Supreme Court finds individual right to own guns

Discussion in 'Freedom and Liberty' started by Quigley_Sharps, Jun 26, 2008.


  1. Quigley_Sharps

    Quigley_Sharps The Badministrator Administrator Founding Member

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, for the first time in U.S. history, that individual Americans have the right to own guns for personal use, and struck down a strict gun control law in the nation's capital.

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    The landmark 5-4 ruling marked the first time in nearly 70 years the high court has addressed whether the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, rather than a right tied to service in a state militia.

    Writing the court's majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia said the Second Amendment protected an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

    Although an individual now has a constitutional right to own guns, that new right is not unlimited, wrote Scalia, a hunter.

    The ruling came the day after a worker at a plastics plant in Henderson, Kentucky, used a handgun to shoot and kill five people inside the factory before killing himself, the latest in a series of deadly shooting sprees across the country.

    The Supreme Court's last review of the Second Amendment came in a five-page discussion in an opinion issued in 1939 that failed to definitively resolve the constitutional issue.

    The court struck down the nation's strictest gun control law adopted in Washington D.C., 32 years ago. It bans private possession of handguns and requires that any rifles or shotguns kept at home be unloaded and dissembled or bound by a trigger lock.

    The justices split along conservative-liberal lines in the ruling, one of the most important of the court's current term, in deciding a legal battle over gun rights in America. The ruling came on the last day of the court's 2007-08 term.

    President George W. Bush's two appointees on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both voted with the majority in finding an individual right to keep firearms.

    In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, "The decision threatens to throw into doubt the constitutionality of gun laws throughout the United States."

    (Reporting by James Vicini, Editing by Deborah Charles)
     
  2. Quigley_Sharps

    Quigley_Sharps The Badministrator Administrator Founding Member

    So did Bush do something right here?............... the single greatest thing to come along in a while.
     
  3. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    a bit shocked...
     
  4. thepatriot1976

    thepatriot1976 Resigned Membership

    What was left out of this article is that they did not protect the right to not infringe and although people have the right to bear arms they decided that it should be balanced with whatever they seem reasonable. They decided that their is a right on behalf of the government to regulate and license gun owners however they seem fit. The anti-gun declares this a win for them because they intend to increase restrictions on the average gun owner such as a license requirement program to own a gun and more stringent background check laws and requirements. This will eliminate a lot of current gun owners
    and create a lot of hoops to jump through just to own a gun. When their finished only a select few will be able to own a gun, just like old Mayor Guilani's CCW requirements he had in NYC, It was almost impossible for anyone to get their CCW and only a select few had theirs.
     
  5. franks71vw

    franks71vw Monkey+++

    From Ted Nugent today:[​IMG]


    Ted Nugent wrote this in response to today’s Supreme Court ruling that individual Americans have the right to own guns for personal use, striking down a strict gun control law in Washington, DC. Ted was recently re-elected for his fifth term on the Board of Directors of the NRA.

    A “SUPREME” COURT? I CAN DO BETTER
    by Ted Nugent

    It is glaringly obvious that a critical lesson in history 101 is due in America, for it appears that not only does a lunatic fringe of anti-freedom Americans dismiss our founding fathers’ clear declaration of independence and succinct enumeration of our God-given individual rights, but some Americans have the arrogance and audacity to question whether the right to self-defense is indeed one of these individual rights. Dear God in heaven, who could be this soulless? How about 4 out of the 9 so called “Supreme” justices of the land. God help us all.

    Who could be so asinine as to believe that a free man has no such right to keep and bear arms for self-defense? What kind of low-life scoundrel would know that courageous heroes of the U.S. Military would volunteer over and over again to sacrifice and die for such self-evident truths, then turn around and spit on their graves by discounting the very freedoms that these brave men and women have died to protect?

    Will these supreme legal scholars also affirm an individual right to choose the religion of our individual choice? Do they authorize our individual freedom of speech? Can you imagine? Them is fighting words my friends, and the line drawn in the sand has never been more outrageous.

    Recent USA Today and Gallup polls showed a whopping 73% of good Americans know damn well that we are all created equal, and that we each have an individual right to protect our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. What kind of jackass doesn’t know this? Allow the guitar player to translate for the soul-dead among us.

    Keep-this means the gun is mine and you can’t have it. This does not mean I will register it with a government agency. The government works for “we the people,” not the other way around, regardless of what Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein or Barack Hussein Obama or 4 supreme justices may try to tell you.

    Bear-this means I’ve got it right here, on me, either in my grasp or damn near. This does not mean locked away in a safe, trigger-locked or stored at the local sporting club.

    Shall not be infringed-this of course is another way of saying Don’t tread on me, for we will not be your willing crime victims, subjects, servants or slaves, so don’t even think about it.

    When the evil King’s gangsters came to collect unfair taxes from Americans, we tossed their tea into the drink. When they came to disarm us into helplessness against their old world tyrannical ways, we met them at Concord Bridge and shot them dead till they quit treading on us. Any questions children? I didn’t think so.

