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To: Sully- who wrote (29330)	10/8/2009 1:30:32 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

From Guns to Butter How a Second Amendment case can help restore economic liberty Jacob Sullum Reason October 7, 2009 In the 1856 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the idea that Africans and their descendants in the United States could be "entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens." To emphasize how absurd that notion was, Chief Justice Roger Taney noted that, among other things, those "privileges and immunities" would allow members of "the unhappy black race" to "keep and carry arms wherever they went." The 14th Amendment, approved in the wake of the Civil War, repudiated Taney's view of the Constitution, declaring that "no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens," who include "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." Just four years after the amendment was ratified, however, the Supreme Court interpreted the Privileges or Immunities Clause so narrowly that a dissenting justice said it had been transformed into a "vain and idle enactment." The Court now has a chance to rectify that mistake—fittingly enough, in a case involving the right to arms. Last week the Court agreed to hear a Second Amendment challenge to Chicago's handgun ban. Since that law is very similar to the Washington, D.C., ordinance that the Court declared unconstitutional last year, it is bound to be overturned, assuming the Court concludes that the Second Amendment applies not just to the federal government (which oversees the District of Columbia) but also to states and their subsidiaries. That seems like a pretty safe assumption, since over the years the Court has said the 14th Amendment's "incorporates" nearly all of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights. But the Court's reasoning in applying the Second Amendment to the states could have implications far beyond the right to arms. If it cites the Privileges or Immunities Clause instead of (or in addition to) the usual rationale for incorporation, the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause, it can prepare the ground for a renaissance of economic liberty. Abundant historical evidence indicates that the Privileges or Immunities Clause was meant to protect the right to arms. Rep. John Bingham (R-Ohio), the 14th Amendment's main author, repeatedly said the "privileges or immunities of citizens" included the liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. So did Jacob Howard (R-Mich.), the amendment's chief sponsor in the Senate. As David Hardy shows in a recent Whittier Law Review article, this view was widely reported in the press and therefore was understood by the general public and by the state legislators who ratified the 14th Amendment. They perceived the amendment as a remedy for the oppressive policies of Southern states that sought to deprive freedmen of their basic liberties. The right to weapons was one of the liberties frequently cited by the 14th Amendment's backers, since disarmed blacks were defenseless against attacks by Klansmen and local officials. As reflected in post–Civil War legislation that the amendment was intended to reinforce, its supporters also were concerned about economic liberty: the right to own and exchange property, make and enforce contracts, and work in the occupation of one's choice—all freedoms the Southern states tried to deny former slaves. Despite this context, in 1872 the Supreme Court declared that the "privileges or immunities of citizens" included only those rights that were created by the Constitution (such as the right to petition the federal government), not the pre-existing rights the Constitution was designed to protect. The Court therefore upheld a slaughterhouse monopoly created by the state of Louisiana, an infringement of economic liberty that the three dissenting justices saw as a violation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Those privileges or immunities, the dissenters said, include "the right to pursue a lawful employment in a lawful manner, without other restraint than such as equally affects all persons." That view reflects the original understanding of the 14th Amendment, which holds great promise as a bulwark against arbitrary interference with economic freedom. The Supreme Court should seize this opportunity to revive it. Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist. © Copyright 2009 by Creators Syndicate Inc. reason.com

To: Sully- who wrote (29330)	12/31/2009 3:19:15 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

