We have now posted an article pertaining specifically to how we can be aware of potential situations within our Federal Way environment. Entitled “Terrorism Awareness in Federal Way“, we started getting an average of about 1400 hits per day when we posted the piece!
We also encourage reading all the Massad Ayoob articles. Go to the links herein and click on one of articles; there is a list of links to Ayoob’s articles about dealing with threateningsituations at:
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Ayoob is an eminent firearms author and lecturer trained in law and police work. Mr. Ayoob trains law enforcement, military and civilians in combat shooting skills and teaches at the Firearms Academy of Seattle (in Onalaska, Washington) every year.
If you think that small arms are not likely to be deployed as deadly instrumentalities of terror by jihadist or other terrorist teams read the following:
Leave a comment | PermalinkArmed Intrusions and Building Occupations
“Attackers using small arms are a growing threat. Even “routine” workplace shootings can prove disastrous for business continuity. A single disgruntled employee with no training, no accomplices, no support, and with little reconnaissance and preparation has been able in the past to penetrate a variety of workplaces, systematically murder workers, and wreak havoc on businesses.”
One such case occurred in a mall in Omaha and another earlier in the year in Salt Lake City, killing eight and five, respectively. Most of these tragedies occur in so- called “gun-free zones". Imagine what multiple coordinated, trained and well-equipped terrorist teams might be able to accomplish with detailed support and advance planning if they hit at the same time in several strategic locations.
“The prospect of a business office or campus takeover, a media spectacle hostage crisis, or instances of mass murder cannot be ruled out in the coming years.” (From Anticipating Terror Threats by Robert C. Chandler, Ph.D.)
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The above-referenced Disaster Resource website is designed for business managers and disaster planning professionals. It contains many excellent articles for busibess management. The Chandler article makes an excellent point relating to how carefully the potential for attacks against business operations has been quantified by insurance actuaries since 911.
Those that are in denial about the potential for further attacks like the WTC attacks are already paying for potential damage in the cost of insurance premiums, directly or passed on via the price of goods and services. The economics of the insurance industry are far less susceptible to political manipulation than Fox News audiences, CNN viewers or, for that matter, MoveOn.Org enthusiasts.
Another good link is to the Firearms Academy of Seattle, Inc. which now offers a UTAH concealed firearm permit that is good in 27 states- and it only costs $85.00 to take the class which does not include the permit fee of $65.25.
http://www.firearmsacademy.com/utpermit.htm
FAS offers classes at almost every level of shooting from basic safety to advanced tactical and combat shooting with most types of firearms. Massad Ayoob is a regular lecturer at the Academy which includes legal professionals among its instructors. The law of armed defense is one of the primary components of the FAS course work.
I recently attended the Lethal Force Institute for four days and will discuss the details of the training at this site in the near future. Two days of classroom lecture pertaining to the legal elements of armed defense were followed by two days of hands-on firearms training with Ayoob and several other instructors providing excellent guidance.
We started in the classroom with detailed discussion as to when a reasonable person is justified in using deadly force. The equal force that is reasonable for a civilian is quite different than the necessary force deployed by a police officer. Carrying in public is a privilege so it is necessary for armed citizens to understand the legal and physical limitations presented in real life situations.
We are not forces of good battling forces of evil but it is important that as an armed citizen you are not provoking a disturbance in any way. The person that may end up confronting you in a parking lot or other public place has a family and wants to live as much as you do. The best way to confront an angry person is with calm well-measured words but if that other person is presenting deadly force and demonstrating to you that you are in jeopardy, you should not hesitate to stop that individual from taking the opportunity to separate you from your family and those that you love.
The circumstances that justify presenting deadly force are immediate and otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to innocent person(s). Any consent to enter into mutual combat negates innocence on your part and makes you part of the problem rather than part of the solution to the threat of criminal violence. Your words should be chosen carefully, for example, if another driver confronts you in a road rage incident.
If an unarmed attacker assaults you, lethal force is not justified without disparity of force. In other words, you cannot present your weapon if another man attcks with his bare hands- even if he is bigger than you! The bottom line is that you still have to know how to fight. If someone tries to take your weapon from its holster, the equation changes considerably.
there was recently a case in Sturgis, South Dakota where a Hell’s Angel (or several Hell’s Angel’s) had a police officer on the floor and may have been trying to take his weapon when he shot one of his attackers. The fact that the Seattle Police Officer (who was in Sturgis for some extra-curricular motorcycle activity) was on the floor where a boot can deliver a crushing blow, in and of itself put him in jeopardy of death or grave bodily harm.
When you add the fact that there were probably three attackers and they were allegedly attempting to remove his weapon, it is not hard to anticipate that he will probably not be charged with any crimes related to discharging his weapon. A Hell’s Angel went to the hospital and it remains to be seen whether there will be more to the story.
In the legal world every rule has its exceptions. The discussion herein is not intended to impart the details of when to use lethal force. Our only goal is to encourage taking a class because no amount of reading is going to prepare you to fight for your life on the street or in the legal aftermath of a firefight. One thing is certain, at some point you will have to articulate your decisions after the fact and your decisions and statements pertaining to why you decided as you did will have consequences that will determine a great deal about your future. Although most attorneys (including this one) will advise you to remain silent, it is important to identify yourself as the victim of an assault and make sure the officers know who the witnesses are and that you feared for your life. It may also be important to identify potential evidence (e.g., weapons and/or spent casings).
Officers understand the importance of not talking unnecessarily right after undergoing so much stress. Police officers are taught to wait until they can speak with their attorneys after a shooting incident and they will respect your decision to wait until your attorney can be present.
The criteria in determining whether to use lethal force is to look at the assailant’s ability to produce death or grave bodily harm based on what you know at the time that you are forced to make the decision. In other words, even if an attacker is coming at you with no weapon in his hands, you may have a medical condition or know of some previous history on the part of the assailant that puts you in reasonable fear that he will injure you to the point of producing death or grave bodily harm (e.g., he is known to you to be prone to weapons produced from concealment and he kills or maims his victims). On the other hand, if there is any way to avoid taking a life, take the option that spares a life even if that means letting an assailant or intruder in your home run away.
Women are usually considered to lack the upper body strength to defend against a male attacker and so use of deadly force may be justified for a female under circumstances where a smaller, weaker man would be expected to defend without use of a weapon.Opportunity must also be present. A man with a baseball bat that is 100 yards away from you does not have the opportunity to hurt you no matter how much he verbally threatens to hurt you. On the other hand, an athletic individual with a knife or other contact weapon can run twenty feet and cut you before you can react.
We ran drills in the Lethal Force class and it only takes slightly over a second for a determined assailant to reach you. Unless you are exceptionally well-trained and have quick reflexes, your reaction time (ability to make the decision to draw and shoot) is probably over two seconds. You may hit center of body mass with one or more rounds and be killed by the momentum of a knife-wielding assailant’s body charging at you.
See Jihad.
Ability, opportunity and jeopardy are the criteria. Three men with sheath knives on their belts walking past you on the street have the ability and opportunity to produce death but the mere fact that they are approaching you on the sidewalk does not indicate jeopardy without more. On the other hand, if one of them takes out a knife and demands your wallet… well, it is just possible that you are in jeopardy!
Normally the police will apprehend burglars soon enough and you and I do not have the training to deal with holding an intruder for the police. The “experts” that claim that most burglars are not armed are wrong and when the perpetrators are in the penitentiary they have all day long to practice furtively producing weapons and disarming people like you and I that have some training but not enough.If you think you are dealing with someone that is determined to come back and harm you and your family and feel that you have to hold them at gunpoint you should not appoach them and you should stay behind cover. Have someone else call, the police and provide your description to the 911 operator along with the fact that you are holding the intruder at gunpoint.
If at all possible, stay in a safe room in the event that a home invasion is occurring and call the police rather than exposing yourself to an intruder that has the tactical advantage (and maybe several friends to back him up). We cannot go beyond the information already provided herein because much of the training information could be used against honest people.
Remember that if you ever have to make such a decision, you are making a split-second decision that you will have to live with the rest of your life. If you hesitate or make the wrong decision, your life may end right at that critical place and time. If you panic and draw your gun where no jeopardy exists, the mere fact that three men on the street had the opportunity and ability to hurt you will not get you out of charges of displaying a weapon with the intent to intimidate or even more serious charges.
So spend the time and money to get trained now. You cannot gain the training you need to exercise your privilege to carry a weapon in public just from a website or a book. The fact that people like you and I are willing to learn from professionals is evidence that we take our responsibilities as armed citizens very seriously and that we are facing the risks honestly.
Please forward our site to friends. Family and friends serving overseas and at home in the armed forces need to know that we appreciate their role in keeping the rest of us safe. Please keep us informed.
In closing, we also need to let members of the armed forces know that we agree with their mission and appreciate their ongoing fight for our freedom. Without our police and armed forces, we could not debate the issues and say almost anything we damned-well please without getting our heads sawed off with a blunt scimitar. The people of Iraq and other countries are also starting to experience peace and freedom from terrorism due to the efforts of our fighting men and women.
Link us to your sites, submit your articles and comments and let us know about your blogs and websites. Our intention is to be a resource for unity and strength.
Bear in mind that the watchman watches in vain unless God guards the city.
The SAF brief is especially important because Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in DC v Heller drew on many sources referenced in the following brief.
The Second Amendment Foundation (“SAF”), a tax exempt organization under § 501©(3) of the I.R.C., is a non-profit educational foundation incorporated in August 1974 under the laws of the State of Washington.
SAF seeks to preserve the effectiveness of the Second Amendment through educational and legal action programs. SAF has 650,000 members and supporters residing in every state of the Union.
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The language, grammar, and history of the Amendment show both that its protection is not limited to militia related activities, and that the protected right does extend to having arms for self defense against violent criminals.
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ARGUMENT
United States v. Miller is unworkable: Petitioners’ principal claim is that the 2nd Amendment “protects the possession and use of guns only in service of an organized militia.” This interpretation leads to one of three untenable conclusions:
• that the federal government is free to eliminate the people’s constitutional right to keep and bear arms by abolishing or failing to maintain an organized militia, a conclusion that is absurd on its face; or
• that American citizens have a right to require the federal government to maintain an organized militia in which they can keep and bear arms, which implies–contrary to all historical evidence– that the Second Amendment substantially amended the provision of Article I giving Congress virtually unfettered authority to regulate the militia;4 or• that the Second Amendment forbids Congress to preempt state laws conferring a right to keep and bear arms while serving in a state militia, which has the problems discussed below.
Petitioners appear to adopt this third alternative, which is fatally flawed.
1. Like the second alternative, it entails an historically unsupported assumption that the Second Amendment substantially altered Congress’ Article I authority to regulate the militia.
2. A right of the states to organize and arm their own militias as they see fit conflicts with the constitutional prohibition against their keeping troops without the consent of Congress.
3. This Court has consistently concluded that the federal government has extremely broad powers to preempt state militia regulations, and has never suggested that the Second Amendment has any relevance at all to preemption questions. E.g., Houston v. Moore, 18 U.S. 1 (1820); Perpich v. Dep’t of Def., 496 U.S. 334 (1990).7 Accordingly, petitioners’ interpretation of the Second Amendment is insupportable.
The Miller case suggests an interpretation that is different from petitioners’, and more facially plausible, namely that private citizens might have a right to possess weapons that are “part of the ordinary military equipment or [whose] use could contribute to the common defense.”
This test (which is not Miller’s holding) implies that American citizens have a right to possess at least those weapons that an unaided individual can “bear” and that “could contribute to the common defense.” Today this would include, at a minimum, the fully automatic rifles that are standard infantry issue, and probably also shoulder-fired rockets and grenades.
When Miller was decided, infantry were typically armed with the same sort of bolt-action rifles that civilians commonly kept for use in everyday life.
Dissenting in Houston v. Moore, Justice Story noted that the Second Amendment at most might confirm that states have a limited concurrent power to regulate their militia “in the absence of, or subordinate to, the regulations of Congress.” 18 U.S. at 52-53. Cf. Hamilton v. Regents, 293 U.S. 245, 260 (1934)(citing Second Amendment when noting that state militia laws that are not preempted must also transgress “no right safeguarded to the citizens by the Federal Constitution”).
The SAF brief goes on to explain that the Miller case focused on whether the weapon (a sawed-off shotgun) was militarily useful and concludes that such an approach is ambiguous when it comes to deciding whether individuals can assert the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms apart from membership in a state sponsored militia:
Accordingly, the ambiguous opinion in Miller should be read to hold only that this Court required further evidence before it could decide whether an unregistered short-barreled shotgun was, in the circumstances presented by that case, covered by the Second Amendment.
As the following discussion will show, the purpose of the Second Amendment is to prevent Congress from using its Article I authorities, including its authority to regulate the militia, to disarm American citizens. The principal reason for including a preamble praising the militia – a preamble that does not substantively alter the operative prohibition on federal overreaching – was to endorse the traditional citizen militia, which many Americans preferred as an alternative to standing armies.
The language, grammar, and history of the Amendment demonstrate both that its protection is not limited to militia related activities, and that the protected right does extend to having arms for self defense against violent criminals.
II. The text of the Second Amendment establishes that the constitutional right extends beyond militia-related weapons and activities.
Eighteenth century state constitutions frequently included explanatory language that was manifestly over- and/or underinclusive.See Eugene Volokh, The Commonplace Second Amendment, 73 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 793 (1998).
A. The grammatical structure of the Second Amendment does not imply that the purpose of the constitutional right is limited to fostering a well regulated militia.
The most significant grammatical feature of the Second Amendment is that its preamble is an absolute phrase, often called an ablative absolute or nominative absolute.
Such constructions are grammatically independent of the rest of the sentence, and do not qualify any word in the operative clause to which they are appended. The usual function of absolute constructions is to convey some information about the circumstances surrounding the statement in the main clause.
The Northwest Ordinance (for example) stated that “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged".
The SAF brief goes into a fairly tedious grammatical discussion that includes very some tecnical details pertaining to the syntax and linguistical construction of the preamble’s endorsement of militias. Some editorialists have criticized Justice Scalia’s opinion (which contains even more linguistical analysis) arguing that the majority tortured the English language in order to achieve an outcome-oriented “activist” decision.
Of course, the reality is that Justice Stevens and his Constitutional wrecking crew (aka the minority) are the judical activists. Justice Stevens leaps through a series of mental gymnastics in order to conclude that only state militias are encompassed in the Second Amendment’s language. Individuals, according to the minority, have no recourse under the Second Amendment. Why- because the Miller case held that weapons must have useful military purposes and that sawed-off shotguns lack such military usefulness. It takes a great deal of linguistic agility to get from Miller to Justice Stevens’ dissent. Justice Stevens’ dissent makes for great reading- if you want to major in psycho-linguistics! The reality is that Miller was about the federal government’s ability to regulate firearms and had nothing to do with asking the question before the Court in Heller; i.e., the question of whether the Second Amendment is an individual right.
No one even questioned the meaning of the Second Amendment in the 1930s. The Miller case was decided not long after the federal government made its first foray into controlling weapons like sawed-off shotguns and machine guns.
Prof. Lund’s brief on behalf of SAF continues:
C. “The people” referred to in the Second Amendment has always been a much larger body of individuals than the militia.
The militia has always been a small subset of “the people” whose right to keep and bear arms is protected by the Second Amendment. James Madison, for example, estimated that the militia comprised most obviously…
… women were not part of the eighteenth century militia, nor are they included today (except for female volunteers in the National Guard). Women, however, have always been citizens and thus part of “the people.” See, e.g., Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 165-70 (1874) (although women did not have voting privileges, they were part of “the people” who ordained and established the Constitution, and they have always been citizens).
Just as women have always been covered by the First Amendment’s “right of the people” to assemble and petition for redress of grievances, and the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people” to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, women have always had the same Second Amendment rights as men.
Even if one mistakenly supposed that “the people” referred to in the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments included only those citizens with full political rights (thus excluding women), the militia and the people would still remain substantially noncongruent.
Under the Second Militia Act of 1792, for example, the militia included most free, able-bodied male citizens who were at least 18 but under the age of 45. This would have included a substantial number of men who were not old enough to vote. The framers of the Bill of Rights knew how to draw precise distinctions between rights appertaining to militiamen and those belonging to the general population. See U.S. Const.amend. V (requiring presentment or grand jury indictment “except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger”).
This example further undermines the supposition that the framers thoughtlessly conflated the militia with the people in the Second Amendment. Political speeches during the founding period sometimes seemed to equate the militia with the people. Careful attention to the context, however, shows that such statements were not meant literally, but rather served rhetorically to contrast a relatively broad-based militia with narrower variations. See,e.g., 10 The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution 1312 (John P. Kaminski & Gaspare J. Saladino eds., 1993) (George Mason at the Virginia ratifying convention); 2 The Complete Anti-Federalist 341 (Herbert J. Storing ed., 1981) (Federal Farmer).
Thus, the militia included many men who did not have full political rights. The opposite form of noncongruence was also significant. Those who were physically unable to perform militia duties, as well as those aged 45 and older, still had all their political rights, including the right to vote. Besides the numerous men in these categories, many other citizens were legally exempted from militia duties. Thus, many men with full political rights were not subject to militia obligations.
The noncongruence of the militia and the people points to another fatal defect in petitioners’ interpretation of the Second Amendment. Nothing in the Constitution purports to forbid Congress from exempting everyone from militia duties, as this Court has recognized.
III. The nature and history of the Second Amendment confirm that its purpose cannot be confined to fostering a well regulated militia.
The preceding analysis demonstrates that the text does not impose a “militia-related” limitation on the Second Amendment right. The constitutional language, however, would be nonsensical if one could not specify any relation at all between the right to arms and the desideratum of a well regulated militia. There is such a relationship, though not the one assumed by petitioners, who mistakenly contend that the Second Amendment protects access to arms only in the service of an organized militia.
A. The Second Amendment contributes to a well regulated militia by preventing a specific misuse of Congress’ Article I authorities, including its authority to regulate the militiaArticle I of the Constitution gives Congress virtually plenary authority to regulate the militia, and the Second Amendment does not purport to shift any of that power to the state governments. The Court has recognized this fact by deciding numerous preemption cases involving state militia laws without so much as mentioning the Second Amendment. See, e.g., Houston v. Moore, 18 U.S. 1 (1820); Perpich v. Dep’t of Def., 496 U.S. 334 (1990).
