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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (133214)	3/23/2001 6:40:44 PM
From: Kevin Rose	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

Here's more. The Supreme Court has repeated ruled that the 2nd amendment does not guarantee the right for individuals to bear arms; only in the context of the Militia. Full text at: abanet.org The United States Supreme Court and lower federal courts have consistently interpreted this Amendment only as a prohibition against Federal interference with State militia and not as a guarantee of an individual's right to keep or carry firearms. The argument that the Second Amendment prohibits all State or Federal regulation of citizen's ownership of firearms has no validity whatsoever. The controversy over the meaning of the Second Amendment exists only in the public debate over gun control. Few issues have been more distorted and cluttered by misinformation than this one. There is no confusion in the law itself. The strictest gun control laws in the nation have been upheld against Second Amendment challenge, including local bans on handguns. The Supreme Court enunciated in United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) what, over fifty years later, remains clearly the law of this country -- that the scope of the people's right to bear arms is limited by the introductory phrase of the Second Amendment regarding the necessity of a "well regulated militia" for the "security of a free State." In Miller, the Court held that the "obvious purpose" of the Amendment was "to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of..." the state militias and cautioned that the Amendment "must be interpreted and applied with that end in view." Since today's "well regulated militia" does not use privately owned firearms, courts since Miller have unanimously held that regulation of such guns does not offend the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has twice reaffirmed its view of the Second Amendment as expressed in Miller. In Burton v. Sills, 394 U.S. 812 (1968), the Court dismissed a gun owner's appeal, for want of a substantial federal question, of a New Jersey Supreme Court holding that the Second Amendment permits regulation of firearms "so long as the regulation does not impair the active, organized militias of the states." Most recently, in Lewis v. United States, 445 U.S. 55 (1980), the Court held that legislative restrictions on the use of firearms do not - for purposes of equal protection analysis - "trench upon any constitutionally protected liberties." The lower federal courts have uniformly followed the interpretation of the Supreme Court. No legislation regulating the private ownership of firearms has been struck down in our nation's history on Second Amendment grounds. Yet the perception that the Second Amendment is somehow an obstacle to Congress and state and local legislative bodies fashioning laws to regulate firearms remains a pervasive myth. The gun lobby has conducted extensive and expensive campaigns to foster this misperception and the result has been that the myth of the "absolute bar of the Second Amendment" has real effects on regulatory efforts.