    Corrupt men cannot be trusted, hence the right of “the people” to choose the individual church of our choice, to speak our individual ideas and beliefs, to have individual freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures, and ultimately, to exercise our individual right to keep and bear arms so that evildoers cannot do unto us that which we would not do unto them. Get it? I would love to meet the human being who would argue these points with us. We would be looking at a fascist, and of course fascists, by all historical and empirical evidence, must be eliminated.

    If you value the American Way, if you believe in the words and spirit of the US Constitution and our sacred Bill of Rights, if you know in your heart that you have the right, the duty, the spiritual obligation to protect yourself and your loved ones from evil in all of its forms, then you had best contact each and every one of your elected officials right away and let them know that you know exactly what the Second Amendment says and stands for. Remind them about the “shall not be infringed” clause.

    It will not be the fault of the rotten anti-Americans out there who don’t believe in individual rights that rape and pillage our Constitution, it will be the fault of those who know better but failed to speak up. Now is the time to fortify America, and we better inform the Supreme Court just who truly is the “Supreme” Court of America-We the people. Individual people with individual, God given rights. The real America. Live free or die.
     
  6. Quigley_Sharps

    Quigley_Sharps The Badministrator Administrator Founding Member

    I left nothing out of the article it is in its entirety as i found it. I'm not sure if i like you implying i Left some out. BTW if you make this assertion i did this, then you left out the whole thing with yours....
     
  7. Quigley_Sharps

    Quigley_Sharps The Badministrator Administrator Founding Member

    OK.... reading this makes me realize a couple things. Firstly is how just one appointee to the court from "Barry" could have killed our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. That was some scary shit that 4 of those little socialista bestards went against the Bill Of Rights. Shows to go ya why the Founders drew up such a comprehensive Bill.
    Secondly, as far as I can see it seems the Court validated Miller's Case and leaves a GAPING HOLE for further litigation regarding the whole '34 ban, not to mention the "86 ban. They basically said that you should have the right to own any military weapon that is in common use. Not a Nuke, or a ballistic missle, just an arm that would be carried as an avg. infantryman. All this sporting qualification shit is going to be HISTORY upon further litigation. Can you say imported assault rifles again.
    That being said, this is going to take years and a McCain in the White House to appoint maybe one or two Justices so that we can keep this train rollin'.
     
  8. thepatriot1976

    thepatriot1976 Resigned Membership

    Calm down a bit,

    I didn't mean anything about you. I meant that they left out the part about "resonable restrictions"
    I have nothing against you brother and actually have grown fond of your posts. They have made it look like a complete victory for gun owners but in fact has created a whole new can of worms as to what "they" consider "reasonable".

    Seattle Times article:

    By Jonathan Martin
    Seattle Times staff reporter

    The Supreme Court's ruling Thursday on gun ownership prompted agreement on one point from advocates in Washington state on both sides of the debate: Many, many more court battles are ahead.

    The Supreme Court ruling
    IN A 5-4 VOTE, a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Constitution protects an individual's right to bear arms, while leaving room for governments to regulate gun ownership. The ruling repudiates the long-held notion that the right to bear arms is strictly linked to militia service. Instead, the court concluded that it's an individual right untethered to military or government necessity. This will make it easier for gun-rights advocates to resist new regulations and overturn existing laws.
    The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling Thursday establishing a citizen's right to keep a gun at home prompted quick responses from Washington state advocates on both sides of the debate.
    And it turns out they agree on one thing: many, many more court battles are ahead.
    Now the litigation here — as elsewhere in the country — is likely to shift to more nuanced, but still critical, questions:
    Can guns be banned on public property, as Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels recently ordered? Can you openly carry a pistol on a downtown Seattle street? Is the state's ban on sawed-off shotguns and other types of guns constitutional?
    The 5-4 ruling, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, clipped the extreme ends off the debate. An outright ban on handguns was found to be unconstitutional, but Scalia's opinion defended government's authority to enact "reasonable restrictions" on gun possession.
    The definition of "reasonable" is likely to fuel further argument, but it was a joyful day for gun-rights advocates such as Dave Workman, of Bellevue, who is the senior editor of the magazine Gun Week.
    "This is probably the biggest story I'm going to write in my lifetime," he said. "This is not just a win for gun-rights guys. This is a win for all civil rights."
    Still, in Washington the immediate effects of the ruling are limited. With an estimated million gun owners in the state, many state laws are already rooted in a Western, libertarian philosophy about firearms.
    And the state constitution has a more forceful protection of the right for "the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself" than the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The state Attorney General's Office on Thursday said a review of existing laws found none that appears to be in conflict with the high court's ruling.
    But the ruling has emboldened gun-rights advocates' protests of a pending ban on handguns in city of Seattle buildings, parks and community centers. Nickels signed an executive order last month; the ban is likely to be posted in July, the mayor said.
    "The central part of the court's decision was that a jurisdiction cannot totally ban handguns, but they recognize there is a need for common-sense gun laws," Nickels said.
    "I think, in fact, it clarifies the fact that we do have ability to enact reasonable restrictions on guns in public property."
    The mayor may be right, said Andrew Siegel, a professor of constitutional law at Seattle University. But the Supreme Court did not set a legal test to define "reasonable."
    "If you think about it in terms of the First Amendment, we've had 100 years of complicated tests for [defining] free speech," Siegel said. " We're going to start that process with the Second Amendment."
    Among the issues likely to be tested here is the "open carry" of firearms. A gun owner must get a concealed-weapons permit — 235,000 Washingtonians have one — and pass a background check to hide a gun inside clothing. It is legal to wear firearms openly in Washington. But a state law outlaws showing a weapon in a way that "warrants alarm" in others.
    Buoyed by the high-court ruling, gun-rights groups are likely to test that law in the Legislature, Workman said.
    "This is the top half of the first inning," he said. "Now we're going to follow and see where the gun-rights battle really goes."
    Meanwhile, Kristen Comer, executive director of the gun-control group Washington Ceasefire, said the ruling was no surprise. But her group thinks it could actually help their efforts by ensuring the right to private ownership of guns.
    Now gun-rights groups can't argue that reasonable gun control will lead to a "slippery slope" to total gun bans, she said.
    "Gun restrictions are not a backdoor way to ban all guns in society," she said.
    "And that is never what we intended. But when we advocate for policy restrictions, that's where we're accused of heading. That argument is now gone."
    Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com

