Category: 2nd Amendment

No second amendment in Onodaga County New York:

Walsh wrote that the ability of New York residents to keep and bear arms is a privilege granted by statute. The state’s constitution contains no such guarantee, he added.

Hat tip to Jacob

Eugene Volokh relays a case where a felon tried to raise a second amendment claim and was shot down.  The Court did us a huge favor by taking this off the table immediately.  This makes it far more likely that the people who raise Second Amendment in courts will generally be more sympathetic individuals, rather than career criminals.

Also, there are already have people raising the machine gun issue, which all the legal experts I’ve talked to agree is a dead end.  As one notable legal expert pointed out to me “We got 5-4 on a .38 revolver.”

Then you have a postal employee challenging the ban on firearms in post offices.  The magistrate dismissed the challenge in this case, arguing that:

Indeed, federal law (OSHA) requires employers to abate workplace hazards and encourages employers to take measures to prevent gun-related injuries. Surely, the United States Postal Service would be remiss if it failed to practice what federal law requires. Without question, § 232.1(1) bolsters the United States Postal Service’s zero tolerance for workplace violence and is a regulation designed to maintain safety and order on postal property.

I don’t agree with this one, but there’s always a political solution to this problem.  Professor Volokh has a lot of worthwhile commentary on this one.

This case just seems like a disaster waiting to happen [Edit 7/17/08 – Linked to the wrong item.  A few weeks later, I don’t remember what I intended to link to here, but will try to find again]  Thankfully, we have some very talented people pursuing other incorporation cases.

But hey, at least we don’t have courts still pretending like Heller doesn’t exist, right?  This should be a wake up call to gun owners that Heller hasn’t really settled much.  We have the fight of our lives ahead of us, and I think we seriously need to face the fact that we can either have McCain picks on the federal courts, who has a chance of being good, or perhaps Deval Patrick.  If the thought of that isn’t enough to get you to hold your nose this fall, I don’t know what is.

Over at Xrlq’s place.

Dale Carpenter takes on a rather odd notion that technology will make Heller obsolete. I think it is correct to note that the second amendment isn’t limited merely to firearms technology, but to many things as well.  In fact, I think the door is open for a Second Amendment challenge to many state and local laws that regulate or prohibit the carrying or possession of less-than-lethal weapons.

I am also doubtful that less-than-lethal weapons will supplant firearms, rather than merely supplementing them, which is how they are used in modern police work.  Anything that’s effective at disrupting a person’s physiology or central nervous system enough to stop them in their tracks is probably going to be very likely to kill that person.  Most critters, including humans, are tough to stop quickly without bringing them very close to death.

It’s good to see President Bush committed to nominating bureaucrats who are committed to preserving and sustaining individual liberty:

By a 5-4 vote last week, the nation’s highest court struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns, the first major pronouncement on gun rights in history. It upheld the right for communities to license guns.

Mueller said communities will have to determine their own license programs. As a former Marine who served in Vietnam, he said “I tend to believe weapons harm people and more often than not they harm the people carrying them.”

With his grandchildren going to college, Mueller said he hopes “those campuses will be weapons free.”

Except they didn’t say communities could license guns.  In fact, The Court speicifcally said they do not address that.  Since Mr. Heller did not ask the court the overturn the licensing requirement, The Court did not do so.  I guess it’s too much to ask of CBS News to do a little research, rather than just repeating nonsense.

Hat tip to NRA-ILA

UPDATE: “I tend to believe weapons harm people and more often than not they harm the people carrying them.”  I anxiously await Mr. Muller’s memo that informs all FBI agents that they should cease and desist from carrying firearms.  Since it only endangers them, you know.

Scott Bach, who is President of the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, and an NRA Board member, has this to say about the Heller ruling:

That such a question was even the subject of controversy, or that there were dissenting Justices, is a sad testimony to the state of our nation. It is also a testimony to one of the worst hoaxes and frauds ever perpetrated by gun ban extremists: the phony claim that the phrase “right of the people” really means “right of only those people in state militia service” when firearms are involved.

There is no basis for such an assertion. Yet for years, those unable to legislate the Second Amendment away have shamelessly pursued a scheme to interpret it out of existence by convoluting its words and rewriting its history. They have actually argued, with a straight face, that one provision of the Bill of Rights doesn’t really apply to all Americans – just to some Americans.

Read the whole thing.  It’s sure to displease this particular hoaxster, since the The Court has no doubt put the brakes on his attempt to ban muskets.

Dave Kopel has an excellent article in the New York Sun.  Interesting factoid I didn’t know:

As a Monroe County court accurately observed in the 1994 case Citizens for a Safer Community v. City of Rochester, “The Courts of this State have concluded that the language of federal law interpreting the Second Amendment (which is identical in its language to Article 2, section 4 of the Civil Rights Law) should be used in interpreting the provisions of this state law.”

Some New York courts have interpreted the New York right to arms restrictively, but these decisions were explicitly based on misunderstanding of the same language in the Second Amendment. The cases treating the Civil Rights Law as almost meaningless are of dubious validity now that Heller has made is clear that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” is a broad and important individual right.

So basically, the ruling in Heller reinterprets, under New York State case law, the meaning of their state right to keep and bear arms provision.  That doesn’t speak well for the future of the Sullivan Act.