More Guns, Less Crime in '09 By Joe Gimenez American Thinker Americans went on binges buying guns and ammunition in early 2009, worried that a radical leftist president and Democrat-dominated Congress would violate their Second-Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. The effects? Less murder, robbery, rape, and property crime, according to an FBI report released Monday. This gives the young president and Democrat Congress at least one proud but unintended accomplishment for which they'll never claim credit. Indeed, gun buyers were out in droves in late 2008 and early 2009. While it's easy to infer that increased gun ownership figures align precisely with the drop in crime in the same calendar period, you won't see that headline in the New York Times, despite their penchant for such inferences about increases in crime coinciding with increasing "guns on the street." The gun-buying started shortly before, and then took off after, Obama's election. The Toronto Star reported a 15% increase of 108,000 more FBI background checks in October 2008 than during the same month in 2007. People were already anticipating the dire consequences of an Obama victory. Then, in November 2008, the number of FBI background checks on applicants buying guns spiked 42% from the previous year. The FBI performed 12.7 million background checks in 2008, compared to 11.2 million in 2007, a 13% increase. More evidence of rampant gun-buying loads up in the states. Through June 2009, the Texas Department of Public Safety received a monthly average of 12,700 applications for concealed handgun licenses, up 46% from the average in 2007. Even the New York Times noted how gun sales were up in 2009; in a June story, it focused on its less sophisticated neighbors in New Jersey. Even in liberal Massachusetts, gun permits surged 15% over the last two years (after falling several years before that). While background checks and applications for concealed handgun licenses don't directly equate to the number of new guns on the street -- some applicants are refused, and applications can include multiple guns at the same time of purchase -- the numbers do indicate that more law-abiding Americans had new or enhanced arms in the first six months of 2009. Most criminals don't subject themselves to background checks. (This is a good place to note that "new guns on the street" is just a liberal scare cliché we should not carelessly adopt. These statistics indicate the real dynamic: gun purchases and concealed licenses acquisitions are made predominantly by law-abiding citizens taking their guns home with them from the store, for self-defense, hunting, and target-shooting purposes.) But shouldn't more guns equate to more murders and other violent crime? Only if you live in liberal never-never land. That certainly has not been the case in early 2009. Guns are purchased so that good people can protect themselves against bad people. And moreover, self-protection is a basic human right, despite the fact that our new wise Latina Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor couldn't bring herself to acknowledge that this summer. The newspapers west of the Hudson River are chock full of stories in which law-abiding citizens protected themselves by using guns. And these are just the incidents that are reported. The Armed Citizen blog does a great job of capturing these stories in their raw form, and every thinking American needs to make his own inferences about the value of guns in these situations: They prevent people from becoming statistics. Go through the news reports compiled on the Armed Citizen blog and make your own count of people who refused to become statistics. For instance, in May, eleven students in Atlanta avoided becoming murder statistics thanks to the bravery of one among them who had a gun in his backpack. He used it to kill one robber and injure another. Chillingly, the news reports describe how the robbers were counting their bullets to make sure they had enough to kill their victims. One of the robbers was about to rape a woman as well. That's at least thirteen fewer violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery) that did not need to be included in the FBI's crime report for the first half of 2009. As 2009 winds down, the Democratic Party deserves an off-handed "thank you" for inspiring more law-abiding citizens to purchase weapons and protect themselves from bad people, at least in the first half of the year. But even while giving them that tribute, it's important to reflect that the only direct result of their gun control efforts in the past -- the Clinton administration's regulation forbidding U.S. military personnel from carrying personal firearms -- resulted in the deaths of thirteen people and an unborn infant in Fort Hood. Sadly, those deaths will add to an increase in the second half of 2009's statistics -- and renewed calls for gun control legislation, to be sure. americanthinker.com

To: Sully- who wrote (29330)	1/26/2010 5:38:38 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

From an e-mail: Subject: Please vote - USATODAY.Com Survey - Does the second amendment give individuals the right to bear arms? Obama's new Attorney General, Eric Holder, has already said this is 1of his major issues. He does not believe the 2nd Amendment gives individuals the right to bear arms. This takes literally 2 clicks to complete. Please vote on this gun issue question with USA Today. It will only take a few seconds of your time. Then pass the link on to all the pro gun folks you know. Hopefully these results will be published later this month. This upcoming year will become critical for gun owners with the Supreme Court's accepting the District of Columbia case against the right for individuals to bear arms. Here's what you need to do: First - vote on this one. Second - launch it to other folks and have THEM vote - then we will see if the results get published. The Question is: "Does the Second Amendment give individuals the right to bear arms?" Click on the link below and PLEASE vote Yes! USATODAY.com - Quick Question usatoday.com

To: Sully- who wrote (29330)	3/6/2010 11:05:56 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

69% Say Cities Don’t Have Right To Ban Handguns The Supreme Court is wrestling with a major case questioning whether Chicago’s handgun ban violates the Second Amendment, but 69% of Americans say city governments do not have the right to prevent citizens from owning such guns. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 25% of adults think city governments do have that right. ... Link

To: Sully- who wrote (29330)	3/23/2010 6:56:13 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Hey, the Second Amendment Applies to Adoptive Parents, Too By: Jim Geraghty The Campaign Spot Ted Deutch, the Democrat running for Congress in Florida's 19th congressional district, just voted against a bill that would ban adoption agencies from requiring prospective parents to disclose whether they have a firearm. To every other member of the Florida state senate except one, it seemed clear that an adoption agency should not look into a person's exercise of their constitutionally protected Second Amendment rights as part of determining whether someone would make a good parent. UPDATE: This measure passed the Florida State House, 112-0, and then passed the Senate 38-2. Yeah, Florida's considering sending one of those two to Congress. .

