curator piped up: "The boss has that one. He's using it for a fan."
Progressives, those who profess to be the defenders of civil rights against the centralization and accretion of government power are standing reality on its head. In terms of our traditional rights to freedom of speech, freedom to own property and the like, and not to mention right to own weapons, progressives, and their judicial counterpart, activist judges, regularly act to limit our traditional civil rights. This is often accompanied by imposing new "rights" outside of the text of the Constitution. David Bernstein discusses this as part of an article on the Supreme Court that he wrote for the CATO Institute: ______________________________________________________
This from Mr. Bernstein:
The Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support "individual rights" and "civil liberties," while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides.
Or perhaps it's not as remarkable as we've been led to think. Consider the Court's First Amendment decisions. Contrary to popular belief, conservative justices are about as likely to vote in favor of individuals bringing First Amendment challenges to government regulations as are the liberals. Indeed, the justice most likely to vote to uphold a First Amendment claim is the "conservative" Justice Anthony Kennedy. The least likely is the "liberal" Justice Stephen Breyer. Consistent with general conservative/liberal patterns in commercial speech cases, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have voted to invalidate restrictions on advertising more than 75 percent of the time. Justices Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, meanwhile, have voted to uphold such restrictions in most cases.
Conservative justices also typically vote to limit the government's ability to regulate election-related speech, while liberal justices are willing to uphold virtually any regulation in the name of "campaign finance reform." . . .
Liberals have also been more willing than conservatives to limit the First Amendment's protection of "expressive association." The Court's conservatives held that forcing the Boy Scouts of America to employ a gay scoutmaster violated the Scouts' right to promote its belief in traditional sexual morality. The liberal dissenters thought the government should be allowed to force the Scouts to present a message inconsistent with the Scouts' values.
The Fifth Amendment's protection of property rights presents, if anything, an even starker example of greater commitment to individual rights by the conservative majority. In the infamous Kelo v. New London, the Court's liberal justices, joined by Justice Kennedy, held that the government may take an individual's property and turn it over to a private party for commercial use. The four conservative dissenters argued that such actions violate the Fifth Amendment's requirement that government takings be for "public use."
A few years earlier, the Court's conservative majority held that a government regulation that deprives a land owner of any use of his property amounts to a "taking" that requires compensation. The liberal dissenters would have permitted the government to totally wipe out an individual's investment without any redress.
And consider the issue of government use of racial classifications. Liberal justices have been willing to uphold virtually any use of race by the government--including quotas in higher education, set-asides for government contracts, and raced-based assignments of students to public schools--so long as the government claims benign motives. The conservatives, by contrast, argue that the government must treat people as individuals, not as members of a racial caste.
Other examples could be raised. The conservatives, for example, have been more sympathetic to free exercise of religion claims than the liberals, and more inclined to forbid government regulation of "hate speech."
The point should be clear. There are many ideological differences between the conservative and liberal justices on the Supreme Court. But a consistent, stronger liberal devotion to supporting individual rights and civil liberties against assertions of government power isn't one of them.
Read the entire article. Don't expect this truisim to get repeated too often. And where it does, expect the point to be shouted down by the progressives who really do not want you to exercise those First Amendment rights.
The most interesting posts from around the web, all below the fold . . . __________________________________________________________
Art: The Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull
Second Amendment
Slapstick Politics hosts a guest blogger who was particularly impressed by the precision of Scalia’s opinion in Heller. It is well worth a read to savor the taste of the seminal originalist opinion of our time.
As Transterrestrial Musings points out, a lot of people who support a robust Second Amendment right will pulling the lever for McCain in November. The reason – as I also pointed out here - an Obama presidency will likely see the Heller decision rendered a nullity. Power and Control thinks likewise.
Carl at No Oil For Pacifists has a great post on the whining and lamentations of the left in the wake of the Heller opinion. The whine that really gets me comes from those who claim the 1939 Miller case was precedent for holding that the Second Amendment did not grant an individual right. The only people who can possibly spout such nonsense and believe it are people who have never read the case and have no understanding of the law.
In the UK, from whom we inherited the Second Amendment right, the Adam Smith organization ponders the erosion of their own rights.