Let us focus again on the language of the Constitution. One obvious way for a militia to be well regulated is to be well trained or well disciplined as a military organization, and the framers of the Second Amendment no doubt meant to conjure thoughts of such an organization.
32 The Second Amendment, however, added absolutely nothing to Congress’ almost plenary Article I authority to provide for military training and discipline.
Furthermore, the term “well regulated” also has a broader meaning that is actually more relevant in this context.
It requires no skill in the science of war to discern that uniformity in the organization and discipline of the militia would be attended with the most beneficial effects. . . . If a well regulated militia be the most natural defence of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation, and at the disposal of that body, which is constituted the guardian of the national security.
As its operative clause makes clear, the Second Amendment simply forbids one kind of inappropriate regulation (among the infinite possible regulations) that Congress might be tempted to enact under its sweeping authority to make all laws “necessary and proper” for executing its Article I militia powers (or perhaps other delegated powers).
Note: The brief discusses how the drafters of the Bill of Rights were concerned as to the negative consequences of standing armies (much like people today that justifiably express concerns that military exigencies may subvert our Constitutional framework and undermine privacy and freedom. There was also concern that state militias would come under federal control and/or that the federal government would fail to maintain organized militias. Either circumstance would hold the potential of eroding national and local security:
…or (the federal government) may so neglect the militia as to deprive it of any meaningful existence.
B. The Second Amendment’s background and drafting history confirm that the constitutional right is not limited to militia-related purposes.
The history of the Second Amendment confirms this limited and indirect – though real – relationship between a well regulated militia and the constitutional right to arms.
At the Philadelphia Convention, qualms were repeatedly expressed about the danger of standing armies in peacetime, along with a preference for maintaining the militia as an alternative to such armies.
It was also recognized, however, that a traditional militia could not by itself adequately provide for the nation’s security, even in peacetime.
Accordingly, the delegates put no significant limits on federal military authority in the constitution they proposed.38 Near the end of the Convention, however, George Mason recurred to the uneasiness he and others had expressed. Recognizing that “an absolute prohibition of standing armies in time of peace might be unsafe,” Mason proposed that the clause giving the federal government almost plenary authority over the militia be prefaced with the following words: “And that the liberties of the people may be better secured against the danger of standing armies in time of peace.”
James Madison himself spoke in favor of this proposal, arguing that the proposed addition would not actually restrict the new government’s authority, but would constitute a healthy disapprobation of unnecessary reliance on armies.
The only recorded objection, offered by Gouverneur Morris, was that this language set “a dishonorable mark of distinction on the military class of Citizens.”
During the subsequent ratification debates, the massive transfer of military authority to the federal government became one of the chief Anti-Federalist complaints. The Federalists who controlled the First Congress, however, were no more willing than the Philadelphia Convention had been to curtail federal authority in this field.
As Madison noted when introducing his initial draft of the Bill of Rights in the House of Representatives, he was averse to reconsidering “the principles and substance of the powers given” to the new government, but he was prepared to incorporate noncontroversial “provisions for the security of rights.”
Consistent with Madison’s view – though not with petitioners’ interpretation of the Second Amendment – Congress rejected proposals to put substantive limits on congressional authority over armies and the militia.
“What the First Congress was quite willing to do, and what it did do in the Second Amendment, was to make explicit the… denial of federal power to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”
Like the Mason proposal that Madison had supported at the Philadelphia Convention, though more subtly, Madison’s initial draft in the First Congress lauded the militia without diminishing federal authority to keep up standing armies, and without requiring the federal government actually to maintain a well regulated militia.
In the Madison draft, however, the comment about the militia’s value was attached to a provision guaranteeing a right of the people rather than to a provision about congressional authority to regulate the militia, as Mason’s proposal at Philadelphia had been. This created the potential for confusion, and virtually all of the modifications made in Congress to Madison’s initial draft had the effect of clarifying that the right of the people to keep and bear arms was not confined to the militia context.
That each state respectively shall have the power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining its own militia, whensoever Congress shall omit or neglect to provide for the same.
Although Madison was obviously quite familiar with this proposed amendment, he offered nothing like it to the First Congress. (An unidentified Senator did offer an amendment with the same wording, which was voted down. Id. at 1151, 1152.)
First, the House deleted the reference to a “well armed” militia, which might have misleadingly suggested that the sole purpose of protecting the people’s right to arms was to ensure that the organized militia would be well armed. The text sent to the Senate read: A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed; but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.
Congress adopted the text that is now a part of the Constitution:
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.
This text offered nothing to satisfy Anti-Federalist desires for actual limits on federal authority over military affairs, and the only contemporaneous criticisms of the Second Amendment were complaints that it did not satisfy these desires.49 The private right protected by the Second Amendment caused no controversy, precisely because it is a private right.
The drafting history of what became the Second Amendment thus confirms that its endorsement of the traditional militia does not imply that the people’s right to arms is contingent on the manner in which Congress exercises its authority to organize and regulate the militia.
Stephen P. Halbrook is a prolific gun rights theorist and avid shooter. The brief cites his law review article entitled “The Right of the People or the Power of the State”, 26 Val. U. L. Rev. 131, 184-85, 192-94 (1991).
Justice Scalia’s opinion also referenced Halbrook extensively. Justice Scalia’s opinion is remarkable in that it shows the little known relationship between the Second Amendment, passage of the 14th Amendment and the beginnings of modern conceptions of Civil Rights that occurred when Southern Democrats enaged in vigilante attacks against black and white republicans in the South. The attacks against the newly free blacks were often initiated by house to house searches in order to confiscate weapons that were prohibited to blacks pursuant to Southern Jim Crow laws. Lynchings often ensued against blacks that resisted and white sympathizers (usually white Republicans).
C. This Court has recognized that the Constitution contains declaratory language that does not change the legal effects that the Constitution would have had without that language.
When Congress sent the Bill of Rights to the states for ratification, it described its provisions as “declaratory and restrictive clauses” meant to “prevent misconstruction or abuse of [the Constitution’s] powers.” The Second Amendment has both declaratory and restrictive elements. The words of praise for the militia in the Second Amendment are a declaration of respect for the traditional militia system, which might – or in practice might not – provide an alternative to the standing armies that many citizens feared.
As early as Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 174 (1803), the Court acknowledged that an entire constitutional clause might be interpreted to be without effect if 50 2 Schwartz, supra, at 1164. U.S. 316, 420-21 (1819), went even further: without claiming that the words required such an interpretation, the Court concluded that the Necessary and Proper Clause may not augment and certainly does not diminish the incidental powers elsewhere conferred by implication on Congress. Perhaps the best example of constitutional language that was not meant to change the meaning of the Constitution came from the very same draftsmen who gave us the Second Amendment. The Tenth Amendment simply reaffirms what was already established by the original Constitution. Citing relevant historical documents, this Court concluded that its purpose was simply to provide reassurance to the public that the new government was meant to be one of limited, enumerated powers:
The [tenth] amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered. There is nothing in the history of its adoption to suggest that it was more than declaratory of the relationship between the national and state governments as it had been established by the Constitution before the amendment or that its purpose was other than to allay fears that the new national 51 The full sentence in Marbury reads: “It cannot be presumed that any clause in the constitution is intended to be without effect; and therefore such construction is inadmissible, unless the words require it.” Petitioners quote only the first clause. Pet. Br. 17.
Thus, this Court has concluded that an entire constitutional amendment was adopted only to allay what were regarded as unfounded fears, without changing or qualifying anything in the Constitution to which it was appended. It is therefore not at all anomalous that the Second Amendment – drafted by the same Congress and adopted at the same time – includes a reassuring preambular comment that was not meant to change or limit the effects of the operative clause to which it was appended.
IV. The purpose of the Second Amendment includes protection of the fundamental natural right of self defense against criminal violence.
Respect for the original meaning of the Second Amendment requires that its language be applied – faithfully and appropriately – to contemporary society….
The fact that public debates focused on questions about the Second Amendment’s adequacy as an obstacle to tyrannical exercises of federal military power does not so much as suggest that anybody thought the new federal government did or should have the authority to disarm its citizens in the name of crime control. Such illogical inferences have long been rejected.
… fear of a tyrannical federal government – has understandably subsided. At the same time, the military power of the government has become overwhelming, which greatly diminishes the potential of an armed citizenry to deter such tyranny. It remains true that a large stock of arms in private hands raises the expected cost to the government of engaging in seriously oppressive actions, and thereby makes such oppression less likely to occur. But whereas Madison could plausibly argue that the new federal government would be incapable of raising an army capable of subduing America’s armed populace, today’s armed forces have the technical ability to inflict unthinkable mayhem on the civilian population.
Even more important, a significant gap has developed between civilian and military small arms. Eighteenth century Americans commonly used the same arms for civilian and military purposes, but today’s infantry and organized militia are equipped with an array of highly lethal weaponry that civilians do not employ for self defense or other important lawful purposes. The Constitution does not require this Court to blind itself to that post-Miller reality, or to hold that the civilian population has a right to keep every weapon that the militia can expect to find useful if called to active duty.