To: Sully- who wrote (29330)	6/29/2010 1:27:44 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Gun Prohibition, R.I.P. By: David Rittgers National Review Online The Supreme Court’s rejection of Chicago’s handgun ban in McDonald v. City of Chicago is more than a recognition that the Second Amendment applies to the states as well as the federal government. The McDonald decision is a harbinger for the end of gun prohibition as an idea. The simple, undeniable truth is that gun control does not work. McDonald brings the law up to speed with reality, where advocates of gun control have been wrong since the issue became a national discussion. Strict gun-control policies have failed to deliver on their essential promise: that denying law-abiding citizens access to the means of self-defense will somehow make them safer. This should come as no surprise, since gun control has always been about control, not guns. Racism created gun control in America. Confronted with the prospect of armed freedmen who could stand up for their rights, states across the South instituted gun-control regimes that took away the ability of blacks to defend themselves against the depravity of the Klan. Fast forward to the 1960s, when a century of institutionalized racism began to come to an end. While racism was no longer the driving force, social change, the drug trade, and the assassination of several national figures turned gun control into an article of faith among progressive politicians. They saw the elimination of guns as the only way to counter the rapid increase of crime in inner cities. Truly onerous gun control came to fruition only in a minority of jurisdictions, predominantly those run by Democrat machines. The District of Columbia enacted a registration requirement for all handguns in 1976, then closed the registry so that all guns not on the books could never be lawfully owned in the District. Chicago followed suit in 1983. With each failure of gun control, the rejoinder was to do it again, this time with feeling. Since the Heller case invalidated the District of Columbia’s handgun ban two years ago, Chicago has served as the gun-control capital of the United States. Not coincidentally, Chicago is a dangerous place to live. Two weekends ago, 52 people were shot, eight fatally. Local politicians frequently ponder calling out the National Guard to patrol Chicago’s streets. Three times in the last month, Chicago residents have defended their homes or businesses with “illegal” guns. In the first, an 80-year-old Navy veteran killed a felon who broke into his home. In the second, a man shot and wounded a fugitive who burst into the man’s home while running from the police. In the third, the owner of a pawn shop killed one of three robbers in self-defense, sending the other two running. The Illinois legislature, confronted with clearly justified shootings like these before, created an affirmative defense for those who violate local gun bans when unregistered guns are used in self-defense. Then-state senator Barack Obama voted against this law, which passed by an overwhelming majority and over then-governor Rod Blagojevich’s veto. In passing this exception, Illinois recognized the basic injustice of the Chicago gun ban. Otherwise law-abiding citizens are victimized at a high rate. Chicagoans cannot depend on the police to defend them, cannot sue the city because the law protects officials from liability for failure to protect them, and are barred from effective means of self-defense. Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, the de facto ban against self-defense will be overturned and Chicagoans will not have to rely on the discretion of prosecutors and the benevolence of legislators to affirm their inalienable right to self-defense. Advocates of gun control will not be swayed by the Supreme Court’s holding in McDonald. No matter the evidence, the rallying cry will continue: If gun control “saves just one life” it will be worth it. This plea ignores the irony of crusading for individual safety by disarming all of society. That logic can now be squarely turned on the advocates of gun control. If it saves just one life -- or many, since jurisdictions with more legally owned (and carried) guns tend to have less violent crime -- we should create a sensible legal framework for gun ownership that does not hamper the right of individuals to exercise self-defense. A generation from now, legal and policy discussions will look back and see gun control for the sham that it has always been. The real shame is that it took decades of political action, millions of dollars in litigation, and thousands of lives lost to end the preposterous idea that governments can reduce the number of victims of violent crime by first taking away their means of resistance. -- David Rittgers is an attorney and legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute. .

