Second Amendment: it doesn’t just mean firearms
The mention of the second Amendment immediately brings to mind in many of those that have no idea of what our constitution really means or grants us in rights is the image of an NRA member toting the biggest firearm he / she can carry. Mention the second amendment and people brace themselves for an in your face discussion over the highly charged issue of personal firearm use, possession and carry. Somehow in the quest to protect the most obvious of our rights, the second most important amendment in the Constitution: Firearms and the right to bear and use these arms to protect ourselves, our loved ones and our country has over ridden every other facet of this amendment.
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
No where in this statement of our most cherished document does it say this refers ONLY to firearms. It says very clearly that to maintain the security of a free state, our freedom and our country and our way of life, that the right of the people, that is the right of each person to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Arms: that’s an important word and must be viewed in context of what the founders themselves would have meant, carried and used themselves and since the Constitution is an alive document recognizing that arms change was ambiguous enough to allow modern arms or variations of those arms to be included in that protection. Knives were in that documents meaning for all of our founders carried and used knives. Firearms are just an easier arm to try to control because of their place in our society and history. Firearms very nature bring them to the forefront of discussion: tyrants hate them, control freaks hate them, free people cherish and need them. Knives get lost in the shadows. But knives are there. They are arms / tools used by many and carried by all of our framing fathers. Knives were and are still our best friends and our first tools.
In a released Senate report on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, and well known gun rights proponent, states
They argue that the Second Amendment's words "right of the people" mean "a right of the state" — apparently overlooking the impact of those same words when used in the First and Fourth Amendments. The "right of the people" to assemble or to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is not contested as an individual guarantee. Still they ignore consistency and claim that the right to "bear arms" relates only to military uses. This not only violates a consistent constitutional reading of "right of the people" but also ignores that the second amendment protects a right to "keep" arms. "When our ancestors forged a land "conceived in liberty", they did so with musket and rifle. When they reacted to attempts to dissolve their free institutions, and established their identity as a free nation, they did so as a nation of armed freemen. When they sought to record forever a guarantee of their rights, they devoted one full amendment out of ten to nothing but the protection of their right to keep and bear arms against governmental interference. Under my chairmanship the Subcommittee on the Constitution will concern itself with a proper recognition of, and respect for, this right most valued by free men."[
For a more recent judicial interpretation, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stated in 2001 that there are numerous instances of the phrase "bear arms" being used to describe a civilian's carrying of arms. Early constitutional provisions or declarations of rights in at least some ten different states speak of the right of the "people" [or "citizen" or "citizens"] "to bear arms in defense of themselves [or "himself"] and the state", or equivalent words, thus indisputably reflecting that under common usage "bear arms" was in no sense restricted to bearing arms in military service.
Likewise, relative to District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290, a case under review before the Supreme Court of the United States, the earlier 2007 DC Circuit Court opinion (in what was then named Parker v. District of Columbia) dismissed the lawsuit in a 2-1 decision, summarizing its substantive ruling on the right protected by the Second Amendment on page 46 of the slip opinion (at the end of section III) as:
To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Anti-Federalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment's civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.
In the "Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session" (February 1982), a bipartisan subcommittee (consisting of 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats) of the United States Senate investigated the Second Amendment and reported upon their findings. This report included the following opinions:
The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.
ARM: (vb) to furnish with weapons, (n) WEAPON
WEAPON: \we-pan\(n)1: something ( as a gun, knife, or club) used to injure, defeat, protect or destroy
I guarantee that when the constitution was framed all the members who were there and those they represented all carried knives of one kind or another. Most had Sheffield style "Bowie Knives" or the like, pocketr skinners, Colonial Flat grinds and the like on heir persons at all times. Some carried those new fangled foldrs with locks as made in France ( our ally in the Revolutionary War) They used knives in their daily lives and one didn’t show up expecting to find a knife: you carried your tools with you and one carried several types of knives with them everywhere. Without a knife one couldn’t eat, open a package, cut rope or cloth, open a bottle, trim one’s nails, or any other job needing an edged tool. One was armed with one’s knife everywhere at all times: to be without one was to ask for trouble in one’s daily life. Farmers, Hunters, Merchants, Blacksmiths, Carpenters, Ship builders, Sail makers, Sailors, Fishermen, Whalers, Leatherworkers, Doctors, Barbers, Butchers, and just about everyone else in those times used and needed knives. It would border on the inconceivable to think that knives / edged tools were not included in the concept, thought and meaning of the Second Amendment. It is the best tool fo the best job: living one's life safely and to the fullest and also giving protection to us, our families and our country.