Nor should the Court blind itself to other contemporary realities, the most important of which is the problem of criminal violence, and the inability of the government to control it.
Rather than focus exclusively on eighteenth century comments about maintaining an armed counterweight to the armies of a potentially tyrannical federal government, the Court should recognize that the broader purpose of the Second Amendment emerges readily from the Constitution’s founding principles.
Those founding principles are summed up in the familiar liberal axioms set out in the Declaration of Independence. In liberal theory, the most fundamental of all rights is the right of self defense.
Thomas Hobbes, the founder of modern liberalism, advanced this proposition with his customary forcefulness when he acknowledged only one natural right, and described it as “the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation ofhis own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life.”
Locke stated that “[B]y the Fundamental Law of Nature, Man being to be preserved, as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the Leviathan", ch. 14 (first paragraph) (1651).
See Donald S. Lutz, The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought, 78 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 189 (1984).
“And one may destroy a man who makes War upon him, or has discovered an Enmity to his being for the same Reason, that he may kill a Wolf or a Lion . . . .”
The SAF brief quotes several other great thinkers from the liberal tradition of freedom that developed in Western Europe during the Age of Reason.
For example the brief quotes Montesquieu:
“The life of states is like that of men. Men have the right to kill in the case of natural defense; states have the right to wage war for their own preservation.”
Blackstone in his Commentaries on the English Common Law stated:
“Self-defence therefore, as it is justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the law of society.” The exchange of rights that constitutes the social contract does not diminish the central importance of the natural right to self defense. Rather, political or legal limitations on the exercise of that right must be understood as efforts to enhance the citizens’ ability to protect their lives effectively. For that reason alone, the Second Amendment should be applied vigorously with respect to governmental restrictions on the liberty of citizens to defend themselves against the violent criminals whom the government cannot control. “
This corollary to the central premise of liberal political theory is consistent with evidence about eighteenth century attitudes. William Blackstone, for example, characterized the English right to arms as a “public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”
Just as one would expect from the fundamental principle of liberal theory, Blackstone makes no distinction between oppression by the government itself and oppression that the government fails to prevent. If anything, his language seems to refer more easily to the ineradicable phenomenon of criminal violence, experienced by all free societies, than to the extraordinary instances of governmental oppression that call for armed resistance.
…(T)he Pennsylvania ratifying convention proposed a bill of rights including this provision: That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military shall be kept under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power.
It would be anachronistic to think that the reference to “killing game” in this proposal reflected a passion for sport. Apart from the role of hunting as a food source at that time, Americans would have been acutely aware, from Blackstone if from nowhere else, of the English game laws behind which the “preventing of popular insurrections and resistance to the government, by disarming the bulk of the people . . . [was] a reason oftener meant, than avowed, by the makers of forest or game laws.”
The Massachusetts ratifying convention proposed that the federal Constitution: be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless when necessary for the defence of the United States, or of some one or more of them . . . .
The natural right of self defense is the most fundamental right known to liberal theory, and the Second Amendment is our Constitution’s most direct legal expression of Blackstone’s insight that “in vain would [basic rights such as that of personal security] be declared, ascertained, and protected by the dead letter of the laws, if the [English] constitution had provided no other method to secure their actual enjoyment.”
The brief cites Blackstones Commentaries to show that “Personal security” is listed as the first of the three great primary rights and that Washington, DC presents exactly the kind of threats which demonstrate the importance of the right to keep and bear arms under English principles of Common Law.
According to what Blackstone calls “the dead letter of the laws,” personal security must be very well assured in a city where almost nobody except agents of the government are authorized to possess an operable firearm. The reality is rather different, and nothing in the Constitution requires this Court to ignore that reality.
In the twenty-first century, the most salient purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the people’s ability to defend themselves against violent criminals.
Accordingly, the federal government must be required to offer justifications for gun control statutes that go far beyond fashionable slogans and unsubstantiated appeals to hypothetical salutary effects on public safety. Any other approach would trivialize the fundamental right protected by the Second Amendment.
Petitioners have not satisfied the standard of exacting scrutiny to which the District of Columbia’s disarmament laws should be subjected, and this failure is fatal to their case. Nor should this Court accept the Solicitor General’s beguiling invitation to remand the case for application of some lower level of scrutiny loosely derived from an inapt analogy to governmental regulation of elections that the government itself conducts.
The D.C. Code unequivocally forbids American citizens to keep an operable firearm in their own homes for the protection of their own lives. Under no standard or review that respects the fundamental nature of the Second Amendment right could this prohibition possibly be upheld.
♦ ———————————
CONCLUSION
The judgment of the court of appeals should be affirmed.
Respectfully submitted,
Nelson Lund*
George Mason University School of Law
3301 Fairfax Drive
Arlington, Virginia 22201
(703) 993-8045
*
Counsel of Record
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels recently announced a plan to ban guns at all city facilities, including parks, Seattle Center and community centers. He was already kicking against the restrictions of Washington’s state preemption law- a state statute that absolutely restricts the regulatory authority of local governments when it comes to almost everything pertaining to firearms. The legislature’s rationale was to make sure that checkerboard laws do not make gun ownership and sales impracticable on a jursidiction by jurisdiction basis.
A man with a Concealed Pistol License injured two people in a shooting at the Northwest Folklife festival at Seattle Center. Apparently there was some kind of scuffle, possibly occurring when someone decided to grab his weapon because of concerns about safety (something that should have been dealt with by the police- not self help- if the concern was well-founded). The incident became a triggering event for the Mayor to hold a news conference with Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske (also an advocate of further gun controls, Chief Kerlikowske is known around our area as the chief that let his weapon get stolen from his unlocked vehicle). Mayor Nickels declared “Our parks, our community centers and our public events are safer without guns.”
The executive order, which does not require City Council approval, will apply even to citizens with a concealed-weapon permit.
Violators will be considered trespassers and asked to leave city property, but the city does not have authority to impose fines or jail time (due to the above referenced preemption statute:
RCW 9.41.290
State preemption.The state of Washington hereby fully occupies and preempts the entire field of firearms regulation within the boundaries of the state, including the registration, licensing, possession, purchase, sale, acquisition, transfer, discharge, and transportation of firearms, or any other element relating to firearms or parts thereof, including ammunition and reloader components. Cities, towns, and counties or other municipalities may enact only those laws and ordinances relating to firearms that are specifically authorized by state law, as in RCW 9.41.300, and are consistent with this chapter. Such local ordinances shall have the same penalty as provided for by state law. Local laws and ordinances that are inconsistent with, more restrictive than, or exceed the requirements of state law shall not be enacted and are preempted and repealed, regardless of the nature of the code, charter, or home rule status of such city, town, county, or municipality.
Many state legislators are asking the state Attorney General’s Office to issue an opinion as to the Mayor’s announcement. The order directs city departments to report back to Nickels within thirty days with a plan to implement the policy, so the state AG’s office is reluctant to plunge into the fray where restrictions are contemplated but not actually imposed at this time.
According to one local news article, Nickels stated the city will start by posting signs in city buildings such as City Hall:
The mayor said he hopes the city will not have to require pat-downs or metal detectors in city buildings, but suggested those measures as a possibility for festival organizers of events such as Bumbershoot at Seattle Center.
“I would not be surprised if there is a challenge to our authority on this,” Nickels said. He said a recent lawsuit involving the city of Sequim may give him authority to ban concealed weapons on city property.
The Sequim case involved gun show operators that sued the City of Sequim for interference with contractual relations when the City required that the premises (the venue for the gunshow was owned by the City) would be restricted to gun sales by dealers only. The court held that where the City was acting in a capacity similar to a private business, imposition of some restriction on gun sales did not violate RCW 9.41.290.
See Pacific Northwest Shooting Park Association v City of Sequim, 158 Wash.2d 342 (2006).
Many Washington localities have already been doing what Mayor Nickels wants to do. Cities like Federal Way have simply been violating the state preemption law without advertising it. The Mayor of Seattle thinks he can throw around enough weight to make the legislature cave-in to his fiat. The Washington State legislature is so heavily Democrat that it often seems impossible to block most of the Demsocratic majorities wishes.
So far, there have been enough Democrats from Eastern Washington and Republican stalwarts to hold the line on gun laws. Those “blue dog” Dem and GOP lawmakers must feel like the the boy with his thumb holding back a flood of firearms restrictions, but every year they manage to keep a number of laws (like gun show restrictions) from getting reported out of committee.
It is going to be interesting to see how the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in DC v Heller will impact the lawmakers in state capitals around the country. Already cities in Illinois and other states are amending their laws. Morton Grove, Illinois, for instance, is busy modifying its longstanding restrictions. If a future Court is composed of justices like Breyer, Souter, Ginsburg, Stevens and Kennedy the issues may be relitigated so the upcoming presidential election is critical!
The difference between Constiturional strict constructionists and those that worship at the altar of “the Living Constitution” is that conservatives obey judge-made laws even when we do not agree with them. Many of the media hacks have been denouncing DC v Heller as judical activism and Washington, DC announced that it will register revolvers but not semi-autos! To call such conduct passive-aggressive behavior is an understatement. It is more like lawlessness on the part of the authorities in Washington, DC. It is no wonder there is so much crime on the streets. When the powers that be are not setting criminals loose or spending our tax dollars to promote some new social lunacy, they are busy finding ways to prevent us from effectively defending ourselves.
By the way, people in the inner-cities are most often the victims of violence and are often afraid to testify in court. For such folks (like the citizens of Washington, DC), the issue of defending one’s home and family is not an academic exercise in pettifoggery and parsing legal hairs. Not with gangs of drug dealers ruling the streets.
In order to make such claims, the “newspapers of record” claim that it is settled Constitutional doctrine that the Second Amendment only protects state militias. If you said such a thing to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson or John Adams they would think you had lost your mind! So much for objectivity.
We need to start registering journalists; but just in the big cities, because that is where all the major journalistic crimes are being fomented. We can start with NYC and then move to Chicago, Washington, DC and San Francisco.
Every registered journalist will be required to keep a key-lock on his or her keyboard. If one of these journalists tries to defend herself in writing by calling me (or anyone like me) a right-wing fanatic, ignorant redneck or lawyer affiliated with the religious right, the feds should revoke his/her license and prosecute for brandishing an automatically-keyed writing utensil with intent to intimidate.
The First Amendment balancing test will apply, of course. I am not in favor of chilling freedom of speech!
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The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed DC v Heller in a five to four landmark decision today. Justice Scalia firmly placed the Court’s decision, which knocks down Washington DC’s ban on firearms firmly within the bedrock of the Founding Fathers’ original intentions; i.e., the decision sets forth a principle scorned by tyrants over the centuries, that it is in the people that the power of governmental force resides. The government’s use of deadly force ultimately derives from an individual’s duty to protect herself or himself, one’s family and neighbors.
The fact that the discussion of self defense is is usually framed in terms of rights is, perhaps, unfortunate in that Americans can easily become exhausted by the perpetual yapping about “rights". We have welfare rights, immigration rights, First Amendment right to purvey obscenity- more than most other freedoms, to keep and bear arms is a duty. Many states, especially in the Eastern U.S., still have laws on the books requiring men of certain ages to have a military weapon and suitable ammunition in specific quantities in order to be ready to perform militia service:
That is what Congress did in the first militia Act, which specified that “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states, resident therein, who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.” Act of May 8, 1792, 1 Stat. 271.
Ironically, many of the states that still have such laws on the books will see state and local restrictions on gun ownership challenged as a result of Justice Scalia’s bold enunciations. The Court has recognized an ancient truth that the ancient commonwealths of Israel, Athens, Rome and England (to name a few) took for granted. Free men should own weapons. Those that refuse will not remain free for long. As late as WW II, the authorities called out armed civilians to patrol the East Coast to prevent possible invasions.
The habits of training and handling personal firearms breed a culture of respect for life, habits of steady minded courage, craftsmanship, patience and skill along with appreciation for history and the role of the individual and families in shaping history.
With the Founders’ values and principles in mind, it is worth reflecting on the context of the decision. Yesterday, the Court in another five to four decision, Kennedy v Louisiana, referenced evolving standards to institutionalize a “consensus” that capital punishment for violent child rapists offends decency. In both cases, there were four solid justices lined up in favor of looking to the Founders’ intentions against four justices that regularly look to vague extra-Constitutional concepts such as international norms, foreign precedent and consensus. These paradigm shifts in the court evolve in synchronicity with the evolution of the elitist morality that has so often been legislated upon those of us that are not law professors or enablers of the American mandarin class.
Had Al Gore or John Kerry been elected President, the upcoming court battles over the duty to defend yourself and family in Chicago and New York and Morton Grove, Illinois could never be anticipated. In the Ninth Circuit, the largest and most progressive, the court (sitting in San Francisco) has dismissed Second Amendment claims by denying standing to individuals on the grounds that the Second Amendment is the right of the state to create a state militia and has nothing to do with a duty to preserve and protect. Judges like we have in the Ninth Circ. Court of Appeals are the kind that would be sitting on the nation’s highest court.
Judges like Justice Ginsburg, a former ACLU counsel, will normally confront the violent rape of a child with a certain amount of equanimity. After all, in her world, shaping public policy is a priest-like and arcane activity, requiring esoteric power to construe the direction of evolving standards and articulate a mysterious consensus about which mere mortals are unaware.
If elected president, Sen. Obama will appoint judges such as Justice Ginsburg. He could even appoint Rev. Wright. I am being facetious, of course, but there is no legal requirement that a Supreme Court justice even have a law degree. It just takes a friend that is President of the United States of America.
Rather than attempt to amend the Constitution from the bench as the dissenters would, Justice Scalia begins squarely with the plain meaning of the terms employed by the framers of the Bill of Rights:
“Keep and bear Arms.” We move now from the holder of the right—“the people”—to the substance of the right: “to keep and bear Arms.” Before addressing the verbs “keep” and “bear,” we interpret their object: “Arms.” The 18th-century meaning is no different from the meaning today. The 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined “arms” as “weapons of offence, or armour of defence.” 1 Dictionary of the English Language 107 (4th ed.) (hereinafter Johnson). Timothy Cunningham’s important 1771 legal dictionary defined “arms” as “any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another.” 1 A New and Complete Law Dictionary(1771); see also N. Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).”
Justice Scalia goes on to define what it means to keep and bear arms:
We turn to the phrases “keep arms” and “bear arms.” Johnson defined “keep” as, most relevantly, “[t]o retain; not to lose,” and “[t]o have in custody.” Johnson 1095. Webster defined it as “[t]o hold; to retain in one’s power or possession.” No party has apprised us of an idiomatic meaning of “keep Arms.” Thus, the most natural reading of “keep Arms” in the Second Amendment is to “have weapons.”
The decision demonstrates that when the Constitution was drafted, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects. Scalia quotes Blackstone, the great expounder of the common laws of England. Blackstone’s Commentaries “constituted the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation….” The English Bill of Rights inspired, to a large degree, the U.S. Bill of Rights and, according to Blackstone, self defense and the right to be armed was “one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen”. See 1 Blackstone 136, 139–140 (1765). Contemporary authorities concurred.
The decision also presents incisive history lessons related to the nature of the organized & unorganized militia, concepts that were familiar to many at the time that the Federalists were trying to win over anti-Federalists who feared standing armies and the despotism that was associated with strong central government:
There are many reasons why the militia was thought to be “necessary to the security of a free state.” See 3 Story §1890. First, of course, it is useful in repelling invasions and suppressing insurrections. Second, it renders large standing armies unnecessary—an argument that Alexander Hamilton made in favor of federal control over the militia. The Federalist No. 29, pp. 226, 227 (B. Wright ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). Third, when the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny.
Thus, Justice Scalia states, “It was understood across the political spectrum that the (Second Amendment) right helped to secure the ideal of a citizen militia, which might be necessary to oppose an oppressive military force if the constitutional order broke down.”
Many of the state constitutions at the time of the Founders used Second Amendment keep and bear arms language in a manner that clearly demonstrated the intent to recognize that individual ownership and use of firearms was encompassed by the term. Scalia cites Pennsylvania’s Declaration of Rights of 1776:
“That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves, and the state . . . .” §XIII, in 5 Thorpe 3082, 3083 (emphasis added).
Vermont, another example cited by Justice Scalia in the Heller opinion an identical provision. North Carolina also codified a right to bear arms in 1776: “That the people have a right to bear arms, for the defence of the State . . . .”
The majority opinion goes on to point out that many colonial statutes required individual arms-bearing for public-safety reasons— such as the 1770 Georgia law that “for the security and defence of this province from internal dangers and insurrections” required those men who qualified for militia duty individually “to carry fire arms” “to places of public worship.”
The Court cites St. George Tucker’s version of Blackstone’s Commentaries for the proposition that:
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.” He believed that the English game laws had abridged the right by prohibiting “keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game.”
Another famous Constitutional scholar wrote:
One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offence to keep arms, and by substituting a regular army in the stead of a resort to the militia.” A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States §450 (Story).
The Court cites one of my favorite authors, firearms lawyer Stephen Halbrook, to illustrate that “in the aftermath of the Civil War, there was an outpouring of discussion of the Second Amendment in Congress and in public discourse, as people debated whether and how to secure constitutional rights for newly free slaves. See generally S. Halbrook, Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, 1866–1876 (1998):
Yet those born and educated in the early 19th century faced a widespread effort to limit arms ownership by a large number of citizens; their understanding of the origins and continuing significance of the Amendment is instructive. Blacks were routinely disarmed by Southern States after the Civil War. Those who opposed these injustices frequently stated that they infringed blacks’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Needless to say, the claim was not that blacks were being prohibited from carrying arms in an organized state militia.”
The majority opinion discussing the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment quotes a joint Congressional Report that described how after the Civil War “in some parts of [South Carolina], armed parties are, without proper authority, engaged in seizing all firearms found in the hands of the freemen. Such conduct is in clear and direct violation of their personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, which declares that ‘the right of the people to freedmen of South Carolina have shown by their peaceful and orderly conduct that they can safely be trusted with fire-arms, and they need them to kill game for subsistence, and to protect their crops from destruction by birds and animals.”
The point is that the view was common at the time that newly free black citizens held a constitutional right to bear arms. The viewpoint expressed in these statements “was widely reported and was apparently widely held.”
