Thomas wrote:Setanta wrote:Basically, the colonists, etc., etc. . . .
I don't know that this is true. But it's beside my point, so I'll go with your facts. My point is that the founders had strong beliefs about human rights that they held rightly or wrongly. In particular, they believed that as Englishmen, they had absolute individual rights that they were fighting for in 1776, that they were writing a constitution to protect in 1787, and that they passed a Bill of Rights to protect in 1791. Even if the colonists' belief in Blackstone, chapter 5 had been a collective hallucination, conceived on an LSD trip during an after-convention party, they would still have enshrined it in the Bill of Rights. Consequently, the hallucination of absolute individual rights should still guide jurists who interpret the Bill of Rights today.
That, of course, is only my opinion.
Your references to Blackstone are meaningless, and that was my point. The Declaration of Independence struck out into new ground in terms of the conception of the rights of Englishmen. I won't go into the history of the Parliament, but simply note that all the "rights of Englishmen" had accreted over time, and were almost exclusively inferential, based partly upon Parliamentary act, but more certainly through judicial precedent.
The concept of virtual representation as alleged by Parliament in 1765 was not as absurd to the minds of Englishmen as it would seem to us. Prior to the 1832 Reform bill, not three in a hundred Englishmen had the franchise, and it was seen as reasonable that one was "virtually represented" by those with whom one assumed one shared a community of interests, who were directly represented in Parliament.
The colonists were directly represented in varying degrees, but to an extent which was unknown anywhere else in the world in 1765. John Winthrop, as Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, had in 1630 extended the franchise to any adult male in good standing in his congregation. The same applied in Connecticutt, settled from Massachusetts. Rhode Island enfranchised all adult males, and including Indians and free Blacks who chose to vote, mostly in defiance of Massachusetts. In Virginia, the Virginia Company of the very early 1600s had been made up of men who considered themselves gentlemen, and therefore entitled to vote, and those who might have been their servants in England, but without whom they could not have survived. The original House of Burgesses enfranchised all adult, white males. Pennsylvania enfranchised all adult, white males who were not convicts or distrained for debt.
Never in the history of England has there been such a broad franchise, and never in the history of England had the men of a community had such a degree of control of their own affairs.
Magna Carta mostly deals with rights in property, but is most famous for granting the right of
habeas corpus, the right of freedom from search and seizure, and of trial by a jury of one's peers--but peers is the operative word, it applied to members of the baronage and peerage who alleged abuses by the Plantagenets. Those rights were not only never codified by Parliament for all men, the Agreement of the People of 1649 had been beaten down by the Puritan Major Generals who rounded up the Agitators and hunted down the Levelers.
The Bill of Rights codified the rights of citizens as they had never before been codified for Englishmen--
pace Blackstone. You refer to Blackstone, but his work was only published at the time of the Stamp Act Congress. It is absurd to suggest that Americans were responding to his commentaries when they decided what rights they believed they were entitled to exercise. I suggest that you might read Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania by John Dickinson, for a better feel of the arguments which were percolating in America between 1765 and 1776.
When the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights were asserted, many of them were only newly asserted. Many were reactive to Acts of Parliament which the Americans had found odious--the right peacably to assemble was in direct contradiction of the Riot Act. The prohibition on quartering was in direct contradiction of the Quartering Act.
It nothing short of absurd to refer to Blackstone, other than as a coincidence to the extent that Blackstone took notice of rights to which the colonist had already appealed when he began to publish his commentaries.
I don't recall saying Congress didn't have the power. I was asking for a reasonable definition of "assault rifle". You've imagined a connection, where none exists. Get a grip. 