A six year study on the Supreme Court and the Second Amendment reveals the Supreme Court supports the individual right to arms. And other stuff:

– The Court has not been quiet on this subject as previously thought, using some form of the word “gun” in its decisions 2,910 times (gun, rifle, pistol, shotgun, firearm, etc., even Winchester five times) in 92 cases. Three dozen of the cases quote or mention the Second Amendment directly.

– Armed self defense with personally owned firearms is recognized and supported in more than a dozen cases, is a distinct right of American citizens, and an ancient “duty to retreat” is not obligatory.

– The often-cited Miller case from 1939 is inconclusive, which is why gun-rights and gun-control advocates both claim it supports their position. The record shows that the Court actually remanded this case back to the lower court for retrial and a hearing on the evidence, since there was no evidence presented. Because Miller had been murdered by that time and his co-defendant had taken a plea agreement, no retrial or evidentiary hearing was ever held.

– All 92 cases are reproduced to show what the Court has actually said. More than 1,000 interesting quotations are highlighted, and each case includes a plain-English description. A special “descriptive index” reduces each case to the firearms-related question(s) it answers.

Posted in uncategorized on August 12th, 2003 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |