Score
Well, it also heaps you praises. Thanks for the update. But don’t feel too bad, it is a stated strategy among anti-gun groups to intentionally mislead you. Via Sebastian.
Now, I’m as gun nutty as gun nut can be. But gun laws don’t generally correlate to crime, for good or bad, in any meaningful way. The CDC agrees.
Background here.
Update: And for the record:
I still firmly hold to the existing Supreme Court interpretation of the amendment, which to my understanding does not support the kind of individualized gun rights often advocated by groups like the NRA.
There is no such interpretation. The SCOTUS has not ruled on the issue specifically but has casually referenced the individual right to arms a few times. In US v. Miller, they asked for clarification. Miller then died and the case did not proceed. If the court bought the collective right mythology, it would have asked Is Miller a state? It did not. It asked if the weapon in question (a short barreled shotgun) was suitable for militia use.
June 1st, 2007 at 4:00 pm
And a few months later, war broke out in Europe, with submachine guns figuring prominently. The SC’s been avoiding the issue ever since, because if they followed Miller, the only question about possession of a full-auto weapon would be whether it was suitable for militia use – and for submachine guns and assault rifles the answer would obviously be “yes”…
June 2nd, 2007 at 10:02 am
Actually, Miller didn’t die, he just disappeared and his unpaid, small-town, sole-practitioner lawyer didn’t want to shoulder the expense of a Supreme Court appearance (briefs have to be printed by a commercial printer, and you have to go to DC to argue – in the 1930s this could have taken as much as 2 weeks of the lawyer’s time away from his practice, in addition to all the costs of the trip.)
Amplifying the original post: at a recent legal seminar on firearms law, one of the speakers noted that the first mention of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court was in the Dred Scott decision, where the opinion noted, with obvious horror, that if a slave became free by moving to a free state he would thereby acquire the rights of a citizen, including the right to keep and bear arms. (You may recall that the Supreme Court held, in Dred Scott, that a slave did NOT become a free man just because he moved to a free state, a ruling which moved the nation one step closer to Civil War.)
June 2nd, 2007 at 10:30 am
Thought I read somewhere he died.
June 2nd, 2007 at 8:20 pm
He did die. He was murdered.
The court held that a short barrelled shotgun and Miller were not protected by the second amendment because the weapon in question was not suitable for military and/or militia application. Their ruling was flawed as was their premise. The short barrelled shotgun gained quite a reputation as an effective “trench gun” in WWI, thus they not only ruled against Miller, they did so on a flawed understanding of the facts of the case and in the absence of legal representation for Miller.
This is one of the more shameful derelictions of the highest court. That is why the founders intended and codified the petit jury as the final arbiter, and not the USSC, which just assumed its role as arbiter of constitutional questions in Marbury v. Madison. The USSC assumed a power not assigned it and was not challenged. Hence it has become custom, but it is not the final word.
June 3rd, 2007 at 4:21 pm
There is a recently released piece of research on Miller:
http://volokh.com/posts/1179865714.shtml
“. . . the case was brought by the federal government as a test case to quell Second Amendment popular opposition to the Attorney General’s efforts to create federal handgun control. The federal district judge who wrote the one-sentence opinion declaring the National Firearms Act to violate the Second Amendment was a gun control advocate with strong political connections. The prosecution of Miller was perfect as a government-initiated test case, since Miller had an established record as “a pliable snitch” who would cooperate with the government, ensuring that the Supreme Court saw no meaningful opposition to the government’s position.”
June 5th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
And yet, the government didn’t win. They just got a murky decision that they could quote pieces of out of context – but only by ignoring the actual functional part of the decision, which was to send it back to the lower court for fact-finding as to the “militia use” of short-barrelled shotguns.