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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (13859)	11/25/1997 5:41:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

>>Alex, I'm not sure how to answer your post. Likewise I'm not sure how I should answer yours. We appear to be at an impasse. If I say a lot more right now, I'll be letting my emotions speak. So, if it's ok, I'll hit "hold" for a while and think up a deliberate reply. Suffice it to say that I disagree with some of the statements, express or implied, contained in your previous post. But I want time to weigh my thoughts and come up with a reply worthy of a reasoned debate. Alex

To: Grainne who wrote (13859)	11/25/1997 6:47:00 PM
From: Skipper	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Christine, You rely heavily on statistics to establish value. Let me apply this method, and make a value judgement about wicca. Based on your own research, the percentage of wiccans in the U.S. is .02%, that's one wiccan for every 5000 people. I conclude that wicca is not essential to the health of this country, and that any effort to protect the rights of the wiccans is a waste of time. Skipper

To: Grainne who wrote (13859)	11/25/1997 6:55:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Here's a link to a site I find most interesting. It contains a detailed and referenced treatise on the current state of Second Amendment jurisprudence. It's quite long, so I won't post content here. 2ndlawlib.org >>Why are we going in the opposite direction from other first world societies at the end of the twentieth century? I don't think we are. We're moving in the same direction: ever tighter controls on lawful gun ownership/use. I haven't seen one liberalization in gun laws in the states I've lived in, not as long as I've been of voting age. What I'm hearing is this (suffer my restatement; I want to be sure I'm hearing you right): You're saying that Guns = Violence, and if the price of reducing Violence is to outlaw Guns, then that's a good deal. My objection is that I don't see it that way at all. Gun Crime = Violence, and Gun Crime is often outside the pale of Legally-purchased Guns. Two entirely different premises! I am very interested in seeing that part of the debate made more honest, because it's exactly there that I have your (inverted in my case) sensation and dread of nefarious ulterior motives. Guns and Gun Crime should be treated as separate issues in a society that aspires to being civilized! All else is rabblerousing propaganda; string-pulling by Hidden Interests. Imho. I'm all for exploring ways to lower the boom on gun crime as well as any other sort of violent acts. But I am not willing at this point to accept that gun crime goes up or down in lockstep with private gun ownership. There's an immense burden of proof there placed upon those who would ban guns. It's easier to sidestep this burden and just keep pounding forth the soundbite that No Guns = A Safer Society, until we've all heard it so many times that we accept it out of sheer fatigue. I'm not yet that tired :-)

To: Grainne who wrote (13859)	11/25/1997 11:14:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Respond to of 108807

several posters had said basically that if I didn't like the second amendment, why not try to repeal it? Well, why try to repeal it if it is not about individual gun ownership? "All government represents a balance between individual freedom and social order, and it is not true that every alteration of that balance in the direction of greater individual freedom is necessarily good. But in any case, the record of history refutes the proposition that the evolving Constitution will invariably enlarge individual rights. The most obvious refutation is the modern Court's limitation of the constitutional protections afforded to property. The provision prohibiting impairment of the obligation of contracts, for example, has been gutted. I am sure that We the People agree with that development; we value property rights less than the Founders did. So also, we value the right to bear arms less than did the Founders (who thought the right to self-defense to be absolutely fundamental) and there will be few tears shed if and when the Second Amendment is held to guarantee nothing more than the state National Guard. But this just shows that the Founders were right when they feared that some (in their view misguided) future generation might wish to abandon liberties that they considered essential, and so sought to protect those liberties in a Bill of Rights. We may like the abridgement of property rights and like the elimination of the right to bear arms; but let us not pretend that these are not reductions of rights." "Professor Tribe regards the Second Amendment's prologue ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State") as a textual obstacle to my interpretation of the Second Amendment as a guarantee that the federal government will not interfere with the individual's right to bear arms for self-defense. This reading of the text has several flaws: It assumes that "Militia" refers to "a select group of citizen-soldiers," Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms 136 (1994), rather than, as the Virginia Bill of Rights of June 1776 defined it, "the body of the people, trained to arms", see id at 148. (This was also the conception of "militia" entertained by James Madison, who, in arguing that it would provide a ready defense of liberty against the standing army that the proposed Constitution allowed, described the militia as "amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands." The Federalist No. 46 at 322 (Jacob E Cooke ed. 1961) The latter meaning makes the prologue of the Second Amendment commensurate with the categorical guarantee that follows ("the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed"); the former produces a guarantee that goes far beyond its stated purpose -- rather like saying "police officers being necessary to law and order, the right of the people to carry handguns shall not be infringed." It would also be strange to find in the midst of a catalog of the rights of individuals a provision securing to the States the right to maintain a designated "Militia". Dispassionate scholarship suggests quite strongly that the right of the people to keep and bear arms meant just that. In addition to the excellent study by Ms. Malcolm (who is not a member of the Michigan Militia, but an Englishwoman), see Willaim Van Alstyn The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Bear Arms, 43 Duke LJ 1236 (1994). It is very likely that modern Americans no longer look contemptuously, as Madison did, upon the governments of Europe that "are afraid to trust the people with arms," The Federalist No 46; and the traveling Constitution that Professor Tribe espouses will probably give the effect to that new sentiment by effectively eliminating the Second Amendment. But there is no need to deceive ourselves as to what the original Second Amendment said and meant. Of course, properly understood, it is no limitation upon arms control by the states." A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law, Antonin Scalia, Princeton University Press, 1997 Antonin Scalia has been an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1986. Prior to that time he served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.