Seven years after 9-11, the war on terror has been a great success on all major fronts. Four Right Wing Whackos have the new Dem line: "Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let's retreat!"
A very good post from Callimachus giving his thoughts on the reality of war, total war, and the costs of finding war too brutal to fight to win.
On Jan. 5, Lance Cpl. Robert Crutchfield, home on leave, was shot in front of his girlfriend during a mugging and later died. Red Alerts is following the story and posts that the two thugs who committed this crime will face the death penalty.
Oil & Economics
From Markedmanner, oil hit another all-time high today. Supply is so tight that any problem with any large producer causes a big jump in the futures contracts. That combined with the weak dollar is causing tremendous problems.
From This Ain’t Hell, Dems latest attempts to tie the explosion in oil prices to some highly nebulous Bush big oil agenda. It does not seem to be working. Kollarow is blogging on polls showing the vast majority of Americans favor drill for oil offshore and in ANWR. Even 40% of Democrats are starting to think that a rig or two in ANWR is sounding pretty good. From Pam Meister, Drill Here, Drill Now. Freedom Now ponders our oil woes and Democratic obstructionism – not only at home, it seems, but abroad also.
Matt at Weapons of Mass Discussion has a great blog addressing the canard repeated ad infinitum concerning there is no need to lift the moratorium on ANWR, offshore drilling or the exploration of oil shale when "Big Oil needs to drill in the 68 million acres they already have leased."
Obama
Discriminations post on former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger who compares Obama’s pre-emptive race bomb with the tactics he observed from Joe McCarthy.
Eye on the World posts that Obama tosses Wessley Clark under the bus after Clark’s unconscionable comments on McCain’s service to our country yesterday. Clark is pure ambition unsaddled with ethics.
Comments Confederate Yankee, the saddest thing about Obama’s military experience is that "the only person he knows with the experience of getting a bomb on target is Bill Ayers."
Jammie Wearing Fool notes the new Democratic talking point: "so McCain was tortured, big deal." These people have a deficit of class matched by their deficit of sense. Gay Patriot also weighs in, and then notes "The more attacks I see from the left the more convinced I become that theirs is a party of hate." In truth, the default position for an increasing majority on the left is not to argue issues, but to demonize those whom they do not agree with. I think "party of hate" only scratches the surface.
Vocal Minority posts on Larry Elder, a black conservative, who responded to a query from a fellow African American. Elder explains in detail why he is supporting McCain over Obama. It makes for a good read.
Joshua Pundit posts on Iraq’s decision to sue the UN over the oil for food program – and there is an Obama connection.
Are Obama trolls gaming Google to get anti-Obama blogs shut down? It appears that way. The Irate Nation has the story. The Anchoress also blogs this, along with other stories.
I concur with Stop the ACLU that unions are no longer of benefit to our nation. The benefits unions provided to America ended long ago when the worst of employer abuses likewise ended. And with that thought in mind, please note that full and accurate information is the very coin of democracy – and literally so when it concerns the taxpayers coin. Apparently, unions in Washington do not see it that way.
Republicans
Matt at Weapons of Mass Discussion questions the efficacy of donating to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Their strategy is apparently to hide their affiliation and run against McCain. Who dreamed up this strategy, Howard Dean?
Insanity in the UK posted by Dhimmiwatch. The UK is about to deport a Pakistani family that converted to Christianity even though they face a threat of death for that in their home country. This as the UK hosts a rogues gallery of the world’s worst terrorists that they cannot deport for precisely the same reason. Meanwhile, Shield of Achilles blogs on another honor killing of a young girl in the UK.
In the Netherlands, charges dropped by prosecutors against Geert Wilders for insulting Islam. Dinah Lord posts that the decision included the finding that the legislator's comments were part of a legitimate debate. That debate does not extend to the utterly ludicrous UN Human Rights Council which will now, per Europe News, entertain no discussion of Islam. Anyone who does not realize that this is an existential conflict isn’t paying attention.
Seraphic Secret has an articulate and chilling post on "jew hating savages of Paris" and wherein he makes the point that "Jews are the canaries in the coal mine of civilization."