Who in their right mind would attempt to regulate, control or repress the citizens of the USA from carrying knives? Carrying a knife or several knives for various purposes was as usual as wearing clothes to them...it was 1700's almost the 1800's and knives WERE part of life itself.
Try to picture be it an icon of our history or a framer of our nation: such men as James Bowie, Davey Crockett, Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, John Addams, George Washington, Paul Revere, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, John Paul Jones et al, all without knives.
THe Second Amendment protects us the Knife owners and knife users as well as the Firearms -Gun guys. We are their brothers and sisters in arms. AKTI and the NRA are kissing cousins and we could take apage from their playbook and apply it to ourselves> NO ONE CAN BAN ANY KNIFE OR KNIFE CARRY BECAUSE ITS OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT!
NOTE:
Firearms Industry Hails Victory in
Supreme Court Second Amendment Case NEWTOWN, Conn. -- The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) -- the trade association for the firearms industry – hailed today’s United States Supreme Court 5-4 decision written by Justice Scalia that determined authoritatively that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms.
“Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is a major victory for all Americans,” said NSSF President Steve Sanetti. “The Heller decision reaffirms the wisdom of our founding fathers in creating the Bill of Rights to protect and preserve individual rights, the cornerstone of our democracy. Furthermore, this decision solidifies an historical fact, the commonsense understanding that governments have powers, not rights -- rights are reserved exclusively for individuals.”
Demonstrating the strong grassroots support for the individual rights thesis, the nation’s leading gun control group, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, conceded victory prior to the High Court’s ruling. In an interview with ABC News last week, Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke noted, “We've lost the battle on what the Second Amendment means. Seventy-five percent of the public thinks it's an individual right.” The U.S. Supreme Court agrees that the public is correct.
The importance of having a uniform and legally accepted definition of the Second Amendment is particularly important to the firearms industry, as noted by Sanetti. “The products that our industry manufactures are the means through which our Second Amendment rights are realized. Clearly sportsmen, hunters, responsible firearms owners and the industry are all heavily vested in this groundbreaking ruling.”
Though the Heller decision is the first time that the High Court has declared in absolute terms that the Second Amendment is an individual right, the nation's leading historians, legal scholars and constitutional experts have long been on record supporting such a conclusion. Renowned scholars, including Lawrence Tribe of Harvard, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, William Van Alstyne of Duke and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, have been vocal in their assertion that the Second Amendment, like all the other rights of the people recognized in the Bill of Rights, secures an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
"Today’s decision lays to rest the specious argument that the Second Amendment is not an individual right and marks the beginning of the end of repressive gun laws that have infringed upon individual liberty and done nothing to make America safer,” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel.”
NSSF filed a friend of the court brief in support of the respondent, Mr. Heller.
BACKGROUND:
In March, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in striking down the District's gun ban, held in Parker, et al., v. District of Columbia that "The phrase 'the right of the people' . . . leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual." This was the second time in recent history that a federal circuit court upheld the longstanding belief that the Second Amendment was an individual right. In 2001, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in the case of U.S. v. Emerson that "All of the evidence indicates that the Second Amendment, like other parts of the Bill of Rights, applies to and protects individual Americans."
The mayor of Washington, D.C., Adrian M. Fenty, filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, setting the stage for the high court to rule. The case became known as District of Columbia v. Heller. According to FBI statistics, Washington D.C., with its gun ban, ranks as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States and maintains one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the country
be safe
Bram
www.CSSDSC.com
The mention of the second Amendment immediately brings to mind in many of those that have no idea of what our constitution really means or grants us in rights is the image of an NRA member toting the biggest firearm he / she can carry. Mention the second amendment and people brace themselves for an in your face discussion over the highly charged issue of personal firearm use, possession and carry. Somehow in the quest to protect the most obvious of our rights, the second most important amendment in the Constitution: Firearms and the right to bear and use these arms to protect ourselves, our loved ones and our country has over ridden every other facet of this amendment.
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
No where in this statement of our most cherished document does it say this refers ONLY to firearms. It says very clearly that to maintain the security of a free state, our freedom and our country and our way of life, that the right of the people, that is the right of each person to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Arms: that’s an important word and must be viewed in context of what the founders themselves would have meant, carried and used themselves and since the Constitution is an alive document recognizing that arms change was ambiguous enough to allow modern arms or variations of those arms to be included in that protection. Knives were in that documents meaning for all of our founders carried and used knives. Firearms are just an easier arm to try to control because of their place in our society and history. Firearms very nature bring them to the forefront of discussion: tyrants hate them, control freaks hate them, free people cherish and need them. Knives get lost in the shadows. But knives are there. They are arms / tools used by many and carried by all of our framing fathers. Knives were and are still our best friends and our first tools.
In a released Senate report on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, and well known gun rights proponent, states
They argue that the Second Amendment's words "right of the people" mean "a right of the state" — apparently overlooking the impact of those same words when used in the First and Fourth Amendments. The "right of the people" to assemble or to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is not contested as an individual guarantee. Still they ignore consistency and claim that the right to "bear arms" relates only to military uses. This not only violates a consistent constitutional reading of "right of the people" but also ignores that the second amendment protects a right to "keep" arms. "When our ancestors forged a land "conceived in liberty", they did so with musket and rifle. When they reacted to attempts to dissolve their free institutions, and established their identity as a free nation, they did so as a nation of armed freemen. When they sought to record forever a guarantee of their rights, they devoted one full amendment out of ten to nothing but the protection of their right to keep and bear arms against governmental interference. Under my chairmanship the Subcommittee on the Constitution will concern itself with a proper recognition of, and respect for, this right most valued by free men."[
For a more recent judicial interpretation, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stated in 2001 that there are numerous instances of the phrase "bear arms" being used to describe a civilian's carrying of arms. Early constitutional provisions or declarations of rights in at least some ten different states speak of the right of the "people" [or "citizen" or "citizens"] "to bear arms in defense of themselves [or "himself"] and the state", or equivalent words, thus indisputably reflecting that under common usage "bear arms" was in no sense restricted to bearing arms in military service.
Likewise, relative to District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290, a case under review before the Supreme Court of the United States, the earlier 2007 DC Circuit Court opinion (in what was then named Parker v. District of Columbia) dismissed the lawsuit in a 2-1 decision, summarizing its substantive ruling on the right protected by the Second Amendment on page 46 of the slip opinion (at the end of section III) as:
To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Anti-Federalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment's civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.
In the "Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session" (February 1982), a bipartisan subcommittee (consisting of 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats) of the United States Senate investigated the Second Amendment and reported upon their findings. This report included the following opinions:
The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.
ARM: (vb) to furnish with weapons, (n) WEAPON
WEAPON: \we-pan\(n)1: something ( as a gun, knife, or club) used to injure, defeat, protect or destroy
I guarantee that when the constitution was framed all the members who were there and those they represented all carried knives of one kind or another. Most had Sheffield style "Bowie Knives" or the like, pocketr skinners, Colonial Flat grinds and the like on heir persons at all times. Some carried those new fangled foldrs with locks as made in France ( our ally in the Revolutionary War) They used knives in their daily lives and one didn’t show up expecting to find a knife: you carried your tools with you and one carried several types of knives with them everywhere. Without a knife one couldn’t eat, open a package, cut rope or cloth, open a bottle, trim one’s nails, or any other job needing an edged tool. One was armed with one’s knife everywhere at all times: to be without one was to ask for trouble in one’s daily life. Farmers, Hunters, Merchants, Blacksmiths, Carpenters, Ship builders, Sail makers, Sailors, Fishermen, Whalers, Leatherworkers, Doctors, Barbers, Butchers, and just about everyone else in those times used and needed knives. It would border on the inconceivable to think that knives / edged tools were not included in the concept, thought and meaning of the Second Amendment. It is the best tool fo the best job: living one's life safely and to the fullest and also giving protection to us, our families and our country.