For example, the Court goes on, “an editorial in The Loyal Georgian (Augusta) on February 3, 1866, assured blacks that “[a]ll men, without distinction of color, have the right to keep and bear arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.”
Thus, “It was plainly the understanding in the post-Civil War Congress that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to use arms for self-defense.”
These little jewels should be enough to whet your appetite. Could you imagine Constitutional law professor Obama citing such authorities? “Well, I believe in the right to hunt and have lawful representation, provided that we use common sense when we interpret the Constitution so that we do not restrict the duty of the Washington DC authorities to deal with crime by promulgating reasonable restrictions against handguns.” (Basically what Obama has said in so many words.)
Every issue on which Sen. Obama speaks is like this. He is for Jerusalem remaining under the government of Israel and then he is for this issue being negotiated with the Palestinians. He thinks we should minimize abortion but he is against a law that would protect a child’s life after an abortion fails to end the child’s life (in other words, after the child is born!). It is scary!
It is scarier yet to think about how easy it is for a president to appoint one or two justices that will be more than willing, even anxious, to overturn U.S. Supreme Court’s precedent within a few years by invoking changed consensus and foreign precedents from international tribunals (it’s a global economy, you know).
Justice Stevens’ dissent strains to reach new apogees of linguistic sophistry. It is like listening to President Clinton split hairs about what the meaning of “is” is:
“[K]eep and bear arms” thus perfectly describes the responsibilities of a framing-era militia member. This reading is confirmed by the fact that the clause protects only one right, rather than two. It does not describe a right “to keep arms” and a separate right “to bear arms.” Rather, the single right that it does describe is both a duty and a right to have arms available and ready for military service, and to use them for military purposes when necessary. Different language surely would have been used to protect nonmilitary use and possession of weapons from regulation if such an intent….”
The dissent lectures the majority on the principle of stare decisis; i.e., the principle that a court should not lightly set aside prior precedent. Citing Miller, Justice Stevens argues that the holding relates the right to keep and bear arms to military matters. The fact of the matter is that there was no party briefing the case for the other side in Miller and the government’s lawyer tried to make a corporate right argument that the Second Amendment does not belong to the individual. The Court ruled that the distinction between the sawed-off shotgun possessed unlawfully by the defendant in the case and a militarily useful weapon should be the basis for upholding the National Firearms Act that outlawed certain kinds of weapons. That is as far as the Miller court went, but from 1939 until now that case stands as landmark Second Amendment jurisprudence in the minds of the minority- jurisprudence that denies individuals any standing to enter the courthouse door and seek redress when we are rendered defenseless in our own homes. See United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174 (1939).
In 2003, the usual Supreme Court suspects cried, “Stare decisis be damned and full speed ahead with the global social agenda!” All in the name of melding our institutions with the evolving international consensus. That was the case where the Court overturned its own seventeen year old precedent, thus negating its previous opinion upholding states that outlaw sodomy between adults. These justices have lowered the respect in which the public holds the Court to somewhere between Sean Penn and Jimmy Carter.
Think of all the cities that have disarmed their citizens, a citizenry that has seen their children raped, their streets held hostage to thugs and armies of drug dealers. Citizenry that fears what used to be called “hue and cry”. Well, now the mayors, like Seattle, Washington’s Mayor Nickels and the Mayor of the other Washington, will be letting out the hue and cry. OMaybe some of these so-called liberal-progressive gun-grabbers always were enabling the rioters in the streets, street-thuggery and general lawlessness with which we can all partake vicariously, thanks to Hollywood and the evening news.
Incidentally, have you ever noticed all the Hollywood films about honest citizens that get fed up and go after revenge against perpetrators? The good guy stabs, beats to a pulp and blasts away at gangsters, crooked cops, CIA conspirators and rapists in so many movies that no one person could ever count them all. Then the people that make these movies and stab their way through one sequence after another proclaim that they are against anything that has to with guns (outside the hands of police and military- police and military are two other categories that displease the average denizen of the silver screen even more than “rednecks” with guns). I only mention this pithy observation in closing.
The Hollywood phenomenon is another example of that smirking elitism (think Sean Penn again) that is hard to define but you know it when you see it. For me such elitism goes by the name of Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter and Breyer.
See http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/07-2901.pdf
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Obama’s Gun Dance
By Robert Novak
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Barack Obama, who informs campaign audiences that he taught constitutional law for 10 years, might be expected to weigh in on the historic Second Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are pondering whether the 1976 District of Columbia law effectively prohibiting personal gun ownership in the nation’s capital is constitutional. But Sen. Obama has not stated his position.
Obama, disagreeing with the D.C. government and gun control advocates, declares the Second Amendment’s “right of the people to keep and bear arms” applies to individuals, not just the “well-regulated militia” cited in the amendment. In the next breath, he asserts this constitutional guarantee does not preclude local “common sense” restrictions on firearms. Does the Draconian prohibition for Washington, D.C., fit that description? My attempts to get an answer have proved unavailing. The front-running Democratic presidential candidate is doing the gun dance.
That is a dance of many Democrats, revealed by my private conversations with the party’s strategists. As urban liberals, they reject constitutional protection for gun owners. As campaign managers, they want to avoid re-enacting the fate of many Democratic candidates who lost elections because of gun control advocacy. The party’s House leadership last year pulled off the floor a bill for a District of Columbia congressional seat in order to save Democratic members from having to vote on a Republican amendment against the D.C. gun law.
Hillary Clinton has extolled the Second Amendment, though not as far as Obama. Campaigning at Iowa’s Cornell College Dec. 5, he asserted that the Second Amendment “is an individual right and not just a right of the militia.” He repeated that formulation along the primary trail, declaring at a Milwaukee press conference before the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary: “I believe the Second Amendment means something. … There is an individual right to bear arms.”
That implies that the D.C. gun law is unconstitutional. Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty’s brief to the Supreme Court rests on the proposition that the Second Amendment “protects the possession and use of guns only in service of an organized militia.” Consequently, I deduced in a March 13 column about the case that Obama had “weighed in against the D.C. law.”
On March 24, a reader e-mailed The Washington Post that “Obama supports the D.C. law” and demanded a correction. That was based on an Associated Press account of Obama’s Milwaukee press conference asserting that “he voiced support for the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns.” In fact, all he said he was: “The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can’t initiate gun safety laws to deal with gang bangers and random shootings on the street isn’t born out by our Constitution.”
That leaves Obama unrevealed on the D.C. law. In response to my inquiry about his specific position, Obama’s campaign e-mailed me a one paragraph answer: Obama believes that while the “Second Amendment creates an individual right … he also believes that the Constitution permits federal, state and local government to adopt reasonable and common sense gun safety measures.” Though the paragraph is titled “Obama on the D.C. Court case,” the specific gun ban is never mentioned. I tried again, without success, last week to learn Obama’s position before writing this column.
Obama’s dance on gun rights is part of his evolution from a radical young state legislator a few years ago. He was recorded in a 1996 questionnaire as advocating a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns (a position since disavowed). He was on the board of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which takes an aggressive gun control position, and in 2000 considered becoming its full-time president. In 2006, he voted with an 84 to 16 majority (and against Clinton) to prohibit confiscation of firearms during an emergency, but that is his only pro-gun vote in Springfield or Washington. The National Rifle Association (NRA) grades him (and Clinton) at “F.”
There is no anti-gun litmus test for Democrats. In 2006, Ted Strickland was elected governor of Ohio and Bob Casey U.S. senator from Pennsylvania with NRA grades of “A.” Following their model, Obama talks about the rights of “Americans to protect their families.” He has not yet stated whether that right should exist in Washington, D.C.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/obamas_gun_dance.html at June 26, 2008 - 12:33:06 AM CDT
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As modern day Israel prepared to celebrate Purim, a Palestinian gunman was preparing to slaughter Israeli people in the same way that Haman attempted to do in the time of Esther. Purim is the annual celebration of the great deliverance of the Jewish people in the days of Queen Hadassah (Esther):
These holy days are observed to honour the defeat of the enemies of GOD’S people. Purim commemorates the downfall of Haman (means: tumult), the enemy of the Jewish people in the Persian Empire. As such, Haman is a type of Satan, the “accuser” - the one who has throughout history, sought to eliminate the Hebrew race. Haman had the king’s servants cast lots (purim) to determine the date on which the Jews would be destroyed, but his wicked plan was thwarted because of GOD’S great mercy and the obedience of Hadassah (Queen Esther).
“Purim” (casting of lots) is explained like this: Haman, having been warned that all enemies of the Jews had in the past met with frustration, being superstitious, decided to cast lots to determine the most favourable day for the slaughter.
But it turned out that Haman was hanged on the same gallows which he had previously prepared for Mordecai, and all the Jews escaped a terrible massacre. The next day, the 14th of Adar, the victory was joyously celebrated.
After the Persian royal advisor, Haman’s genocidal plot to rid the world of the Jewish people was foiled, “V’nahafoch Hu!” (roughly interpreted: “and the tables were turned!") became the rallying cry of the Jewish people during the month of Adar. Today the Talmudic sages advise [Tractate Ta’anit 29a] Jews throughout history to seek to schedule critical events, in which Divine assistance is desired, during the month of Adar:
On the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, the king’s decree was supposed to be executed. The enemies of the Jews had hoped to overpower the Jews that day, but the plot was overturned, and the Jews overpowered their enemies.
Throughout King Achashvairosh’s provinces the Jews gathered in their cities to defend themselves against those who tried to hurt them. No one could withstand them, because everyone was afraid of them.
Even the provincial ministers, the satraps, the governors, and the king’s pages, supported the Jews, because they were afraid of Mordechai.
You see, Mordechai had become very influential in the king’s household, and his reputation was known throughout the empire; as a result, Mordechai was becoming more and more powerful.
The Jews struck at all their opponents with the sword, killing and destroying them, and they defeated all their enemies.
In Shushan Capital the Jews killed and destroyed five hundred men.
They also killed Parshandasa, Dalfon,Aspasa, Porasa, Adalya, Aridasa, Parmashta, Arisei, Aridei and Vayizoso, the ten sons of Haman, the son of Hamdoso, persecutor of the Jews. But they did not pillage their property.
They notified the king of the death toll in Shushan Capital the same day it occurred.
The king said to Queen Esther, “In Shushan Capital the Jews killed and destroyed five hundred men, as well as the ten sons of Haman. Who knows what they did in the more distant provinces of the empire? Whatever you want, you will be given; whatever your request, it will be done.”
Esther replied, “If it pleases the king, may the Jews of Shushan have tomorrow also, with the same rules as today? And also, could the ten sons of Haman be hanged on the gallows?”
The king ordered these things to be done. The decree was announced in Shushan, and also the ten sons of Haman were hanged on the gallows.
So the Jews of Shushan gathered again on the fourteenth day of Adar, and they killed another three hundred men in Shushan, but they did not pillage their property.
The Jews in the rest of the empire also gathered to defend themselves and get peace from their enemies, and they killed a total of seventy-five thousand, but they did not pillage their property.
They fought their battle on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar, and they rested on the fourteenth. So they made the fourteenth day of Adar a day of feasting and celebration.
The Scriptural explanations above are from a Messianic and Jewish teachers. Surprisingly, the Persian Emperor, deceived by Haman’s manipulation, issued an edict for the massacre of the Jewish people. Esther informed the Emperor-King of the deception and the only way that he could legally undo his own decree was to issue a new edict permitting the Jews to defend themselves. The decree had the same effect as the modern day Second Amendment. Although it was a temporary decree, genocidal killing was stopped as the Jews turned the table on those who would have killed and plundered them. The death toll was great but the Persians that were foolish enough to seek Jewish blood died instead.
The following is a recent example of how Israel’s modern history contains many events that convey to an open minded observer that supernatural military events are still occurring. The modern Purim story of the Mercaz Harav seminary is also an example of what military strategists call swarming tactics where as soon as the enemy attacks or presents a target of opportunity, opposition coalesces spontaneously as a result of units that are prepared to react to random situations that are impossible to anticipate by means of conventional response planning:
From BBC News
Eight people have been killed and nine wounded by a Palestinian gunman who infiltrated a Jewish seminary in West Jerusalem, Israeli officials say. The gunman entered the school’s dining room and opened fire with an AK-47.
Witnesses said the gunman went into the library at the Mercaz Harav seminary in the city’s Kiryat Moshe quarter and opened fire.
The assailant, who Israeli police said was a resident of East Jerusalem, was shot dead by an Israeli army officer.
The attack is the worst of its kind in Israel for a number of years.
The White House has led international condemnation but the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas called the attack “heroic” while not claiming responsibility.
When we got in… we saw young, 15-, 16-year-old guys lying on the floor with their Bibles in their hands - all dead on the floor.
However, the 15-strong UN Security Council failed to agree on a resolution condemning the attack because of reservations from temporary member Libya, which sought to link it to Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.
A previously unknown group called the “Jalil Freedom Battalions - the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyeh and Gaza” claims to have carried it out, according to Lebanese Hezbollah media.
The fact that the school is at the heart of the settler movement in the occupied West Bank may have been the reason why it was targeted, BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen reports.
Many of its students are on special courses that combine religious study with service in combat units in the Israeli army, he notes.
There will be an Israeli response to this attack, our Middle East editor adds - the question is how severe it will be.
‘Horrific’
The gunman entered the library at the Mercaz Harav seminary on Thursday evening, where about 80 students were gathered, and fired an AK-47 rifle for several minutes, witnesses say.
One of the students, Yitzhak Dadon, reportedly shot the gunman twice before he was finally killed by an off-duty Israeli army officer, who had gone to the school after hearing gunfire.
“I shot him twice in the head,” he told the Reuters news agency.
“We heard shooting and knew that something had happened,” recounted Yitzhak Dadon, 40, who studies at the yeshiva. Dadon said he cocked his handgun and went up to the roof of the yeshiva, where he saw the terrorist spraying gunfire indiscriminately at the crowd inside. Dadon said he fired two bullets at the terrorist, who began to stumble.
“He started to sway and then someone else with a rifle fired at him, and he died.”
Another man told the BBC that there had been “terrible scenes” inside the building afterwards.
“When we got in… we saw young, 15-, 16-year-old guys lying on the floor with their Bibles in their hands - all dead…” he said.
Jerusalem police commander Aharon Franco confirmed there had been only one gunman and said he had hidden his weapon in a cardboard box.
Celebratory gunfire reverberated throughout Gaza City, as groups of Hamas militants marched through the streets waving green flags and calling out over loudspeakers: “Allah gave us this victorious day, because we deserve our freedom.”
John Lott, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, provides the following analysis for comparison with the above referenced scenes in Jerusalem and the Middle East:
As Northern Illinois University restarts classes this week, one thing is clear: Six minutes proved too long.
It took six minutes before the police were able to enter the classroom that horrible Thursday, and in that short time five people were murdered, 16 wounded.
Six minutes is actually record-breaking speed for the police arriving at such an attack, but it was simply not fast enough. Still, the police were much faster than at the Virginia Tech attack last year.
12,000 people, including relatives of the Northern Illinois University students killed Feb. 14, attend a memorial Sunday in DeKalb, Ill. The previous Thursday, five people were killed in the city council chambers in Kirkwood, Mo. There was even a police officer already there when the attack occurred.
But, as happens time after time in these attacks when uniformed police are there, the killers either wait for the police to leave the area or they are the first people killed. In Kirkwood, the police officer was killed immediately when the attack started.
People cowered or were reduced to futilely throwing chairs at the killer. In attacks last year at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb., the Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City and the recent attack at the Tinley Park Mall in Illinois, or all the public school attacks, they had one thing in common: They took place in “gun-free zones,” where private citizens were not allowed to carry their guns with them.
The malls in Omaha and Salt Lake City were in states that let people carry concealed handguns, but private property owners are allowed to post signs that ban guns; those malls were among the few places in their states that chose such a ban.
In the Trolley Square attack, an off-duty police officer fortunately violated the ban and stopped the attack. The attack at Virginia Tech or the other public school attacks occur in some of the few areas within their states that people are not allowed to
carry concealed handguns.
It is not just recent killings that are occurring in these gun-free zones. The Columbine High School shooting left 13 murdered in 1999; Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, had 23 who were fatally shot by a deranged man in 1991; and a McDonald’s in Southern California had 21 people shot dead in 1984.
Nor are these horrible incidents limited to just gun-free zones in the U.S. In 1996, Martin Bryant killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Australia. In the last half-dozen years, European countries — including France, Germany and Switzerland — have experienced multiple-victim shootings. The worst in Germany resulted in seventeen deaths; in Switzerland, one attack claimed the lives of 14 regional legislators.
At some point you would think the media would notice that something is going on here, that these murderers aren’t just picking their targets at random. And this pattern isn’t really too surprising. Most people understand that guns deter criminals.
If a killer were stalking your family, would you feel safer putting a sign out front announcing, “This home is a gun-free zone"? But that is what all these places did.
Even when attacks occur, having civilians with permitted concealed handguns limits the damage. A major factor in determining how many people are harmed by these killers is the time that elapses between when the attack starts and someone is able to arrive on the scene with a gun.
In cases from the Colorado Springs church shooting last December, in which a parishioner who was given permission by the minister to carry her concealed gun into the church quickly stopped the murder, to an attack last year in Memphis to the Appalachian Law School to high schools in such places as Pearl, Miss., concealed handgun permit holders have stopped attacks well before uniformed police could possibly have arrived. Just a few weeks ago, Israeli teachers stopped a terrorist attack at a school in their country.
Indeed, despite the fears being discussed about the risks of concealed handgun permit holders, I haven’t found one of these multiple-victim public shootings where a permit holder has accidentally shot a bystander.
With about 5 million Americans currently with concealed handgun permits in the U.S., and with states starting to have right-to- carry laws for as long as 80 years, we have a lot of experience with these laws and one thing is very clear: Concealed handgun permit holders are extremely law-abiding. Those who lose their permits for any gun-related violation are measured in the hundredths of a percentage point.
We also have a lot of experience with permitted concealed handguns in schools. Prior to the 1995 Safe School Zone Act, states with right-to-carry laws let teachers or others carry concealed handguns at school. There is not a single instance that I or others have found where this produced a single problem.