Political InSecurity posts that MI-5 is warning that al Qaeda is planning suicide attacks in the UK using NHS ambulances.
From LGF - According to the study "Imams in Germany," up to 20 percent of preachers belong to the more conservative, fundamentalist strand of Islam. The study also discovered that only one fifth of imam’s possess academic qualifications."
IslamistWatch posts that surgical hymen restoration – i.e., to present as a virgin – are the rage in Europe among Muslim women. And it is on the welfare dime in the UK and Denmark because the women face threats of violence if they are not virgins when married.
RightTruth posts on a fascinating book by John Press, Culturalism. It poses the opposite of the insane doctrine of multiculturalism. "Culturism holds that majority cultures have a right to define, protect and promote themselves. By that light, preventing the building of mega-mosques is a reasonable culturist policy. Multiculturalism holds that all cultures are the same and that Britain has no core culture. That is obvious rubbish. Then they use the word racism to slander anyone who does not agree. Culturism is a word that can combat the abuse of Western nations with the words multiculturalism and racism." You could also call it common sense.
Dutchblog Israel posts on the slow diminution of democracy as violence by Islamists comes to be seen as a justifiable method of political expression. To call what is going on in the UK a decline in academic standards at the hands of the socialist Labour government is a grotesque understatement. MK has the story.
Dave in Boca has a fascinating post with a lot of personal insights on the al Dura affair and the circle the wagons irrespective of the facts approach being taken by the French media to protect a reporter who should be jailed for life for the bloodshed he has caused.
And see Shrinkwrapped’s exceptional essay on the al Dura affair and its reverberations. "The parallels between the Al-Dura blood libel and the Haditha slander suggest that the American elites are coming to closely resemble the Israeli elites in their ready acceptance of guilt and their aesthenic reactions to accusations of evil intent and atrocity against those who protect us."
Islam
Ironic Surrealism has a chilling highlight reel from the film "Suicide Killers", by Pierre Rehov – a documentary at the culture, ideology and tactics that go into the making of Islamist suicide bombers.
Verum Serum reports on a Saudi marriage officiant who says that there is no minimum age for marriage – you can marry as young as one year old - though the groom should wait a few years before sexual intercourse. The Dhivehistan, a Maldives blog, posts on two pre-pubescent child brides in Yemen who have run away and both filed for divorce. In fairness to Yemen, this is a major story who many in the country are hoping will lead to a reexamination of the practice. The problem is that the Koran records the 50+ year old prophet taking a 6 year old bride and then having sex with her when she was 9.
From Gates of Vienna: "Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun."
The Truth posts on the decision of the Canadian HRC to dismiss charges against Mark Steyn and Muslim unhappiness therewith.
The good folk at Vast Right Wing Conspiracy have felt the muse and been moved by Obama to write new lyrics for an old song, Hey, Hey, Hey, Another One Under The Bus . . .
If you think the issue of the Second Amendment and gun rights went away with the Supreme Court decision in Heller, you are sorely mistaken. The issue has just bloomed into what will shortly become a full-scale battle to determine the contours of the Second Amendment right. Outside of the justices sitting on the Supreme Court, the individual who will most effect how that right will be interpreted will be our next President. With that in mind, how would a President Obama effect the Second Amendment? _________________________________________________
The Supreme Court decided in Heller that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. While a momentous decision, it was also a very limited one. All Heller decided was that anyone living on federally administered land has an absolute right to keep a pistol, rifle or shotgun in their home and that they have an absolute right to keep the firearm loaded and ready to fire. We also know that some level of restriction on both gun ownership - i.e., who may own them - and the type of firearm that may be owned – e.g., limits on machine gun and short barrel shotguns – are permissible limitations on the right. Everything else about the Second Amendment awaits future litigation.
The phrase "everything else" includes, for example, the seminal issue of whether states can enact a complete ban on gun ownership, either directly or indirectly. As explained here, Heller did not decide that issue. If the Second Amendment does not apply to the states, then states are free to enact any restrictions they want on gun ownership. Further, gun-control advocates, localities, states and even the federal government can enact an endless variety of gun control restrictions in the wake of Heller in an attempt to severely limit the Second Amendment right to the point that it becomes a nullity. [Update: D.C. is already attempting to limitHeller by maintaining a ban on all semi-automatic pistols, the most popular type of handgun in the U.S.] The next President’s Justice Department will also have a key role to play in the Supreme Court's hearing of Second Amendment litigation, either in support or in opposition to gun rights.
