I'll have to take your word for it but there is no way a Conservative Judge would say something like that. But what I said is very mainstream in Liberal circles and we know there is a huge constituency out there that is constantly pounding the drum about gun violence. I have yet to read one word in any reputable media outlet trying to put forth the nuclear argument. It has no credibility at all.
But that's what you're getting. It's obvious the force of Liberalism is dominant in the Democrat Party. When you have a President poised to nominate a black woman just because, then it's clear what is happening. To me, equality means that anyone, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation etc, can be trained to achieve the same level of competence and understanding. But to the Left, it means ripping everything apart and ignoring the basis of our current laws. I hope you give me credit for stipulating those 82 million votes were cast legally.
The leap from choosing the first Black Woman to sit on SCOTUS to a claim of liberal totalitarianism (which you claim often) is a bit much. It's hyperbole without a mirror.
This is a weird thread. I'm bouncing back and forth between agreeing with and fighting with everybody on both sides.
On the flip side, when you're not one of the 82,000,000 you get the ***** grabber who wants an authoritarian state and emulates Erdogan, Putin, et al. I guess it's more of a pick your poison kind of game.
Typically that means that you're the one in the right (read: correct). Neither pole is always correct.
And here I live in Oklahoma, a registered Democrat, and I can only thing of one dude who probably doesn't need his gun and he's not as crazy now as he used to be. I just think if I have a firearm and I want to sell it to you I have some duty to validate that you are legally able to own said firearm and if I do not do that then I open myself up to certain liabilities. I also think it might be smart to make sure those in the process of domestic abuse situations might ought to have to turn in their guns while the case is proceeding. Seems like that would save some lives. These are now "gun control" stances in our crazy world. But, I was on a conference call yesterday driving down the highway and the outside temp was 71 while our discussion was about the winter weather shutdowns that we were having in 48 hours - and the earthquake that we just experienced. So, I guess we can say ****'s getting weird.
That's an "originalism" thought that some judges might hold. I've joked about people and tanks and been told that an individual owning such at item is not that odd. Whatevah Joe Rogan...
That's a good point. Following @bystander 's logic, 74.2 million people are in favor of sexual assault, coups and nepotism. Isn't it grand to use vapid claims to paint those who disagree with as extreme positions as possible? It certainly makes it easier to lay claim to being the more rational of the group after you've painted the opposition as the extreme.
I think gun owners should have to carry liability insurance, no different than the cars they own. Let the insurance companies calculate the risk of potential harm done by owning a gun. I suspect the family of 4 in the suburb who owns 1-2 guns for protection and keeps them in a gun safe may be less likely to have harm caused than by the guy with multiple misdeameanors that owns 30 guns and 1000 rounds of ammo. Let the actuarial tables drive the liability costs.
Sad that you favor taxing a Constitutionally-protected right. Oh, and someone with thirty guns and a thousand rounds of ammo doesn't do much shooting. I've easily got three times that for one handgun...a handgun, by the way, which STILL has not harmed anyone in almost 25 years...
I think part of the Sekulow problem is his ties to Trump and media presence. I don't think anyone could say the same about RBG and T. Marshall when they were "only" attorneys. Yes, they represented liberal orgs the more popular they got, but they also didn't have any equivalent of a Fox News show or blog. I challenge that Rehnquist wouldn't look conservative compared to 18th-19th century jurists. Maybe some of those guys would have been ultraconservative privately, but in terms of court cases and opinions, he'd stack right up there with the conservative-based decisions going back to the Marshall court. He's easily the most conservative of the 20th century. And deciding cases along his reasoning has become kind of a litmus test for pretty much every Federalist Society nominee. The issue with Taney wasn't activism... it was the lack thereof. They were so strict with their interpretations of the constitution and written law that they failed to intervene in even the easiest, deadliest things to identify in hindsight. And I'm not even talking about Dred Scott. The Rhode Island case where the voting restrictions were beyond pre-chartist and the man can't even state whether the court thought that the state was a republican form of government or not. "That's up to Rhode Island." They're literally setting up cannons to fight and he can't say it out loud. Although, let's be honest, I think there's a whole subset of conservatives itching for this kind of fight. I was referring to the idea that sometimes, things have restrictions. Your idea of judicial activism in reference to the 2nd Amendment is basically overturning it. Even the SLIGHTEST of new restrictions since 1968 have been repeatedly ignored, removed, or had court cases like Heller to dismantle them. If you think a 5-4 liberal majority is going to just ban all guns, then I say that has no credibility at all. If you HAVE read one word in any reputable media outlet that says to ban all guns, then link it here. Doesn't count if they're proposing a constitutional amendment.