Though in a minority, a number of universities — from large public schools such as Colorado State and the University of Utah to small private schools such as Hamline in Minnesota — let students carry concealed handguns on school property. Many more schools, from Dartmouth College to Boise State University, let professors carry concealed handguns. Again, with no
evidence of problems.
Few know that Dylan Klebold, one of the two Columbine killers, was closely following Colorado legislation that would have let citizens carry a concealed handgun. Klebold strongly opposed the legislation
and openly talked about it.
No wonder, as the bill being debated would have allowed permitted guns to be carried on school property. He attacked Columbine High School the very day the legislature was scheduled to vote on the bill. With all the media coverage of the types of guns used & how the criminal obtained the gun, at some point the news media might begin to mention the one common feature of these attacks: They keep occurring in gun-free zones.
Gun-free zones are a magnet for these attacks.
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The Answers to Why the Dems Favor Gun Control???
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I sent an inquiry asking a well informed fellow that I know whether he knows anything about a left-winger named Lakoff or Chomsky:
“Know of Chomsky. Never heard of Lakoff. Again, because you have never HEARD this before from me. I am sick of left and right. I wish the Neocons, the Chomskyites, the Islamofacsists, the crips and the bloods could all go to some remote part of Africa and blow one another to smithereens. And leave people who want to be left alone – ALONE!”
I am trying to find a way to tell this old classmate that has remonstrated to me (as per the above) that this is why some of us are sticking to our guns and fighting for our right to do so- so we can be left the hell alone! Actually, my sister is the one that told me about this fellow Lakoff, a linguist (like Chomsky) turned politico.
People like Chomsky and Lafoff (and Michelle Obama) have nothing positive to say about America. As for the potential for gun owners to provide the last line of defense against tyranny, the left-wing politicos are usually negative unless the gun owner is a follower of Che Gueverra, the Black Panthers or the PLO. Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, seems to be struggling toward some kind of epiphany on the subject of the Second Amendment:
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Lakoff (a “progressive” theorist) really makes a telling point by explaining that Conservatives are framing issues in the “metaphor” of patriarchal values like national security, responsibility and self-reliance whereas the other side is framing matters in a decidedly “nurturant” or motherhood framework when it comes to expectations about government.
For example, there was a recent shooting at Seattle’s Folk Life Festival wherein a Concealed Pistol Licensee got into a tussle with some other person(s) that may have been attempting to take away his weapon, a pistol, that he was wearing on his ankle. The CPL holder allegedly may have been a victim himself (i.e., a victim of anti-gun zealotry when his weapon accidentally discharged due to a vigilante attempt to disarm the CPL holder) but he allegedly has a history of mental illness that was never adjudicated- adjudication is the the critical event that prevents issuance of the Concealed Pistol License to a mentally ill person. The complete facts may never be known about these events because, as usually happens in these matters, it is all fuel for the political,legal and media policy debate about firearms in society.
Mayor Nickels already had made it known that he is chafing at Washington state’s firearms preemption statute because it ties the mayor’s hands when it comes to imposing local restrictions on firearms. Seattle’s mayor is affiliated with a coalition of anti-gun mayors that are associated with the mayor of NYC and now he has issued an executive order and intends to take the law into his own hands with no regard for state law or even his own Seattle City Council Members.
The rationale for the Mayor’s illegal actions is that the government can defend people better than the people can defend themselves even though every indication is that police will usually arrive only after a shooting or other violent crime has already occurred. The city parks and other public places belonging to the city are some of the places that experience the highest probability of mass shootings. Japan, a nation with the strictest gun prohibition in the world, has recently experienced another episode in which a man proceeded to hack up innocent young people in an intersection right in the middle of a busy commercial district! The police were there in time to handle the after math.
We are featuring the nice children’s book, “Why Mommy is a Democrat“. Of course, most of us that are devoted to armed self-defense tend to be stronger on security than nurturance.
The book is a real book endorsed by the apparitchiks of the party of Senators Hillary and Obama, both of whom now claim to be strong Second Amendment leaders ("blue dog” democrats seems to be the new expression?). The “Mommy” book is really an anomaly surrounded by all our beautiful photos of military paraphernalia, including EBRs- an EBR is an Evil Black Rifle.
My point is to ask why people that distrust the U.S. government so much and vilify our political process seem so intent on depriving civilians of the means to defend themselves against the government’s monopoly on deadly force. But I do agree with my worst critic (the old school chum that just wants to be left alone); the left/right dichotomy is boring and usually just a linguistic media gloss on the issues.
The media manipulation of social linguistics separates Americans and misleads us. The best reason to keep going back to the Constitution, to uphold it according to the meaning that the drafters of the Constitution intended when they drafted it, is that “Neocons, the Chomskyites, the Islamofacsists, the crips and the bloods” must leave us alone but they will not do so just because wanton violence causes Mayor Nickels to lose votes!.
Steve, if you read this, they are not going to Africa or the Middle East or Asia, etc!
As for me, I want to avoid politics and I do not expect to be left alone without a fight!
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The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD.
Proverbs 21:31 (King James Version)
King James Version (KJV)
The ultimate force is love. Everything we do has to be motivated by love. That is why we constructed this site. To express love for our community, our servicemen and law enforcement; to encourage sensible solutions to the threats that seem to be gathering. We can blow the trumpet until we are blue in the face but if it is not motivated by love, we have accomplished nothing.
So why does our site advocate self-defense?
10 USC 311. Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are commissioned officers of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are–
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia,which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or …
The above referenced federal law recognizes an organized and an unorganized militia. The United States Constitution and the Washington State Constitution clearly recognize an individual right to keep and bear arms. It also states that there is no right to maintain a militia. The prohibition against militias is in reference to a standing (or organized militia) as opposed to the “unorganized” or militia at large (as it used to be known).
The media often equates the concept of a militia with vigilante actions. Militias have been associated with racism and unlawful activities in times past. The concept of the militia-at-large is a legal concept that has its roots in the interest of the people in assisting our government in times of need to providing for the national defense in anticipation of an event (or events) in which turmoil results. There is no place in a decent society for people to take matters into their own hands when it comes to meting out justice. The only situation in which a citizen would be justified in using deadly force is in defense of self or others. All the Founding Fathers and every generation of Americans recognized this concept up through the present time. Ironically, many generations of large scale military bureaucracies and the collectivist mentality fostered by big government programs has resulted in the idea that the people should surrender all control over the means of self-defense, including personal protection.
The Book of Jude makes reference to “…men that speak abusively against whatever they do not understand; and what things they do understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals- these are the very things that destroy them.”
With all the freedom in the U.S. to question our leaders and aggressively express dissent, we should not forget to respect our government. People that rail against government seem to be the kind of people that are referenced in the Biblical passage quoted above. On the other hand, it takes a very shallow minded individual to think that the world will be safer if we all just trust our government to keep us safe. While the sheep dogs are burying a bone or two, the wolves may be scarfing up the sheep!
Some “peace” activists are peddling hate with accusations that Bush lied. They accuse alternative sources of news (like talk radio and conservative internet outlets) of hatemongering and call Christians fascists when we get involved in the market place of ideas. I have even heard claims that dissenters are being “disappeared” for expressing their contempt for the hated Neo-Conservatives. The same ultra-liberal “activists” then turn around and blame Bush for not continuing the assault weapon ban. If we are being taken over by a right-wing conspiracy then why has the Bush administration gone on record as being so friendly to the Second Amendment?
Dictators and arrogant bureaucrats are usually intent on depriving citizens of the means for meaningful alternatives to government’s monopolization of force
When it goeth well with the righteous, the city rejoiceth: and when the wicked perish, there is shouting.
Proverbs 11:10 (KJV)
So who are the real fascists? The people that are disgusted with President Bush are unrelenting in expressing that they absolutely despise him. Bush is the first President in years (except for Jimmy Carter) that has been very public about his religious beliefs. But Jimmy Carter’s political positions over the years, including his overt hostility to the Israel, have consistently aligned with the agenda of secular humanism and the corporate globalists (in fact, President Carter is one of those individuals who expresses utter contempt for President Bush).
The level of rancor that now exists in our political discourse cannot help but break down public institutions over time. Even if you think the confusion is all President Bush’s fault (or Karl Rove’s fault), we are heading into a new era with unknown arenas and new threats and opportunities.
We want to be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks us to give the reason for the hope that we have. But to do so with gentleness and respect….
We also need to ask ourselves what kind of change we are looking for when we cast our votes. Change is inevitable. But where is the change taking us? The leaders within the ranks of the Democrats have favored restrictions on gun ownership and all kinds of other economic restrictions, at least within modern times. Rank and file Democrats, on the other hand, are just as likely to exercise their right to bear arms as other citizens. Many union members (maybe as many as 25 percent, I am told)) are NRA members. Ask your candidates what they believe and if they say that they endorse the Second Amendment but with “common sense” ask them whether they think that the present laws lack common sense. The answer will probably be that assault rifles are the guns that need to be restricted (it used to be Saturday Night Specials) because “assault weapons can be used to kill children in schools".
Ask how a candidate defines assault weapons and why other more powerful semi-automatic rifles are not just as dangerous as the semi-automatics that were defined as assault weapons under the Clinton assault weapons ban. Remember