In light of this, where Obama stands both on the judiciary and the Second Amendment are of critical importance, The most important is of course the type of judges Obama would appoint to the Supreme Court. We saw in Heller four activist liberal justices tie themselves in knots trying to make the argument that the right to keep and bear arms - an individual right at inception - into a collective right two hundred plus years later, based on a balancing test of today's equities while the two most junior Supreme Court Justices, Roberts and Alito, both joined the majority decision.
Obama joined a handful of the most liberal Senators to oppose the appointments of both Judges Alito and Roberts on ideological grounds. A President Obama would appoint judges who resemble the dissenters in Heller. And after the Boumediene decision, anyone who believes the activist wing of the Supreme Court see themselves as restrained by either original intent or precedent is partaking of fantasy. There can be no question that an activist majority on the Supreme Court would limit, if not outright emasculate the Second Amendment right. It is likely a President Obama would have at least one and as many as three Supreme Court appointments (and a bevy of appeals courts appointments). One of those could well tip the balance of the Court, giving the activist wing of the Court an outright majority.
Beyond judges, there is the still important question of how a President Obama would approach Second Amendment rights. Both through the legislation he would approve and the positions he would have the Justice Dept. take in litigation, he would play a direct role in shaping the contours of the Second Amendment. If you listen to Obama in the wake of Heller, the answer is that his views are the same as McCain's and, indeed, the same as what was expressed by Justice Scalia in the Supreme Court opinion, District of Columbia v. Heller. That bald assertion stands in near total opposition to Obama's record and prior pronouncements.
Obama’s animus towards an individual right to own guns and to use them in self defense is well documented. As a threshold matter, DC’s draconian gun laws, just overturned in Heller as violating an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment, are a mirror image of the law in Chicago. Both have an indirect ban on handguns and require guns legally kept in the home to be rendered non-functional. Yet after Obama became a state Senator representing a Chicago district, he never proposed anything that would liberalize Chicago’s laws nor the gun laws in the state of Illinois. To the contrary, Obama’s proposals would have added onerous restrictions and his votes were strongly against any provision that would have allowed law abiding individuals to protect themselves with guns.
In 1994, while Obama was still in a private legal practice, he accepted appointment as a director on the board of the Joyce Foundation, a position he held from 1994 through 2002. According to No Quarter, "the NRA calls the Joyce Foundation an activist foundation whose ‘shadowy web of huge donations’ leads ‘straight to puppet strings that control the agenda of gun ban groups.’"
According to the the NRO, during Obama’s tenure on the Joyce Foundation, they funded the Violence Policy Center for a sum total of $15 million. The Violence Policy Center "touts themselves as "the most aggressive group in the gun control movement" and actively campaigned for a national ban on handguns. The Joyce Foundation also funded the pro-gun control Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research with over a $1.2 million. That organization argued that "guns in the home were more dangerous than protective" and primarily acted in "litigation designed to change the way guns are designed, marketed, distributed, and sold."
Then in 1996, when Obama was first running for office as an Illinois State Senator for Chicago’s Tenth District, an influential local political organization asked Obama to complete a survey on his positions as an integral part of their process to determine which candidate to endorse. The completed survey ascribed to Obama a series of very far left positions on a variety of hot button issues, one of which was support for a total ban on handguns. After the survey came to light, Obama’s aides said he "never saw or approved" the questionnaire. They asserted the responses were filled out by a campaign aide who "unintentionally mischaracterize[d] his position." Indeed, Obama today claim’s that he has never supported a total ban on handguns.
But then additional facts emerged. Obama, it turned out, had met with the organization and was interviewed directly upon the basis of his answers to the survey. Further, the day after the interview, Obama filed an amended survey with hand-written comments in the margins. Once this came to light, according to the Politico, "[t]hrough an aide, Obama, . . . did not dispute that the handwriting was his. But he contended it doesn’t prove he completed, approved — or even read — the latter questionnaire." Several members of the local political organization that accepted the questionarie call Obama’s current claims "unbelievable."