To: Sully- who wrote (29330)	6/29/2010 3:05:01 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Supreme Court strikes Chicago handgun ban, affirms individual gun rights nationwide By: Mary Katharine Ham Weekly Standard 06/28/10 11:35 AM EDT The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of individual gun rights today, striking down Chicago’s 28-year-old handgun ban almost two years to the day after the Court struck down the D.C. gun ban. The ruling in McDonald vs. Chicago is a major win for gun-rights activists who are thrilled to see an individual right to arms affirmed by the nation’s highest court once again. The D.C. ruling applied only to federal laws to curb gun ownership because of D.C.’s unique legal standing as a federal city. Today’s ruling affirms an individual’s right to gun ownership is a restraint on state and local laws as well. <<< Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws. >>> Samuel Alito wrote for the Court, which split along ideological lines, in a rather clinical, citation-heavy opinion. Alito writes in part, “Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day, and in Heller, we held that individual self-defense is “the central component” of the Second Amendment right,” while allowing, as in Heller, for sensible gun ownership restrictions. <<< We repeat those assurances here. Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, incorporation does not imperil every law regulating firearms. >>> He also writes a long history of the Court’s evolving attitudes about whether Bill of Rights protections act as a restraint on state-level infringements. <<< The relationship between the Bill of Rights’ guarantees and the States must be governed by a single, neutral principle. It is far too late to exhume what Justice Brennan, writing for the Court 46 years ago, derided as “the notion that the Fourteenth Amendment applies to the States only a watered-down, subjective version of the individual guarantees of the Bill of Rights.” >>> Gun-control activists will resort to, as Alito might say, “doomsday” predictions of the blood that will run in the streets of Chicago because of this ruling. But there is no lack of blood running in the streets, now, in this allegedly gun-free paradise. It’s just that law-abiding citizens have no means of protecting themselves against the illegall firearms of the city’s criminals. Fully 54 people were shot in Chicago last weekend: <<< Ten people were killed and at least 44 others were shot across the city Friday night into early Monday, including a baby girl who suffered a graze wound to the neck when gunfire erupted at a Near West Side barbecue. The latest victims were found naked, shot to death and lying face down on railroad property near West 91st Street and South Holland Road on the South Side about 8:50 a.m Monday, according to a Calumet Area sergeant. Both were shot at some point Sunday night. >>> Now, Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old South Side Democrat who has been threatened with violence by drug dealers for trying to tame his tough neigborhood, will not be the only one without a weapon. This is what he had to say in March, when the case was being argued: <<< “I just got the feeling that I’m on my own,” said McDonald. “The fact is that so many people my age have worked hard all their life, getting a nice place for themselves to live in … and having one (handgun) would make us feel a lot more comfortable.” >>> Otis McDonald having a gun will not make Chicago any more dangerous, but it will make Otis McDonald a lot safer, so that he can continue his work to make his neighborhood safer for everyone. Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com

To: Sully- who wrote (29330)	6/29/2010 3:25:25 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Gun-Control Laws By: Thomas Sowell National Review Online Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect? Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn’t be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves. When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence. Many people who are opposed to gun laws that place severe restrictions on ordinary citizens owning firearms have based themselves on the Second Amendment to the Constitution. But, while the Supreme Court must make the Second Amendment the basis of its rulings on gun-control laws, there is no reason why the Second Amendment should be the last word for the voting public. If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other constitutional amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws. There is no point arguing, as many people do, that it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn’t happen very often doesn’t mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to happen, even if the intelligentsia are itching to change it. When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution was amended four times in eight years, from 1913 through 1920. What all this means is that judges and the voting public have different roles. There is no reason why judges should “consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and their contemporary significance,” as Justice Stephen Breyer said in his dissent against the Supreme Court’s gun-control decision. But, as the great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, his job was “to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not.” If the public doesn’t like the rules, or the consequences to which the rules lead, then the public can change the rules via the ballot box. But that is very different from judges changing the rules by verbal sleight of hand, or by talking about “weighing of the constitutional right to bear arms” against other considerations, as Justice Breyer puts it. That’s not his job. Not if “we the people” are to govern ourselves, as the Constitution says. As for the merits or demerits of gun-control laws themselves, a vast amount of evidence, both from the United States and from other countries, shows that keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens does not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is not uncommon for a tightening of gun-control laws to be followed by an increase -- not a decrease -- in gun crimes, including murder. Conversely, there have been places and times where an increase in gun ownership has been followed by a reduction in crimes in general and murder in particular. Unfortunately, the media intelligentsia tend to favor gun-control laws, so a lot of hard facts about the futility -- or the counterproductive consequences of such laws -- never reach the public through the media. We hear a lot about countries with stronger gun-control laws than the United States that have lower murder rates. But we very seldom hear about countries with stronger gun-control laws than the United States that have higher murder rates, such as Russia and Brazil. The media, like Justice Breyer, might do well to reflect on what their job is and what the voting public’s job is. The media’s job should be to give us the information to make up our own minds, not slant and filter the news to fit the media’s vision. — Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc. .