U.S. Supreme Court rules against D.C. Handgun Ban

The right to bear arms is not an individual right; it is a collective one for purposes of domestic security in the face of a threat of rebellion or invasion in the absence of a standing army.

What was agreed was that something would be added to the Constitution listing specific restrictions on government power to limit individual activities. Every other amendment in the first 10 deals with the rights of individuals. If the 2nd were intended as a collective right, then it would be both contrary to the reason for which it was written, and different in purpose from the other nine amendments. The first clause is regarded as giving some motivation. A law which states that the government can't infringe a right cannot validly be interpreted as permission to prohibit the right.

Moreover, beyond the fact that this is the clear intention of the amendment, it is immoral to deny any being the right or means to defend itself. Anyone who believes that all people have a basic right to personal liberty must necessarily believe that people have a right to protect themselves, and cannot be forced to become helpless based on the promise that the government will protect them.

Furthermore, it is massively documented that the Founders wanted us to be capable of forcefully removing abusive governments, so that it's unlikely that they wanted the people to be made helpless before an all powerful state.

As Thomas Jefferson said:

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

You may want an all powerful government and a helpless populace, but I prefer a country of free men and women.

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I am sorry for your reading of my opinion, since I come from a tradition that strongly believes in the natural liberties of man. An all-powerful govt may or may not degrade to tyranny, but that will not depend on the capacity of its citizens to adequately revolt with considerable firepower. It will depend on govt control of itself. Protecting oneself is one thing; protecting ourselves from each other is another. And protecting the people from tyranny lies in the hands of the people to legislatively check its own authority- govt. The answer to me is not more guns.

But the circumstances at the time of the writing of the Constitution dont bear out your theory.

At the time, more people lived along the "frontier", and more were moving west all the time.
The standing army at that time was very small, less then 5000 men.
There was no way for the army at the time to protect most of the people moving west, not with the other problems at the time.

At that time, the population moving west used their guns for everything from self defense to hunting to sport shooting.
The founding fathers knew that the people had to be able to defend themselves, because the govt could not defend them.

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But the circumstances at the time of the writing of the Constitution dont bear out your theory.

At the time, more people lived along the "frontier", and more were moving west all the time.
The standing army at that time was very small, less then 5000 men.
There was no way for the army at the time to protect most of the people moving west, not with the other problems at the time.

At that time, the population moving west used their guns for everything from self defense to hunting to sport shooting.
The founding fathers knew that the people had to be able to defend themselves, because the govt could not defend them.

I can not agree with you more. Back then it was "...necessary to the security of a free State."

But what if our govt now has the capacity to defend us from the threat of rebellion or invasion of domestic security?

The Congress finds the following:

(1) Police cannot protect, and are not legally liable for failing to protect, individual citizens, as evidenced by the following:

(A) The courts have consistently ruled that the police do not have an obligation to protect individuals, only the public in general. For example, in Warren v. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App. 1981), the court stated: `[C]ourts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community.'.

(B) Former Florida Attorney General Jim Smith told Florida legislators that police responded to only 200,000 of 700,000 calls for help to Dade County authorities.

(C) The United States Department of Justice found that, in 1989, there were 168,881 crimes of violence for which police had not responded within 1 hour.

(2) Citizens frequently must use firearms to defend themselves, as evidenced by the following:

(A) Every year, more than 2,400,000 people in the United States use a gun to defend themselves against criminals--or more than 6,500 people a day. This means that, each year, firearms are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.

(B) Of the 2,400,000 self-defense cases, more than 192,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse.

(C) Of the 2,400,000 times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, 92 percent merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8 percent of the time, does a citizen kill or wound his or her attacker.

I have not stated anywhere that citizens do not have the right to protect themselves; though I am concerned about the quantity of firearms in households across the country.

To what extent should we arm ourselves due to this limit on their liability?
Of course we ought to take measures to protect ourselves, though what is that measure and to what degree should I use it?