Then in the April debates, Obama not only disclaimed any knowledge of the answers on which he was quizzed, but even claimed that the handwriting wasn’t his on the amended survey. This seems even more unbelievable under the circumstances. And indeed, according to Factcheck.org, it is Obama’s handwriting on the document, though it is not precisely clear how they made that determination. Though this issue now trancends gun rights and goes directly to Obama's honesty and character - and thus his fitness to be President - the MSM seems distinctly uninterested.
Obama claims he believes in the Second Amendment as an individual right, but with room for "common sense" laws. Obama gave us an idea of what he considers "common sense" laws in 1999, when he proposed an incredibly restrictive plan for anti-gun legislation at the state and federal level that would have made the D..C. laws just overturned look as if they had been crafted by the NRA. The following article, reprinted at the Volokh Conspiracy, appeared in the Dec. 13, 1999 edition of The Chicago Defender:
Sweeping federal gun control legislation proposed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-13th) would increase the penalties on gun runners who are flooding Chicago's streets with illegal weapons. . . .
Obama outlined his anti-gun plan . . . Obama is proposing to make it a felony for a gun owner whose firearm was stolen from his residence which causes harm to another person if that weapon was not securely stored in that home.
He's proposing restricting gun purchases to one weapon a month and banning the sale of firearms at gun shows except for "antique" weapons. Obama is also proposing increasing the licensing fee to obtain a federal firearms license.
He's also seeking a ban on police agencies from reselling their used weapons even if those funds are used to buy more state-of-the-art weapons for their agencies. Obama wants only those over 21 who've passed a basic course to be able to buy or own a firearm.
He's proposing that all federally licensed gun dealers sell firearms in a storefront and not from their homes while banning their business from being within five miles of a school or a park. He's also banning the sale of 'junk" handguns like the popular Saturday Night Specials.
Obama is . . . also asking that gun manufacturers be required to develop safety measures that permit only the original owner of the firearm to operate the weapon purchased.
. . . Obama is also seeking to increase the federal taxes by 500 percent on the sale of firearms, ammunition [sic] -- weapons he says are most commonly used in firearm deaths.
Some of the provisions discussed above would make it prohibitive to own a firearm – and essentially impossible to buy one. Anyone who faced a felony with over a year in jail for a stolen firearm would logically have to keep the gun under lock and key at all times, assuming one was willing face such severe criminal penalties to own a gun in the first place. The costs Obama would add to gun ownership and the banning of lower priced "junk" handguns would effectively leave only the financially well to do able to own a weapon. The technology Obama wants on the gun raises its own problems, including for weapons available inside homes for any family member to access in an emergency and the ability to resell the weapons. But the most onerous is last. His call for a federal law limiting sales to storefront businesses and banning all firearms sells from "any gun store within five miles of a school or park . . . would eliminate gun stores from almost the entire inhabited portion of the United States." I think it safe to say that inability to legally buy a handgun in the U.S. would likely serve as a significant narrowing of the Second Amendment right Obama claims to believe in so fervently in the wake of the Heller decision.
Although 40 states currently allow concealed carry permits, Obama "told the Chicago Tribune in 2004 that he favored a national ban" on such permits. He did so on the basis that allowing states to issue concealed carry permits threaten residents of Illinois, even though the permits are only valid in the state of issue.
Interestingly enough, Obama voted to allow concealed carry permits in one instance – for retired Illinois police officers. Not to suggest that Obama would alter his position if there were political gains to be had, but his vote happened to come during the period in which "Obama was battling with his GOP opponent to win the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police."
And Obama does not see self-defense as a reasonable justification for carrying handguns. In 2001, as a state senator, Mr. Obama voted against allowing people who had received injunctive domestic violence protective orders dispensation to carry handguns for protection. It is not clear why he objected to law abiding people facing a threat of violence from obtaining a hand gun permit for self-protection. But his subsequent vote in the case of Hale DeMar make clear he sees state control of guns as more important than any individual right to own weapons and use them for self defense.
In 2003, someone broke into the home of Hale DeMar in Wilmette, Illinois. DeMar used a handgun – banned from the locality – to defend his family. DeMar was prosecuted by the town for this offense. A bill was introduced into the Illinois Senate in response that would have given citizens "a legal defense against prosecution for violating a local handgun ban if they actually used the firearm for lawful self-defense on their own property." Obama was one a handful of Democratic Senators to vote against that bill, which passed overwhelmingly in 2004 despite Obama’s opposition.
In 2004, while running for the U.S. Senate, Obama stated that he was in favor of renewing the assault weapons ban on over 200 different types of guns instituted during the Clinton Presidency. He said "I believe we need to renew -- not roll back -- this common sense gun law."
As a U.S. Senator, in 2005, Obama voted against Senate Bill 397 that would have protected gun manufacturers and stores that sell firearms from law suits by cities and states because of gun crime arising solely out of the misuse of their product.
Obama’s sole vote in support of the right of gun owners came in the wake of Katrina, when police and federal agents were breaking into the homes of law abiding citizens to confiscate their weapons. Obama joined with the vast majority of the Senate in voting for a bill to prohibit federal agents from confiscating firearms during a declared state of emergency.
While most of the above has stayed well out of the pages of the MSM, Obama has repeatedly been questioned on whether he supported the D.C. law restricting gun ownership and usage – which Obama clearly does and far more. Obama has changed his publicly stated position from "yes" to "never" to "I don’t know" and back again, all within the space of several months, and all without ever being challenged on his responses.
In November, when his campaign was asked about Obama's position on gun control and the D.C. ban on handguns, the campaign responded that Mr. Obama thought the D.C. gun laws constitutional. No correction was issued until seven months later when, immediately after the Heller decision was released, Obama claimed that he always had believed the opposite. As Charles Krauthammer wryly observed:
Last week, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the District of Columbia's ban on handguns, Obama immediately declared that he agreed with the decision. This is after his campaign explicitly told the Chicago Tribune last November that he believes the D.C. gun ban is constitutional.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton explains the inexplicable by calling the November -- i.e., the primary season -- statement "inartful." Which suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary -- "Inartful: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial."
Q: You said recently, "I have no intention of taking away folks' guns." But you support the D.C. handgun ban, and you've said that it's constitutional. How do you reconcile those two positions?
A: . . . Because I think we have two conflicting traditions in this country. I think it's important for us to recognize that we've got a tradition of handgun ownership and gun ownership generally. And a lot of law-abiding citizens use it for hunting, for sportsmanship, and for protecting their families. We also have a violence on the streets that is the result of illegal handgun usage. And so I think there is nothing wrong with a community saying we are going to take those illegal handguns off the streets. And cracking down on the various loopholes that exist in terms of background checks for children, the mentally ill. We can have reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respect the Second Amendment and people's traditions.
The problem is of course that, while Obama pays lip service to the Second Amendment, those "reasonable, thoughtful gun control measures" that Obama has supported severely restrict lawful gun ownership. They are inconsistent with a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self defense.
According to a February 15, 2008 AP article, "[a]t his news conference, [Obama] voiced support for the District of Columbia's ban on handguns"
During the April 16, 2008 Democratic debate, Obama was asked about the D.C. gun law and whether he saw it as "consistent with an individual's right to bear arms?" Obama, the Constitutional law Professor, sidestepped the specific issue of the D.C. gun law – despite the fact that D.C.’s law is, in all relevant respects the same as Chicago’s. He said that he could not take a position because he had not read the briefs, and then added:
"As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right, in the same way that we have a right to private property but local governments can establish zoning ordinances that determine how you can use it. "
And Obama’s latest pronouncement on the Supreme Court decision in Heller has been that the decision mirrors what has always been his own deeply felt beliefs. In an article ": "Obama clarifies position on D.C. gun ban", Obama is quoted as saying:
"What I said was that I believe Second Amendment as being an individual right and have said that consistently. I also think that individual right is constrained by the rights of the community to maintain issues with public safety. I don't think those two principles are contradictory and in fact what I've been saying consistently is what the Supreme Court essentially said today."
