Thread: DC Gun Ban Repeal

I like the quote that a user posted:

"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the 2nd Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like." -- Alan Dershowitz

The funniest part about the DC gun ban is how guncontrol supporters argue that it is necessary to prevent crime. Apparently they think it is a coincidence that the place with the most gun control is also the most dangerous place in the country. The DC murder rate is more than three times the national average, and is almost twice as high as the second place finisher.

I thought Chicago had the highest murder rate?

wait I think they have the highest murder rate by gunfire...something like that, at least in the passed few years they have been?

Originally Posted by DOMS

I like the quote that a user posted:

"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the 2nd Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like." -- Alan Dershowitz

Dershowitz is a disgrace masquerading as a law professor. The Supreme Court has never recognized a special fundamental individual right to own a gun over and above the constitutional property right to own a gun. He knows that. But he's a spotlight hound and he's clearly grandstanding. He knows that states have terrific deference when legislating the health, safety and welfare of its citizenry.

In light of the history of gun ownership in the US, the general folly of outright bans of something so ingrained in our country's heritage (think prohibition) and the legitimate interest of an individual's ability to defend himself/herself I think that the court did the right thing in it's holding but its legal reasoning is in err.

I think what Dershowitz is trying to say is that that there are two types of people who don't believe the Second Amendment protects individuals: (1) people who think it never protected individuals, and (2) people who argue that it is a relic, that it was written in the time of single shot black powder rifles, that it is no longer necessary, etc.

If you are making the second argument, essentially you are saying that the Bill of Rights can be disregarded when someone decides it is no longer necessary. Thats the "courting with disaster" he is talking about.

Originally Posted by clemson357

I think what Dershowitz is trying to say is that that there are two types of people who don't believe the Second Amendment protects individuals: (1) people who think it never protected individuals, and (2) people who argue that it is a relic, that it was written in the time of single shot black powder rifles, that it is no longer necessary, etc.

If you are making the second argument, essentially you are saying that the Bill of Rights can be disregarded when someone decides it is no longer necessary. Thats the "courting with disaster" he is talking about.

I think those people in (1)(2) do exist, but so what. He knows how the Court has held re the right to bear arms--a state right and not an individual right. If he wants to criticize SCT reasoning, that's fine with me.

That 'relic' argument can be taken in another direction. The right to bear arms could conceivably include nuclear arms. That would likely require some regulation.

I don't want to be picayune. I think banning is a bad idea. And I think Dershowitz is a piece of shit...especially with respect to his views on torture. But there I go off on a tangent.

The trouble neocons AND neolibs both have is that when ever their ideology isn't in line with our various foundational documents like the Bill of Rights then those documents become archaic or are somehow demoted to being less than timely. The founders of this country did not need to know the difference between an AK74 and a musket loader. It is the principals of freedom that were being detailed and protected. Those principals then are the same ones we deal with now and will be dealing with 1000 years from now.

Originally Posted by Decker

That 'relic' argument can be taken in another direction. The right to bear arms could conceivably include nuclear arms. That would likely require some regulation.

Can you say "Slippery Slope"?

I'm sorry but of all Amendments I don't think that "the right to keep and bear arms," could be any clearer....

Originally Posted by maniclion

I'm sorry but of all Amendments I don't think that "the right to keep and bear arms," could be any clearer....

You would think that.


Here is an analogy I found, that I think illustrates it well:

"A well-educated electorate being necessary to the preservation of a free society, the right of the people to read and compose books shall not be infringed."

Obviously this does not mean that only well-educated voters have the right to read or write books. Nor does it mean that the right to read books of one's choosing can be restricted to only those subjects which lead to a well-educated electorate.

Originally Posted by clemson357

You would think that.


Here is an analogy I found, that I think illustrates it well:

"A well-educated electorate being necessary to the preservation of a free society, the right of the people to read and compose books shall not be infringed."

Obviously this does not mean that only well-educated voters have the right to read or write books. Nor does it mean that the right to read books of one's choosing can be restricted to only those subjects which lead to a well-educated electorate.

I guess I'm a little lower functioning today than I normally am ... help me out here. How does your analogy apply?

Originally Posted by BoneCrusher

I guess I'm a little lower functioning today than I normally am ... help me out here. How does your analogy apply?

The full text of the 2nd Amendment is something like:

"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."

Some people try to claim that it only applies to militias, or that it only applies to weapons that are necessary for a militia.

The most obvious interpretation, in most peoples opinions, is that normal citizens make up militias in times of crisis, and that normal citizens should be allowed to keep guns for that purpose. If the founding fathers intended it to apply to states or militias, they wouldn't have said "the right of the people."

Originally Posted by clemson357

The full text of the 2nd Amendment is something like:

"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."

Some people try to claim that it only applies to militias, or that it only applies to weapons that are necessary for a militia.