Who in their right mind would attempt to regulate, control or repress the citizens of the USA from carrying knives? Carrying a knife or several knives for various purposes was as usual as wearing clothes to them...it was 1700's almost the 1800's and knives WERE part of life itself.
Try to picture be it an icon of our history or a framer of our nation: such men as James Bowie, Davey Crockett, Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, John Addams, George Washington, Paul Revere, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, John Paul Jones et al, all without knives.
THe Second Amendment protects us the Knife owners and knife users as well as the Firearms -Gun guys. We are their brothers and sisters in arms. AKTI and the NRA are kissing cousins and we could take apage from their playbook and apply it to ourselves> NO ONE CAN BAN ANY KNIFE OR KNIFE CARRY BECAUSE ITS OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT!
NOTE:
Firearms Industry Hails Victory in
Supreme Court Second Amendment Case NEWTOWN, Conn. -- The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) -- the trade association for the firearms industry – hailed today’s United States Supreme Court 5-4 decision written by Justice Scalia that determined authoritatively that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms.
“Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is a major victory for all Americans,” said NSSF President Steve Sanetti. “The Heller decision reaffirms the wisdom of our founding fathers in creating the Bill of Rights to protect and preserve individual rights, the cornerstone of our democracy. Furthermore, this decision solidifies an historical fact, the commonsense understanding that governments have powers, not rights -- rights are reserved exclusively for individuals.”
Demonstrating the strong grassroots support for the individual rights thesis, the nation’s leading gun control group, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, conceded victory prior to the High Court’s ruling. In an interview with ABC News last week, Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke noted, “We've lost the battle on what the Second Amendment means. Seventy-five percent of the public thinks it's an individual right.” The U.S. Supreme Court agrees that the public is correct.
The importance of having a uniform and legally accepted definition of the Second Amendment is particularly important to the firearms industry, as noted by Sanetti. “The products that our industry manufactures are the means through which our Second Amendment rights are realized. Clearly sportsmen, hunters, responsible firearms owners and the industry are all heavily vested in this groundbreaking ruling.”
Though the Heller decision is the first time that the High Court has declared in absolute terms that the Second Amendment is an individual right, the nation's leading historians, legal scholars and constitutional experts have long been on record supporting such a conclusion. Renowned scholars, including Lawrence Tribe of Harvard, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, William Van Alstyne of Duke and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, have been vocal in their assertion that the Second Amendment, like all the other rights of the people recognized in the Bill of Rights, secures an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
"Today’s decision lays to rest the specious argument that the Second Amendment is not an individual right and marks the beginning of the end of repressive gun laws that have infringed upon individual liberty and done nothing to make America safer,” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel.”
NSSF filed a friend of the court brief in support of the respondent, Mr. Heller.
BACKGROUND:
In March, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in striking down the District's gun ban, held in Parker, et al., v. District of Columbia that "The phrase 'the right of the people' . . . leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual." This was the second time in recent history that a federal circuit court upheld the longstanding belief that the Second Amendment was an individual right. In 2001, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in the case of U.S. v. Emerson that "All of the evidence indicates that the Second Amendment, like other parts of the Bill of Rights, applies to and protects individual Americans."
The mayor of Washington, D.C., Adrian M. Fenty, filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, setting the stage for the high court to rule. The case became known as District of Columbia v. Heller. According to FBI statistics, Washington D.C., with its gun ban, ranks as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States and maintains one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the country
be safe
Bram
www.CSSDSC.com