Obama's big lie there is claiming that what he believes should be the law is what the Heller Court decided. As to his lie about supporting the D.C. law, with special thanks to Hot Air, here it is in video form:
As amply demonstrated above, what Obama has supported are gun laws far more onerous and restrictive than D.C.’s. It is wholly at odds with his claim to have always supported an individual right to keep and bear arms that mirrored the Heller decision. While Obama mouths the words that the Second Amendment is an individual right that he supports, his belief in "common sense" laws restricting that right are such as would render it a nullity. All of this tells us as much about Obama's character, honesty and trustworthiness as it does about his real position on the Second Amendment.
In a post below, responding to a post by Dr. David Abbott at Brits At Their Best, I added my agreement to his assertion that the British have forgotten - or as I see it, have been taught to devalue - their history. In either case, both roads lead to the current circumstance, where the British have passively acceded over time to giving up the freedoms and liberties hard earned by their progenitors. One of the freedoms the British people held for centuries was an individual right to own and bear guns. That right has been extinguished over the past century. This is at variance with America, yet we both started from precisely the same place in 1776. In the U.S. Supreme Court's decision yesterday in Heller v. District of Columbia, Justice Scalia explained the British history of this right to bear arms. ________________________________________________________
This from Justice Scalia's opinion in Heller [citations removed for ease of reading]:
. . . Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents. Under the auspices of the 1671 Game Act, for example, the Catholic James II had ordered general disarmaments of regions home to his Protestant enemies. These experiences caused Englishmen to be extremely wary of concentrated military forces run by the state and to be jealous of their arms. They accordingly obtained an assurance from William and Mary, in the Declaration of Right (which was codified as the English Bill of Rights), that Protestants would never be disarmed: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” This right has long been understood to be the predecessor to our Second Amendment. It was clearly an individual right, having nothing whatever to do with service in a militia. To be sure, it was an individual right not available to the whole population, given that it was restricted to Protestants, and like all written English rights it was held only against the Crown, not Parliament. But it was secured to them as individuals, according to “libertarian political principles,” not as members of a fighting force.
By the time of the founding [i.e., the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1789], the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects. Blackstone, whose works, we have said, “constituted the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation,” cited the arms provision of the Bill of Rights as one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. His description of it cannot possibly be thought to tie it to militia or military service. It was, he said, “the natural right of resistance and selfpreservation,” and “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence.” Other contemporary authorities concurred. Thus, the right secured in 1689 as a result of the Stuarts’ abuses was by the time of the founding understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence. And, of course, what the Stuarts had tried to do to their political enemies, George III had tried to do to the colonists. In the tumultuous decades of the 1760’s and 1770’s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms. A New York article of April 1769 said that “[i]t is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence.” They understood the right to enable individuals to defend themselves. As the most important early American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries (by the law professor and former Antifederalist St. George Tucker) made clear in the notes to the description of the arms right, Americans understood the “right of self-preservation” as permitting a citizen to “repe[l] force by force” when “the intervention of society in his behalf, may be too late to prevent an injury.”
There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. . . .
While the British wrote down the right of individuals to bear arms as against the Crown in the 1689 Bill of Rights, they wrote down no limitation on Parliament circumscribing Parliament's ability to extinguish their rights. Thus Britain lives under a tyranny of sorts today. Without any recognized Constitution, and with Parliament over a century ago having claimed for itself unlimited sovereignty, there are no permanent rights in Britain. Thus today you have in Britian a populace that has not only been largely disarmed of firearms over the past century, but a populace wherein the law abiding among them are prevented from carrying any sort of weapon for self defense. Even carrying the innocuous pepper spray is illegal.
And then of course there is the penultimate tyrannical act. In what amounts to a coup, the current Labour government has broken its promise to the people of Britain, given but three years ago, to give the people a vote in the decision to extinguish the sovereignty of Britain and become a province in a socialist and anti-democratic EU superstate. By this act, and in the even larger sense that this transfer of sovereignty severly and forever more degrades the democratic right of the British to choose their government, Labour evinces utter disdain for the liberty of Britian's citizens. And with that in mind, there is at least one more passage highly apropos from Justice Scalia's decision:
St. George Tucker’s version of Blackstone’s Commentaries, as we explained above, conceived of the Blackstonian arms right as necessary for self-defense. He equated that right, absent the religious and class-based restrictions, with the Second Amendment. See 2 Tucker’s Blackstone 143. In Note D, entitled, “View of the Constitution of the United States,” Tucker elaborated on the Second Amendment: “This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty . . . . The right to self-defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine the right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.” . . .