I haven't gotten in a car accident in over 20 years yet there is a chance that I could and need to ensure that if I were to do damage to another party they are protected with my liability insurance. Requiring insurance simply means the government is enforcing you have a limited financial responsibility in the event of harm done with your gun to another party whether you shoot someone (inadvertently or purposely), or it's used due to carelessness see someone else's suicide or stolen and used in a crime. I'm not advocating that you can't have your gun but merely protecting society. We are long past confiscation of anyone's weapons being any sort of viable solution. Put accountability on the gun owner.
What you don't understand is that you create a tax that adversely impacts the poor and their ability to exercise a CONSTITUTIONAL right. There is no RIGHT to drive. THAT is a privilege. But it stands to reason that, given your political bent, you have zero qualms with the continuation of inequities between the rich and poor with respect to rights while at the same time as you stick your hand into the bank accounts of citizens. FFS, you purport to live in a City that actually put a draft out to give a goddamned police precinct building to the Burn Loot Murder group.
It's the same trap every time. We start with an interesting conversation and you jump to insulting me, my side of the political spectrum and now added on the city that I call home. Not sure you are capable of having a rational conversation on a topic. Please just put me on "ignore" because I prefer not to be insulted simply for having a different opinion. Just stay in your bubble because you clearly have no intention of having a discussion.
I consider my property taxes a fee to take advantage of my 3rd Amendment right. I laughed out loud at the "adversely impacts the poor." If you can afford ammo, you can afford insurance. You know what else adversely impacts the poor? Taking advantage of the 4th-8th Amendments with proper representation.
There are lots of law-abiding poor families who basically have a revolver that has been in the family for years and likely has had the same six rounds of ammunition as it held a decade ago. Some of those same families who would be unable to pay the unfair tax are also often the same ones who may well be driving with bare-bones liability (if that) because the store-front predators don't offer much in the way of good coverages which pay for for real injury in a worst-case scenario. As to the other poster who seems to demand I place them on ignore...NO! They can take their petty pearl clutching victim-playing and just drive on to the ignore button on their system if they don't want to face objections to their poor views.
South pole posters get put on ignore. My count is three. If Joe fan ever gets past this 1/6/21 investigation and comes back out it may go to four.
Sekulow would have been out of the question long before Trump and long before he had a Fox News show. Conservative activists don't get appointed to the Supreme Court. Liberal activists do. (A point of clarification - when I use the term "activist" on this point, I'm not referring to the commonly used term "judicial activism." I'm referring to advocates for political causes as opposed to private practice lawyers, lower court judges or law faculty.) What is a conservative justice in this context? This stuff gets hairy. From a policy perspective, you would have to put the Lochner era justices to the right of Rehnquist. They were willing to be judicial actvists of the Right. Rehnquist typically wasn't. Personally, I don't consider myself conservative when it comes to judging. I consider myself a textualist. There's a big difference. Here's why. Obviously I'm pro-life and support overturning Roe, but I don't support overturning Roe because I'm pro-life. I support overturning it because it's not consistent with the constitutional text. Accordingly, I'm just as critical of Lochner and City of Chicago v. McDonald (which favored the Right) as I am of Roe. They're every bit as wrong, and I'll happily condemn them just as harshly. I'm not itching for any kind of fight. However, I assume you're referring to Luther v. Borden. If you read the opinion, he didn't really leave it to Rhode Island. He left it to Congress. Do you really think the Supreme Court should have decided that some shadow government was the legitimate authority of the State of Rhode Island? Because that's what they were effectively asking the Court to do. You do know that case is still good law, right? There's a reason for that. Dred Scott is the big stain on Taney (not Luther), and that was an act of rank judicial activism.
I can see two pretty big distinctions and I'll try to be civil. For starters, you have a constitutional right to bear arms and don't have a constitutional right to drive a car. So it's going to be hard for a federal laws putting such an encumbrance on the exercise of the right to bear arms to pass constitutional muster. (At least in Deezestan, a state law would be fine.) Second, why do we impose liability insurance requirements on drivers? You're right about the policy argument, but that logic could be applied to all sorts of situations in which we don't require liability insurance. There are reasons why we require it specifically of drivers. It's because driving is ubiquitous, so if we didn't, it would have massive, systemic consequences. Countless innocent people would be getting massively hosed every day. Furthermore, the probability of damage-inducing accidents is very high. In fact, they are routine. This isn't generally true of gun owners. I'll admit that I don't know the numbers, but I'm willing to bet that a far greater percentage of cars are involved in potential tort liability than guns. It's just a lot easier to get in a car wreck than to screw up with a gun.
Just because you have a right to bear arms doesn't mean it has no cost. Utilizing your logic I can walk into a gun store and walk out with a firearm and claim that I have a constitutional right to bear that arm. Or better yet, I have a "natural right" to protect myself. On to your second point, the cost of the insurance would likely be significantly less costly for my six shooter than for my fleet of 6 cars. Statisticians would square this away PDQ.
