The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.
The court’s 5-4 ruling strikes down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision goes further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.
The wackadoos are in full command. Not only do they have two of the three branches of the government in their pockets, but the Congress is theirs for the asking too (see the right-wing extremist FISA bill they’re about to pass). Now their judicial arm has created a new Constitutional “right,” just for the wackadoos. Brass knuckles are illegal, but guns are too safe for the government to ban. God bless America.
Incidentally, the above-quoted AP lede is dead wrong–it was by no means “the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.” The Supreme Court had ruled AGAINST the Second Amendment having any relevance to gun control laws over and over again in rulings going back to the 19th century.
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.
Until the reign of general idiocy that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and is only just beginning to end, no one but gun wackos bothered quoting that irrelevant Amendment–or rather, quoting the second half of it, since the “well regulated militia” part never did their cause much good.
“Keep and bear arms”? Nobody does that any more. Members of the National Guard–which is today’s Congressionally-designated militia–do not keep their guns at all; they’re in an armory, and they’re the same issue the Army gets. They DO bear arms when in uniform–unlike those who carry around a gun for self-defence or hunting, who are merely carrying arms. In the eighteenth century, when the Second Amendment was drafted, to “bear arms” had a specifically military meaning (see the Oxford English Dictionary).
This explains the otherwise mysterious connection between a militia designed to protect the state and a right of the people. Simply put, the feds can’t keep people from serving in their state militias–nor from keeping the weapons they’d need to do it, if any states still let militia members keep their own weapons (which they don’t). It’s a right of the people to serve in their state’s military service–obviously subject to the provision that the state has to want them there (or the militia would hardly be “well regulated”).
Through the alchemy of our ever-obscurantist Supreme Kangaroo Court, this has transmogrified into a right to own a handgun for self-protection in the District of Columbia, which doesn’t have a militia. Just about as logical as saying you have to stop counting votes because continuing to count them might at least temporarily swing the outcome, giving the impression that the person who’s going to be implanted into office anyway wasn’t really elected. It’s the same five Justices–well, not quite, two having been replaced by the pseudo-president thereby implanted (and subsequently reimplanted through massive fraud).
What really worries me is the folks in D.C. A lot of them are going to die because of this. All in order to reinforce the individualist delusion that each person can fend for him or herself, lone survivors amidst the universe. As if that had anything whatever to do with how people actually live in today's America.