I think the appropriate phrase to finish on is the truism, "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it."
The case of District of Columbia v. Heller has been decided by the Supreme Court in a bare 5 to 4 decision with a majority opinion authored by Justice Scalia. The opinion is seminal in establishing that the Second Amendment provides Americans with an individual right to keep and bear arms, leaving open for future cases the outer contours of the right. The holdings of the opinion are: ____________________________________________________________
1. The right to keep and bear arms is an individual right related to the right of self defense.
2. The right protects against any absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.
3. The right protects against any law that would require a lawfully owned firearm to be rendered unfireable in the home, or otherwise not immediately firable for self defense.
4. The right protected by the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms that were “in common use at the time” of the Second Amendment's passage. The Court interprets this to mean there can be limitations imposed on possession of modern advanced weaponry and does nothing to disturb the holding in the 1939 case of Miller v. that upheld federal law restricting possession of classes of weapons, such as automatic weapons and sawed off shotguns.
5. Prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons are lawful.
6. This case leaves open the door for federal regulation of guns in certain aspects. Quote: "Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."
[Update - should have included this: 7. The Court makes clear that licensure and registration requirements are acceptable so long as they do not otherwise infringe on the right to keep and bear arms.]
8. The critical issue of whether states must respect the Second Amendment is still an open issue. The Heller Case involved the District of Columbia - an area subject to federal law and without the rights of a state. The Bill of Rights protects against federal law encroachment on rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but at the time it was written did not clearly apply stop state law encroachment on the same rights. It wasn't until passage of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War that at least some of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were held to apply equally to limit state interference. The relevant part of the 14th Amendment is the "privleges and immunities" clause:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;
U.S. Const., 14th Am., Sec. 1.
This clause has been held at various time to "incorporate" protections against fedral law encroachment articulated in the Bill of Rights against similar state law encroachment. You can find a good discussion of this legal issue here.
The Court in Heller does not decide whether the Second Amendment limitation against federal infringement of the right to individually keep and bear arms similarly limits the right of a state to do so. The Court intimates that it will. As the explained at the Volokh Conspiracy:
The majority doesn't clearly signal its view on the question, but it does suggest that simply citing some late 1800s cases which rejected incorporation (at a time when incorporation was generally being rejected as to nearly all of the Bill of Rights) will not suffice. Here's footnote 23, on page 48 of the majority oinion:
With respect to Cruikshank’s continuing validity on incorporation, a question not presented by this case, we note that Cruikshank also said that the First Amendment did not apply against the States and did not engage in the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases. Our later decisions in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252, 265 (1886) and Miller v. Texas, 153 U. S. 535, 538 (1894), reaffirmed that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government.
Cruikshank's judgment that the First Amendment wasn't incorporated was of course reversed by "later cases" starting in the 1920s.
A final parting thought. How much in danger are our rights from an activist Court? But for one vote, the right of an individual to keep and bear arms could have been taken away from us. By the skin on our collective teeth, we dodged that bullet today. But we are in every bit as much danger from an activist court as we are from external enemies.
. . . within moments [of the decision], a commenter to the liberal blog Crooks and Liars said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority decision on the case, should be murdered. . . .
Update: As noted by a sharp-eyed "Jabba the Tutt" in the comments, this is the same David Ehrenstein that created the meme of Barack the Magic Negro.
The NYT carries a story on the reaction of gun control advocates:
Gun-control advocates across the country reacted with shock and outrage at the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns today, saying the ruling would threaten gun-control measures in other states. . . .
Read the entire article. Shock and outrage? Whether the Second Amendment was written so as to provide an individual right to gun ownership is not a policy decision to be made by an unelected supra-legislature of activists. The mindset of the left is a clear and present danger to the continued freedoms of this country and our viability as a nation.
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