"Conservative" Columnist: Repeal Second Amendment

The SCOTUS has reserved the right to reverse any previous ruling on the 2dA. You know it.

 

Indeed - same-sex marriage is on the short list.

 

I wonder how many members are not familiar with stare decisis?

 

The left only cites this when it suits them.

 

I know one that isn't.

 

But they can't revoke the 2nd Amendment.

 

p;

Prove it.

 

Of course SCOTUS can change prior precedent. They can change their rulings on abortion, the death penalty, searching cars without a warrant, etc.

But the core rights do not change. A perfect example is the 5th Amendment right to remain silent. The Miranda warnings are a court imposed rule designed to protect the right. The rule—the circumstances under which these warnings must be given—has changed frequently over the years. But the change happens in how the Court protects the right, not in whether the Court says the right exists or not.

“The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government — even the Third Branch of Government — the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges' assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad. We would not apply an “interest-balancing” approach to the prohibition of a peaceful neo-Nazi march through Skokie. See National Socialist Party of America v. Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (1977) (per curiam). The First Amendment contains the freedom-of-speech guarantee that the people ratified, which included exceptions for obscenity, libel, and disclosure of state secrets, but not for the expression of extremely unpopular and wrongheaded views. The Second Amendment is no different. Like the First, it is the very product of an interest balancing by the people….” District Of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 634-635 (200 (emphasis in original)

No one—no rational person anyway—believes SCOTUS is a giant faucet where individual rights are turned on and off like tap water depending on who won what election and appointed whom.

Scalia hit it on the head when he once said the Court is not, and never should be, a 9-headed Caesar, giving a collective thumbs up or thumbs down to whatever outcome suits or offends its collective fancy.

Your argument is dangerously shortsighted, and I suggest you heed this advice:

“Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it's too much of a safety hazard don't see the danger of the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.” Alan Dershowitz, quoted in David T. Hardy, The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason, 62 Tenn L. Rev. 759 (1995).

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“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."--Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (192 (Brandeis, dissenting).

 

Stare Decisis is not binding on this court. It said it would not be bound by earlier decisions.

The core right of 2dA is not clear, BrianVa.

Common sense mandates that one cannot have a civilian open right to a crew mounted weapon.

Common sense stares if one says a civilian has no right to any weapon.

So we will leave it to SCOTUS, yet once again, to pray they muddle through again well enough to settle most of the problem.

 

Has anyone figured out yet that repealing the second amendment will not remove the right?

 

I agree. SCOTUS is limited by the case or controversy clause, and it only decides the narrow issues that come before it. This is why it took several cases for the court to fully define the scope of many of our rights. We can hardly expect the very first case to take a serious look at the 2nd Amendment to resolve everything….

“JUSTICE BREYER chides us for leaving so many applications of the right to keep and bear arms in doubt, and for not providing extensive historical justification for those regulations of the right that we describe as permissible. See post, at 720-721. But since this case represents this Court's first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the entire field, any more than Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879), our first in-depth Free Exercise Clause case, left that area in a state of utter certainty.” District Of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 635 (200

Heller laid out the floor, and not the ceiling, of this house.

If you wish to debate me then I must insist on the courtesy of debating what I actually say, which in this example I did not….

This is a bit jumbled. It sounds like you are trying to say “common sense” suggests a civilian has no right to any weapon. I have a response to this, but first I want to make sure that is what you were trying to say. Could you clarify it please?

But surely (and I’m not calling you Shirley) you have an opinion on the matter. Are you willing to tell me what you think the 2nd Amendment is supposed to protect?

 

I've often expressed the opinion that the right to self-defense itself is not solely a 2nd Amendment issue. Clearly the Ninth Amendment has something to say on the issue as well, and in a nation based on personal liberty and individual rights obviously the inalienable right to self-defense is one of the most fundamental rights there is.

So, if you have an inalienable right to life then you have an inalienable right to defend your life, and by extension the inalienable right to own and possess the most effective tools with which to conduct that defense. That is something no gun control advocate has ever been able to provide any kind of logical or reality-based response to.

 

most of the justices on the Supreme court circa 1937-1953 were not, apparently