The most obvious interpretation, in most peoples opinions, is that normal citizens make up militias in times of crisis, and that normal citizens should be allowed to keep guns for that purpose. If the founding fathers intended it to apply to states or militias, they wouldn't have said "the right of the people."

Gotchya. Thanks.

I think the main part of the article is this................

Until the March 9 ruling, the federal appeals court had interpreted the passage as a whole. But Judge Laurence H. Silberman stated that the second comma in the passage divided it into two clauses. That second punctuation mark “flat out guarantees an individual right ‘to keep and bear arms.’” This right, Silberman wrote, “is broader than its civic purpose” that is generally drawn from the first clause

Originally Posted by dg806

Citizens’ right to keep guns has been vindicated

It's looking like the Supreme Court might be taking this one on:

Supreme Court could take guns case
Justices may weigh in on D.C. ban that was overturned by lower court

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court justices have track records that make predicting their rulings on many topics more than a mere guess. Then there is the issue of the Second Amendment and guns, about which the court has said virtually nothing in nearly 70 years.

That could change in the next few months.

The justices are facing a decision about whether to hear an appeal from city officials in Washington, D.C., wanting to keep the capital's 31-year ban on handguns. A lower court struck down the ban as a violation of the Second Amendment rights of gun ownership.

High court may review gun rights - Politics - MSNBC.com

It's official now:

Court agrees to rule on gun case
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 1:02 pm | Lyle Denniston | Comments (0) |

After a hiatus of 68 years, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to rule on the meaning of the Second Amendment — the hotly contested part of the Constitution that guarantees “a right to keep and bear arms.” Not since 1939 has the Court heard a case directly testing the Amendment’s scope — and there is a debate about whether it actually decided anything in that earlier ruling. In a sense, the Court may well be writing on a clean slate if it, in the end, decides the ultimate question: does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual right to have a gun for private use, or does it only guarantee a collective right to have guns in an organized military force such as a state National Guard unit?

The city of Washington’s appeal (District of Columbia v. Heller, 07-290) is expected to be heard in March — slightly more than a year after the D.C. Circuit Court ruled that the right is a personal one, at least to have a gun for self-defense in one’s own home.

The Justices chose to write out for themselves the question(s) they will undertake to answer. Both sides had urged the Court to hear the city’s case, but they had disagreed over how to frame the Second Amendment issue.

Here is the way the Court phrased the granted issue:

“Whether the following provisions — D.C. Code secs. 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02 — violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?”

The Supreme Court should not have any power in DC.


No taxation without representation

Originally Posted by NordicNacho

The Supreme Court should not have any power in DC.


No taxation without representation

That's an entirely different issue.

This topic NEEDS to be ruled on by the SCOTUS because it impacts the entire country.

Originally Posted by ALBOB

That's an entirely different issue.

This topic NEEDS to be ruled on by the SCOTUS because it impacts the entire country.

They have no senators so they have no power in who gets affirmed to the court. just the facts


same issue

Originally Posted by ALBOB

That's an entirely different issue.

This topic NEEDS to be ruled on by the SCOTUS because it impacts the entire country.

Agreed. This is not an issue that falls within the federally sensitive issues of DC. It's an issue that affects American civil rights at the national level ...

Originally Posted by NordicNacho

They have no senators so they have no power in who gets affirmed to the court. just the facts


same issue

They are still bound by US SC rulings and are therefore not excluded from seeing their issues served by it. Just the facts ...

Originally Posted by BoneCrusher

They are still bound by US SC rulings and are therefore not excluded from seeing their issues served by it. Just the facts ...

doesn't mean its right. They die in Iraq too even though they have no representation in Congress great country

I would feel a lot more comfortable about this if there were one more conservative justice on the court.

I wish more people would appreciate what an important issue this is. The DC gun ban has cost thousands of lives. Violent crime, including murder, has skyrocketed there since the ban. Just like violent crime, gun crime, and murder skyrocketed in England after their 1997 gun ban. Just like violent crime, gun crime, and home invasion skyrocketed in Australia after their gun ban. When Billary gets into office with a Democratic congress, there is likely to be gun control like the US has never seen before.

Originally Posted by NordicNacho

They have no senators so they have no power in who gets affirmed to the court. just the facts


same issue

So? You're still comparing apples to oranges.

D.C. is, in fact, within the United States, right? Are they not bound by U.S. laws? Therefore, when one of their laws is possibly unconstitutional, the SCOTUS is the body that makes the final determination.

In the past, the SCOTUS has been in favor of gun rights. Lets hope they rule this way for DC. It will also mean alot to people in other places with like laws like Chicago.