Even someone from Oklahoma should be able to see that there is a difference between legalizing theft and not having the government imposing an artificial encumbrance on the right to buy a gun. I'm sure it would be cheaper, but that isn't the point. The point is that firearm ownership doesn't meet the criteria most legislatures apply in deciding to require auto insurance.
My issue with Rhode Island was that Congress wasn't about to intervene because of everything else going on in 1850. So Taney was like "welp... have at it Rhode Islanders" and that's obviously not a good decision in terms of preventing actual human cost. While he's right that Congress should be able to know it when they see it, I think many instances show that Congress will do what Congress does without regard for consequences. Like allow a civil war instead of legislate. They very well could have ruled that the original government charter of RI was nullified by ratification of the US Constitution, but they left it up to kismet. I wouldn't have an issue with textualism if we were just an amorphous blob of a country with one overall set of laws. It'd be a hell of a lot easier to decide cases and eliminate activism. And, I think it's kind of a reason that liberals are jealous of places like Denmark and wherever else they cite as socialist-capitalist utopias. Paid maternity leave? Sure! Everyone! Not just people from this province or this department or this _____. My issue with being against all of your caselaw is that it creates a need for a court that has to go and figure out what those issues really come down to, and a lot of the time, it comes down to political leaning, popular support (or lack thereof), and what the number of justices out of those 9 think about it. Using the text of Chicago's law for McDonald or Texas's law against abortion means that it's going to come into conflict with not just beliefs but laws from other levels of government. So, the answer divides people, both figuratively in political leaning and potentially physically (if one so chooses to move to a state more fitting of their needs). It's like 50 toddlers and the Supreme Court is expected to wrangle all of them in time for lunch. And that takes activism sometimes. Because the only recourse otherwise is just to have all libs move to blue states and all conservatives to move to red states and stick with the texts of whatever they produce.
If you want to make it constitutional then put the insurance premium on ammunition for the gun. I'm certain someone can account for presence of ammo or not in insurance premiums. I know you are aware, that "right to bear arms" translation you are using now is not the version the SCOTUS held until the 1970's. That was when the NRA effectively changed our legal view for that to be an absolute right, unencumbered by rules, and diminished the clause "well regulated militia" which is in the same sentence as the right to bear arms. I'm not even arguing over removing guns though...just forcing gun owners to be more responsible. We put that insurance requirement on drivers when cars became ubiquitous and the damage they did when used carelessly became an issue for the other drivers. As of right now per Americangunfact.com 38% of Americans over the age of 18 have a gun and the US has 393M guns in the marketplace. Compare that with only 276M registered automobiles. Yes, we have >100M more guns that cars in homes. With Open Carry and expanded concealed carry laws the guns are even more prevelant. They are now outside of the homes. Guns are the most common murder weapon (by magnitudes), the most common suicide option and accidental deaths. This site has unverified (by me) information on accidental gun accidents. I'm saying, that the US fascination with gun ownership has now crossed that same divide that we did with cars where the volume of them results in more injuries by their users so those users should be financially liable for the responsibility they choose to bear. Above are some numbers. We can argue about where the threshold should be but I'm saying we've past it and with the open carry laws we KNOW gun accidents (and violence) will be more pervasive so it's time to get ahead of it. No, I don't think forcing gun owners to have insurance will cure gun violence any more than liability insurance for cars has forced all those who refuse to get the insurance to stop driving. Anything that forces a would be gun owner to recognize the awesome power of the gun in their possession and treat it responsibly is a good thing, IMHO. For those who care, I own 2 guns, a handgun and a shotgun primarily for personal protection in the home. Both are in a gunsafe in my bedroom and I'd be willing to pay additional insurance for the responsibility of owning them.
But the natural right to protect yourself has to be balanced with property rights which are also natural. You can't violate someone else's natural right to enjoy yours.
The courts decided to start using the original intent of the Founders and not the 19th and 20th century meanings of the words "well regulated". "Well-regulated in the 18th century tended to be something like well-organized, well-armed, well-disciplined," says Rakove. "It didn't mean 'regulation' in the sense that we use it now, in that it's not about the regulatory state. There's been nuance there. It means the militia was in an effective shape to fight."' https://constitutioncenter.org/images/uploads/news/CNN_Aug_11.pdf
Curious what you'd do with the following scenarios, if anything more than what current laws allow: 1) a gun owner who let his/her insurance expire 2) a gun user (not the owner) who didn't have insurance as the gun wasn't registered [this case is weapon not used - just found on the person] 3) a gun user (not the owner) who didn't have insurance as the gun wasn't registered [this case is weapon is used]
