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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. - MaxedOutMama I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. Kim du Toit
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. . . and so are you Wahabism Delenda Est      Hey, FEC!  BITE ME! I'm a Member of the McCain-Feingold INSURRECTION!    "Jeez, Kevin... calling you an asshole would be a huge understatement, wouldn't it?" -Jack Cluth, The People's Republic of Seabrook (Coming from you, Jack, it's an honor.)  email: gunrightsAT comcastDOTnet INVITATION: If you have never shot a firearm, regardless of your position on the right to arms, and if you live near or visit the Tucson, AZ metropolitan area, I invite you to go shooting for a day. I will provide the arms, ammunition, targets, safety equipment, range fees and instruction. All you have to do is show up. 6 Takers To Date DO YOU LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE and want to try shooting? Click HERE  Proud Gun-blogging member of the Pajamahadeen since May, 2003!
Debates: "The Commentary" A OLD discussion on gun control between me and an Irishman living in London Start here. UPDATED! Now with archive! Post #1 by Alex, a Guest A multi-post discussion hosted here at TSM My short exchange with Professor Saul Cornell of the Second Amendment Research Center Best Posts: The "Rights" Discussion: What is a "Right?" What is a "Right"? Revisited, Part I Part II Rights, Morality, Idealism & Pragmatism, Part I Part II Part III Part IV The United Federation of Planets Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection? Part I & Part II 1975 in Washington, D.C. vs. 2004 in Canton, Ohio Go Ahead, Rely on the Government for Your Protection The Other Side Liberal vs. Conservative: Both are Necessary The Mystery of Government The Blog that Ate Poughkeepsie Updated and restated as: Of Laws and Sausages Militias A Mistake a Free People Get to Make Only Once The George Orwell Daycare Center This is NOT What I Wanted to Read TRUST The Lying "News" Media, Pt. II Say WHAT? Bias? What Bias? Agenda? What Agenda? The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation Let's See if I Can "Germinate an Intelligent Thought" Here The ACLU Hasn't Changed its Tune They Never EVER Stop It is Not the Business of Government Five Reasons Why It ISN'T They Keep Making Better Fools Five Month Investigation, 10 Tracer Rounds, Two Felony Convictions That Sumbitch Ain't been BORN! On Guillotines and Gibbets England Slides Further Towards Bondage Pressing the "RESET" Button Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothin' Left To Lose A Terrible Resolve The Courts Will Not Save Us Trilogy: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions "Game Over, Man. Game Over." An Important Question And the denouement: Hudson Was Wrong The Dangerous Victims Trilogy: "(I)t's most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can" Violence and the Social Contract Governments, Criminals, and Dangerous Victims In the same vein: Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them The True Believers Trilogy: True Believers March of the Lemmings Reasonable People Also in the same vein: Tough History Coming The Culture Trilogy Culture Hubris Weltanschauung And its follow-on: In Re: Culture Technical Dissertations Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn't (And Won't) Work Spin, Spin, Spin Speaking of Teddy Kennedy... This is the Kind of Thing That REALLY IRRITATES ME Questions from the Audience?
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PROTESTWARRIOR Some people who are taking the fight to the Left. And some GREAT T-shirts, too. DAILY READS I need a longer day! Day by Day InstaPundit Lileks' The Bleat Mostly Cajun View from the Porch Of Arms and the Law TFS Magnum Ravenwood's Universe Irons in the Fire Say Uncle The Adventures of Roberta X TRUE EXCELLENCE American Digest The Belmont Club Boobs, Injuries, and Dr. Pepper The Volokh Conspiracy Michael Yon Varifrank Eject!Eject!Eject! Eternity Road Oleg Volk ON INDEFINITE HIATUS USS Clueless The Safety Valve Ipse Dixit The Lopsided Poopdeck Acidman (RIP) Skywritings Publicola D.C. Thorton Kim du Toit Personal Effects Smoke on the Water OTHER GUN/RIGHTS BLOGS Airborne Combat Engineer AlphaPatriot Alphecca American Dinosaur A Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver The Anarchangel Mrs. Anarchangel The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler Argghhh! The Bitch Girls Boots and Sabers The Breda Fallacy Gun Nuts Media Carnaby Fudge Clayton Cramer Cogito Ergo Geek Countertop Chronicles Cowboy Blob Critical Mastiff Cryptic Subterranean Found: One Troll FreedomSight From the Heartland Fun Turns to Tragedy!!! The Geek with a .45 Gunwatch Heartless Libertarian Hecate's Crossroad Hell in a Handbasket Individ Justin Buist's Blog The LawDog Files Lead and Gold Les Jones Live from the (upper) Texas Gulf Coast Mad Ogre The Michael Bane Blog Moral Flexibility Mr. Completely Murdoc Online The Munchkin Wrangler Ninth Stage No Looking Backwards No Quarters Oscar Poppa Outrageous Malfunction Pass the ammo Posse Incitatus Random Nuclear Strikes Reasonablenut Resistance is Futile! Sandcastles and Cubicles SlagleRock's Slaughterhouse Snowflakes in Hell Surly Curmudgeon Texican Tattler The Ten Ring South Park Pundit Triggerfinger The View From North Central Idaho Vox The War on Guns Weck Up To Thees! Wince and Nod Xavier Thoughts .45 Caliber Justice BLOGGERS I'VE MET A Keyboard and a .45  
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Sunday, June 05, 2005 "What rational person thinks the Constitution needs restoring?". That's from Joe Huffman's Quote of the Day, attributed to author Jack Anderson, from his book Inside the NRA: Armed and Dangerous. As Joe commented, "what rational person doesn't think it needs 'restoring'?" Antonin Scalia, perhaps my favorite sitting Supreme Court Justice has said: It is literally true that the U.S. Supreme Court has entirely liberated itself from the text of the Constitution.He's also said that the federal and Supreme Courts are, with their decisions, "building a Constitution for a country I don't recognize." There's been a long debate over at The Volokh Conspiracy over the phrase "The Constitution in exile," a concept referring to the the Constitution of the U.S. before FDR got his hands on the reins. One of the commenters at Volokh found this reference: In 1935 the Supreme Court emphatically rejected the industrial code provisions of the NIRA in A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp. v. United States. The Court, led by Chief Justice Hughes, argued that "Congress is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to others the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested." In his concurring