    See, now they will just make ridiculous requirements and licensing procedures for gun owners to widdle us down to a minute few!

    See people you have to understand that they are afraid to take to much at one time from us!
    They have to take a little nibble here and there till the whole pie is eaten and nobody even saw it disappear.

    Just think for a moment what would have happened if they had ruled against us, and the next day they said "Alright you heard the judge, you have no right to own your gun now come over here and turn them in"!

    Their would be a revolt bigger than that of 1776 between the colonists and British.

    Their not stupid folks,
    They won't take your guns away till only a few people have them.

    They may say that assault rifles are "unreasonable" and are banned.
    The handgun owner will just shrug his shoulders and say "oh well, I'm not getting involved in that it doesn't effect me so why bother"?
    Then long range rifle owners (deer guns), then semi pistols, then shotgun owners, etc. till only a select few are left then they can make their move.

    You say Bush's appointee's voted yes and did the right thing. Of course they did so that they can continue to move on this in a stealthy way like I explained above. We would have actually been better off before they had this ruling when they hadn't ruled that they could regulate.
     
  9. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    heheheh. I can't wait for the definition of "reasonable" to get argued over. In the face of the opinion, military and military style weapons are allowed. I wonder if that includes full auto --. This might even get to be fun to watch, or possibly participate somehow.
     
  10. Quigley_Sharps

    Quigley_Sharps The Badministrator Administrator Founding Member

    Ahh ok man, sorry miss-read yours.[chopper]
     
  11. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

  12. monkeyman

    monkeyman Monkey+++ Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    Actualy there was some basic info on 'reasonable' in that no guns or class of guns in common use could be banned. It even called into question some of the current bans like on the M16 (which is full auto otherwise its just an AR15) by name.
     
  13. thepatriot1976

    thepatriot1976 Resigned Membership

    Well,

    I guess well see!

    Give us a range report on your new M-16 okay! (must be colt no fake sh!t)

    Will your's have 3 round burst (A-2) or full auto (A-1 or M-4)?[gun]
     
  14. Valkman

    Valkman Knifemaker Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    My Uzi has no 3 round burst, just single shot or FA. Supressed it's a blast. I like to shoot with guys with M16's, MP-5's, whatever. It's all legal here.
     
  15. ColtCarbine

    ColtCarbine Monkey+++ Founding Member

    At least you didn't get a dramatic public apology [gone]
     
  16. ColtCarbine

    ColtCarbine Monkey+++ Founding Member

    I'm not holding my breath on being able to own full-auto w/o spending thousands of $$$ and paying the guberment their tax money. Would be nice though but a lot of folks banking on their investment to increase in value might not be as pleased.
     
  17. Valkman

    Valkman Knifemaker Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    Most FA owners, including myself, do not root against the ban going away. Not the ones I've talked to and seen their posts anyway. It would open up a whole new world of goodies for everyone!
     
  18. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    Update: The politicos in DC are drafting new rules for purchase and ownership which have to be completed in another two weeks or so. The latest from the council is that they wish to maintain strict controls on keeping handguns in the household. Specifically, they want to mandate trigger locks as a storage control. Personally, I can't see that as being different from the former rules, except that now the residents all get the privilege of locking up a gun. Morons.
     
  19. Quigley_Sharps

    Quigley_Sharps The Badministrator Administrator Founding Member

    morons trigger locks were ruled against in this case, some law suits are on their way soon...[beer]
     
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