Tuesday, March 25, 2008

DC vs Heller Pundit Roundup

Update:

I dare you to watch this video of this woman testifying before Congress and not get a lump in your throat, she speaks the truth. Thanks to Eric at Red State Eclectic:



I meant to put this up last week:

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard a case dealing with the 2nd Amendment. It could prove to be a landmark decision that SCOTUS hands down and may finally put to rest whether owning a firearm is an "individual" or "collective" right. As such, there are plenty of opinions going around before the ACTUAL opinion from the Supreme Court gets handed down. Here's a smattering of them:

Reason Mag- Jonathan Raech - Gun rights protect civil rights even if you are gay.

ABC News - Jan Greenberg - Justice Kennedy may be the "swing" vote in this case, and based on his questioning, it sounds like he's in the "individual" rights camp.

But Dakota Ranger brings up a good point in his post about the Heller case:

We don't licence our other rights, nor do we do background checks for the privilege of driving. When there are politicians that want to give drivers licences to illegal aliens it is disgusting to us law abiding gun owners that we have to go through a background check at every purchase.
The whole idea of having the 2nd Amendment was so that the people would be able to protect themselves from criminals and others who wish to do them harm. But what if the trespasser is the government itself? What if government was so tyrannical, so oppressive that IT was what people were protecting themselves from?

My point is that the idea of having a license program for guns seems antithetical to what the 2nd Amendment is about. Because if the government was the enemy of the people, then a firearm registration program is nothing more than a roadmap to tell the government exactly where the guns are.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think DC is hypocritical in light of the 1981 Warren vs DC ruling:
Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: ``For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers.'' The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a ``fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.'' Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap., 1981).