This is a rant. It doesn't belong in cypherpunks. Anyone who wants to discuss this further is invited to send me mail. Phil Karn says:
Well, according to the authors, "The courts have overwhelmingly supported the collective-rights interpretation" of the Second Amendment.
"... 'the people' seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained, and established by 'the people of the the U.S.' The Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear Arms ...." - Supreme Court of the U.S., U.S. v. Uerdugo-Uriquidez (1990). I keep up with this stuff. There is every indication that the court damn well knows that there is one and only one way to interpret the paragraph in question and just refuses for political reasons to take a case.
the federal government, keeping it from passing legislation that would infringe on a state's right to arm and train its militia [...] On December 6, 1982, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed [...] Under the controlling authority of the only Supreme Court case to address the scope of the Second Amendment, US v Miller, the court concluded that 'the right to keep and bear handguns is not guaranteed by the Second Amendment'. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case, letting the lower-court rulings stand."
Miller was about a sawed off shotgun, not handguns. Miller explicitly stated that ownership of military weapons was protected and that the narrow grounds for finding against Miller was that no evidence was presented that shotguns were a military weapon. Since .45ACP have been military sidearms for the better part of a century, the logic in question is, well, questionable.
You may well disagree with this state of affairs, but can you say that any of this factual information about court rulings is reported incorrectly?
Yes. Thats precisely what I'm saying, Phil. I've been to Handgun Control Incorporated meetings, Phil, and they virtually tell their members to lie. I say this from personal knowledge. They operate a mindless propaganda machine in which virtually no one questions that any tactic no matter how underhanded is perfectly acceptable to the holy cause of total bans on possession of firearms. You don't have to believe me, either. Hear it from their own words: "We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily -- given the political realities -- going to be very modest ... So then we'll have to start working again to strengthen the law, and then again to strengthen the next law, and maybe again and again. Right now, though, we'd be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal -- total control of handguns in the United States -- is going to take time .... The first problem is to slow down the increasing number of guns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. And the final problem is to make the possession of *all* handguns and *all* handgun ammunition -- except for the military, policemen, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal." - Pete Shields, Chairman Emeritus, Handgun Control, Inc. ( "The New Yorker", July 26, 1976 ) The amount of propaganda being spread about guns is astonishing. At this point, the public barely knows the difference between automatic weapons (machine guns and the like), semi-automatics (which merely means a gun that fires a bullet every time you pull the trigger) and the mythical class of "assault weapons." For everyone's information, an "assault weapon" in military terminology can refer only to a fully automatic weapon, and virtually none are sold in the U.S. To my knowledge, no legally owned fully automatic weapon has been used in a crime in the U.S. in decades. HCI constantly pretends that the NRA and others are arguing for the right to "hunt" and claims that there is no "sporting purpose" to "assault weapons". In fact, the NRA, which is not allowed by any of the networks or major magazines or newspapers to place any ads (not a joke!) defends the ownership of guns as part of the right to self defense and in any case there is no such thing as a "hunting rifle" versus a "military weapon" in any feature of design or manufacture. There are also constant lies about "newer more potent guns" when no significant change in gun design this century. The standard military sidearm of the U.S. Army untill a few years ago, the M1911, was designed in, you guessed it, 1911! (The evil "black talon" ammo they were mouthing off about recently was nothing more than ordinary hollow point ammo with a creative name. Dum-Dum ammo has been around since the middle of the last century!) The fact of the matter is that the guns available to the public have been getting less and less powerful over the years, while the crime rate has been rising. The fact also is that jurisdictions that permit concealed carry almost immediately get a reduction in crime rate -- the murder rate in Florida dropped 30% after a nondiscretionary carry permit law was put into place -- where jurisdictions that ban guns experience increases in the rates. If you want, I'll recommend five or six books on this subject.
That the Supreme Court declined to hear the case can only mean that they agreed with the Appeals Court decision and almost certainly would have voted to uphold it. Otherwise enough justices would have voted to hear it on appeal.
Thats untrue. From the early 1960s until a few years ago the court constantly refused to hear cases on flag burning EVEN THOUGH it was obvious what the opinion of the court would be given dozens of symbolic speech cases. Sure enough, as soon as they heard such a case, they threw out the law. Why didn't they hear the cases before then? The usual speculation is that the court didn't want the political flack that they were sure would come from the decision.
Once again, I would like to say that tying cryptography to the Second Amendment is exceptionally bad strategy for the Cypherpunks.
This is not an unreasonable opinion given the insane climate we have now in this country. However, this is NOT to say that the second amendment does not say what it means and mean what it says.
Worst of all are the complete loonies (some apparently on this list) who assert that guns are an essential protection against a tyrannical US Federal Government. Those who believe this have apparently never heard of the US Civil War, because the South tried exactly this over 130 years ago. (They failed, BTW.)
They failed after conducting a war that lasted for years. I would argue that they fairly well demonstrated that it is possible to conduct a fairly solid resistance even without sophisticated weapons.
It succeeded only in destroying most of an entire generation of Americans, along with much of the country. And that was before some rather significant advances in US military weaponry, vis a vis privately owned weapons.
The Vietnamese managed to beat the American Army even though they had no such weapons. Perry