Originally Posted by dg806

Citizens’ right to keep guns has been vindicated

From the AG of the state of MI no less! Well written,


Second-Amendment Showdown
Wall St Journal
By MIKE COX
November 23, 2007; Page A13

The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that will affect millions of Americans and could also have an impact on the 2008 elections. That case, Parker v. D.C., should settle the decades-old argument whether the right "to keep and bear arms" of the Constitution's Second Amendment is an individual right -- that all Americans enjoy -- or only a collective right that states may regulate freely. Legal, historical and even empirical reasons all command a decision that recognizes the Second Amendment guarantee as an individual right.

The amendment reads: "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." If "the right of the people" to keep and bear arms was merely an incident of, or subordinate to, a governmental (i.e., a collective) purpose -- that of ensuring an efficient or "well regulated" militia -- it would be logical to conclude, as does the District of Columbia -- that government can outlaw the individual ownership of guns. But this collective interpretation is incorrect.

To analyze what "the right of the people" means, look elsewhere within the Bill of Rights for guidance. The First Amendment speaks of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble . . ." No one seriously argues that the right to assemble or associate with your fellow citizens is predicated on the number of citizens or the assent of a government. It is an individual right.

The Fourth Amendment says, "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . " The "people" here does not refer to a collectivity, either.

The rights guaranteed in the Bill of Right are individual. The Third and Fifth Amendments protect individual property owners; the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments protect potential individual criminal defendants from unreasonable searches, involuntary incrimination, appearing in court without an attorney, excessive bail, and cruel and unusual punishments.

The Ninth Amendment protects individual rights not otherwise enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Here, "the people" are separate from "the states"; thus, the Second Amendment must be about more than simply a "state" militia when it uses the term "the people."

Consider the grammar. The Second Amendment is about the right to "keep and bear arms." Before the conjunction "and" there is a right to "keep," meaning to possess. This word would be superfluous if the Second Amendment were only about bearing arms as part of the state militia. Reading these words to restrict the right to possess arms strains common rules of composition.

Colonial history and politics are also instructive. James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to provide a political compromise between the Federalists, who favored a strong central government, and the Anti-Federalists, who feared a strong central government as an inherent danger to individual rights. In June 1789, then Rep. Madison introduced 12 amendments, a "bill of rights," to the Constitution to convince the remaining two of the original 13 colonies to ratify the document.

Madison's draft borrowed liberally from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and Virginia's Declaration of Rights. Both granted individual rights, not collective rights. As a result, Madison proposed a bill of rights that reflected, as Stanford University historian Jack Rakove notes, his belief that the "greatest dangers to liberty would continue to arise within the states, rather than from a reconstituted national government." Accordingly, Mr. Rakove writes that "Madison justified all of these proposals (Bill of Rights) in terms of the protection they would extend to individual and minority rights."

One of the earliest scholars of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, confirmed this focus on individuals in his famous "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States" in 1833. "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms," Story wrote, "has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of republics, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers . . ."

It is also important to consider the social context at the time of the drafting and adoption of the Bill of Rights. Our Founding Fathers lived in an era where there were arms in virtually every household. Most of America was rural or, even more accurately, frontier. The idea that in the 1780s the common man, living in the remote woods of the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania and Virginia, would depend on the indulgence of his individual state or colony -- not to mention the new federal government -- to possess and use arms in order to defend himself is ludicrous. From the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington to the irregulars at Yorktown, members of the militias marched into battle with privately-owned weapons.

Lastly, consider the empirical arguments. The three D.C. ordinances at issue are of the broadest possible nature. According to the statute, a person is not legally able to own a handgun in D.C. at all and may have a long-gun -- even in one's home -- only if it is kept unloaded and disassembled (or bound with a trigger lock). The statute was passed in 1976. What have been the results?

Illegal guns continue to be widely available in the district; criminals have easy access to guns while law-abiding citizens do not. Cathy L. Lanier, Acting Chief of Police, Metropolitan Police Department, was quoted as follows: "Last year [2006], more than 2,600 illegal firearms were recovered in D.C., a 13% increase over 2005." Crime rose significantly after the gun ban went into effect. In the five years before the 1976 ban, the murder rate fell to 27 from 37 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose to 35. In fact, while murder rates have varied over time, during the 30 years since the ban, the murder rate has only once fallen below what it was in 1976.

This comports with my own personal experience. In almost 14 years as prosecutor and as head of the Homicide Unit of the Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor's Office, I never saw anyone charged with murder who had a license to legally carry a concealed weapon. Most people who want to possess guns are law-abiding and present no threat to others. Rather than the availability of weapons, my experience is that gun violence is driven by culture, police presence (or lack of same), and failures in the supervision of parolees and probationers.

Not only does history demonstrate that the Second Amendment is an individual right, but experience demonstrates that the broad ban on gun ownership in the District of Columbia has led to precisely the opposite effect from what was intended. For legal and historical reasons, and for the safety of the residents of our nation's capital, the Supreme Court should affirm an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Mr. Cox is the attorney general of Michigan.