It is logical. I mean to say that if there was a legal duty to protect each citizen, and each citizen demonstrated they were in fact not protected, then lawsuits would hit the fan rather quickly. And a police force would not be able to operate given this requirement etc. Even the Army would pale in significance to the number of POs on the streets if this were to be law- that each citizen be protected. In a word, enforcement of this law would entail a PO per each citizen!

Of course, the police would like to be everywhere all the time to protect the citizens, but this is impossible. So to exemplify this and curb liability, the court states that they are not legally obligated to protect every citizen. And citizens do have the right to protect themselves. I have not stated anywhere that citizens do not have the right to protect themselves; though I am concerned about the quantity of firearms in households across the country.

To what extent should we arm ourselves due to this limit on their liability? Of course we ought to take measures to protect ourselves, though what is that measure and to what degree should I use it?

(NOTE: If you are a hunter, and you have permits for licensing and carrying firearms, then do your thing. On a personal note, I am not a fan of hunting when the hunted are not aware that a hunt (involving them) is underway. If you need to hunt in order to feed yourself, then the issue changes with the degree to which hunting is required. I know only of a handful of bands that need to hunt to survive; most in the U.S. do not need it. Sport hunting is for losers and wanna-be hunters. You wanna hunt? Try hunting a green beret in the woods of Virginia... :wink:)

We don't wish to protect ourselves "due to this limit on their liability."

Self-defense is an inherent right of all people, therefore, so is the means of self-defense. And, incidentally, I don't want to live in a country where the police are "everywhere all the time.

We all posses a Fight-or-Flight reaction to perceived dangers.

Run away if possible, but if you choose or are forced to fight... WIN.

... try to win if you value the win over the loss.

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We don't wish to protect ourselves "due to this limit on their liability."

Of course not: it is not because of a "liability issue" that we seek to protect ourselves. This limit is to protect the police from unreasonable (legal) actions or obligations given the simple problem of policing an entire community 24-7. It just so happens that at the same time we must have the means to defend ourselves if in danger. Yes?

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Self-defense is an inherent right of all people, therefore, so is the means of self-defense. And, incidentally, I don't want to live in a country where the police are "everywhere all the time.

Self-defense is a "right" for any organism, I would say. To say that this or that being does not have this "right" is absurd, since applying it to one type of being over another is absurd; the pain would be to prove the advancement of this privilege to one group over another. But to say that it follows from this that the means to self-defense also constitute an inherent right- the same status as the right to self-defense- poses several problems. The first is to ignore the possibility that the latter may easily overcome the necessity to mere self-defense and evolve it something else. And the second is to equate the right to offset any impending violence (as a threat to your safety) with the right to arm yourself in order to prevent this violence by any means. Surely you would agree that there must be some limit to the quantity of the means- if we are talking about weapons.

If we were discussing basic microbes or other bacteria, the matter would different. And, incidentally, I do not want to live in a country in which every member of the population owns some hardware, somewhere.

What we are looking for here is the mean to the right to bear arms and the right to live in a civil society in which neither police nor weapons run rampant.

Try to win

I agree that the right to dear arms is subject to reasonable limits, but the limit isn't that you have no right at all to bear arms.

The amendment states:

"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."

Due to the known fact that a wet bird never flies at night, the right of the peole to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

As for your old-fashioned firearms, they seem impressive.
Are you content with this arsenal?

mellow yellow wrote:

The amendment states:

"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."

The logic is sufficiently simple. The first part of the sentence is a motivation, the second part is the law.

The thing could as easily read:

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Due to the known fact that a wet bird never flies at night, the right of the peole to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The law would be the same. Even if some body were to produce documented proof of a wet bird actually flying at night, even that would not matter.

The founding fathers were deeply distrustful of large and powerful governments and full-time standing armies. They saw armed citizens' groups (militias) as a reasonable alternative to government armies and as institutions which would tend to preserve freedom rather than suppress it.