opinion, Justice Cardozo famously characterized the industrial code provisions as "delegation running riot." But after Roosevelt's 1937 attempt to subvert the judiciary's independence by enlarging the Court, the Court never again struck down a New Deal statute on delegation grounds. Fear of Court-packing concentrated the mind wonderfully, and the judiciary chose not to stand in the path of the administrative state.Recently we've seen the publication of law professor Randy Barnett's book, Restoring the Lost Constitution, based on the belief that the Constitution has been selectively shredded for a variety of reasons over its history, beginning long before FDR. The book begins with: Growing up, I was like most Americans in my reverence for the Constitution. Not until college was the first seed of doubt planted in the form of an essay by a nineteenth-century abolitionist and radical named Lysander Spooner. In his best-known work, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), Spooner argued that the Constitution of the United States was illegitimate because it was not and could never have been consented to by the people on whom it is imposed. Although as an undergraduate I found Spooner's argument unanswerable (and I must admit so it remained until I was in my forties), the problem was largely theoretical. My mind may have doubted, but my faith remained.The point is, a lot of "rational people" think the Constitution needs restoring. Or at least a lot of refurbishment. So I found it very interesting today when I found this article at Law.com (thanks to Denise at The Ten Ring). It seems that lefty law professor Laurence Tribe has decided not to complete a second volume of his textbook American Constitutional Law. The story states: Tribe's treatise, first published in 1978, has been acclaimed as the leading -- or at least the most provocative -- modern synthesis of constitutional doctrine, assigned to countless law students and cited in more than 60 Supreme Court decisions. He revised it in 1988 and again in 1999 when the first volume of the third edition was published.Just so you know, the "individual rights view" Tribe "embraced" in the Third Edition took this form: Perhaps the most accurate conclusion one can reach with any confidence is that the core meaning of the Second Amendment is a populist / republican / federalism one: Its central object is to arm 'We the People' so that ordinary citizens can participate in the collective defense of their community and their state. But it does so not through directly protecting a right on the part of states or other collectivities, assertable by them against the federal government, to arm the populace as they see fit. Rather the amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority of the states to organize their own militias. That assurance in turn is provided through recognizing a right (admittedly of uncertain scope) on the part of individuals to possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes -- not a right to hunt for game, quite clearly, and certainly not a right to employ firearms to commit aggressive acts against other persons -- a right that directly limits action by Congress or by the Executive Branch and may well, in addition, be among the privileges or immunities of United States citizens protected by §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment against state or local government action.Prior to the Third Edition, Tribe had almost nothing to say on the Second Amendment; pro, con, or neutral. You can imagine the shockwave that rippled through the gun control community when that was published. The reason Tribe gives for not finishing Volume 2? Tribe's announcement came April 29 in a letter to Justice Stephen Breyer, who had asked him casually how he was coming on the second volume, which was scheduled to cover individual rights issues.The Constitution of the United States is, as such things go, a remarkably short legal document. It's a contract between a people and their government that's supposed to spell out the powers of and restraints on the federal government, and that's pretty much it. It runs only 30 pages long when published in hardback, whereas Prof. Tribe's tome (Vol. 1) goes 1470 pages in explaining it. Tribe expounds on the difficulty of explaining simple individual rights issues: (A)ttempting to proclaim a new synthesis would bespeak utter hubris were it not so manifestly quixotic.(Only a lawyer...) I found this interesting, too: Tribe cited the current debate over the use of international law in Court decisionmaking, renewed discussion of the "Constitution in Exile" movement, and sharp divisions over Establishment Clause doctrine as examples of flux in constitutional law. He also took a swipe at the "tragic" handling of the Terri Schiavo case by President George W. Bush and others, and conveyed a general discontent with the combative conservatism that he sees dominating the legal landscape.The edge of what, though? This last quote is one that raised an eyebrow: Vanderbilt University Law School Professor Suzanna Sherry says Tribe is "a little late in realizing there is no grand unifying theory."No? I thought the "grand unifying theory" was the rights of individuals? Didn't the Declaration of Independence spell it out pretty clearly? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.Isn't the subtitle of Professor Barnett's book The Presumption of Liberty? Yes, I think Laurence Tribe is on to something. We've perverted the intention of the Founders, folded, spindled, mutilated and shredded the meaning of the Constitution for over two hundred years, until now - as Scalia states - we are no longer bound to it in any recognizable way. The founding legal document of our nation is null and void. The "grand unifying theory" has been discarded. Constitutional law hasn't been "proceeding on a plateu or mesa," it's been hurtling down a slippery slope, and Tribe may indeed be correct when he apparently predicts an upcoming precipice. A while back I wrote The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions, the first of a four-part series I called "The Courts Will Not Save Us." Parts of this essay have been excerpted from it, but I recommend that you read that piece if you have not already as an illustration of just how far we've come since the Constitution was ratified. And I'll repeat one more quotation from my favorite appeals court justice, Alex Kozinski, in conclusion: The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.I cannot help but wonder if Laurence Tribe has seen the possibility that our disconnect from the Constitution may lead, in the not too distant future, to a time when "the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees." And I wonder how well he sleeps at night? UPDATE, 6/7: Et tu, Nino? | | |
