Most likely they will rule in favor of guns. Even before the current 6–3 conservative majority, they had ruled expansively on the Second Amendment in the 2016 case Caetano v. Massachussetts.
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All of my close relatives are USians. I will probably only see them a couple more times in my lifetime if the 2nd Amendment interpretation allows more people to carry concealed weapons there. The homicide rate will go up and I don’t want my risk to life and limb to increase unnecessarily by walking into the lion’s den.
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The problem is that the 2nd amendment is broad and/or vague, and was written when guns were single shot and took time to reload. With that in mind it’s impossible to interpret the framers intent.
There was no single intent. Some wanted a collective right to bear arms as part of the militia, some wanted an individual right, that’s why they arrived to the contorted and deliberately ambiguous language of the second amendment. Back then the Bill of Rights was understood as applying only to the Federal government, not the states, so it was considered a workable compromise.
They did not foresee that a single Federal Supreme Court would be able to impose a single unified view on all states, and in fact the Supreme Court asserted a right of judicial review in the 1803 Marbury v Madison against Jefferson and Madison, the latter being the very founding father who is considered the Father of the Constitution.
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I don’t think the “framers’ intent” is especially important, considering that those very same folks also didn’t intend for women to have the right to vote or black people to have any human rights at all. But it is notable that the 2nd amendment stands out as the lone amendment in the Bill of Rights that includes a justification, specifically stating “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state…”. So for those that claim to really care what the framers had in mind, there it is. It was (apparently) not intended to be about individual freedom and personal “protection.”
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Of course. Its just that “the framers intent” is the thing I hear most often. Its also supposedly a “living document”, or so they teach in schools. We have to live under it, we should change it as necessary. Thats why we have amendments on the first place.
(I was never arguing in favor of “the framers intent” BTW.)
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Correct. For all that the “Originalists” go on about the framers’ intent, I don’t see any demands that people who want to carry these weapons have training by a military professional (archaic term “regulation”) on a regular basis. I’ll bet that most tough-guy ammosexuals and cosplaying collectors would wilt quickly under the tender attentions of the drill sergeants usually responsible for such training.
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Cool! It’s just that I worry that a radical approach to interpretation has achieved the status of hegemony in the US. Interpretation, like historiography, must always be contested.
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“Originalism” treats the Constitution as a religious document- infallible and immune to misinterpretation. Just like all religions, “interpreting” it becomes about finding whatever vague language exists in it that agrees with what you want. It’s all bullshit.
In the end, all that matters is how we treat each other, not what some dusty old piece of paper says. This is why every other developed democracy is doing far better on human rights and gun safety than the US, despite the US having a better founding document than the rest of us. In the end, all that matters is the attitudes of the people reading those documents, not what’s written on them.
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Do you have any source claiming a constitutional right to individual gun ownership before the past century?
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Well, as a contemporary fundamentalist treats a religious document, rather than a historically informed epistemology.
Which is kind of the point I suppose. This is a modern, radical, fundamentalist ideology presenting itself as natural, as if it is the only, the always, reasonable way to do things. More hegemony in action.
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Do you have any source claiming a constitutional right to individual gun ownership before the past century?
“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
– Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776
Also: The True Meaning of ‘Keep and Bear Arms’ - The Atlantic
There was the Kentucky case Bliss v. Commonwealth that granted an individual right based on nearly identical clauses in the Kentucky constitution (remember, until the end of the Civil War and the 14th Amendment the Bill or Rights was seen as applying only to the Federal government, not to the States, which is why some had established churches
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Considering the suit is about the right to be approved for a conceal carry permit - something like this is a more apt post picture
That reasoning doesn’t apply when the state’s laws restrict a citizen’s rights. Another example would be one shouldn’t respect a states oppressive abortion laws.
For a site with so many members who are posting pics of guillotines, railing against the 1%, and the system that separates people into “us” and “them”, I don’t see how one can logically support a system where issuing a licenses is mostly arbitrary and directly connected to how well connected the applicant is. Or cops. I bet a lot of these licenses in both states are former cops/cop wannabes connected to security businesses.
It isn’t like this suit will force states that don’t have issue laws to have them - it means if you have “may issue” laws, you can’t just not grant a licenses for no good reason.
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Of course, in the actual wild west, a large number of towns banned guns.
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Nobody ever conceal carried a guillotine into work and killed a bunch of people with it.
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And no one here is stockpiling a bunch of guillotines in their home because they have an obsessive fetish.
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Some of the founders did recognize that slavery was the elephant in the room, were even opposed to it (Adams for example), and didn’t have the guts to address the problem. They were flawed men, and very much of their era.
They also naively thought the constitution would be totally re-written later to work out the bugs (it was basically cobbled together in haste immediately after the split from England, they were trying to keep the colonies from descending into chaos.)
Jim Jeffires has a bit about “amendments”-- we outlawed alcohol with one amendment, and repealed that amendment a few years later with another amendment. Whether that’s what the founding fathers intended or not is moot, that IS how the document works, so logically we can modify or clarify the 2nd amendment with another amendment. Unfortunately the partisan reality of the USA means a lot more violence before that happens.
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Yeah, no kidding. That characterization of Adams (assuming you mean the elder, not John Q.) is generous. He may have claimed to be concerned about the welfare of black folks but actively opposed efforts at abolition, such as when he spoke out against an abolition bill in Massachusetts in 1777.
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While the ruling is pretty much a foregone conclusion, it’ll at least be interesting to see what kind of disingenuous, tortuous, and specious legal pretzels they can tie themselves into to justify it.
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Like other commenters point out: originalism is in fashion, so let everyone be free to buy and use this:
(from WPedia of course) to be used in any fashion, concealed carry included if your coat is long enough.
Anything more modern, being unknown to the founders, is right out and shan’t be allowed. Voilá.
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You do realize they had black powder pistols as well? And people would carry multiples of them. Blackbeard reportedly carried six on a baldric across his chest. Also cannons. Private people had cannons.
The idea that rights only apply to the technology at the time is rather ridiculous. But good news - black powder muzzle loaders aren’t even considered firearms in the same way their modern versions are. So if one wants more restrictive laws for “modern” firearms, that is how the laws are already structured.
Anyway, this suit isn’t about what level of technology is allowed, but rather the right to conceal carry in a “may issue” state.
I wouldn’t say it is impossible. You can read lots of opinions by founders on the matter. And of course not all of them had the same opinions. But the thought of the time was the free men were able to armed, and peasants beholden to a higher power were not. They didn’t invent this concept, there were rights to arms enumerate in Europe in the past. Specifically, the English Bill of Rights 1689, which has the provision “Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;”.
Certainly one can still argue about some of the specifics and the collective vs individual right. Though I don’t see how you can form a collective with out individuals.
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