Fate of 2nd Amendment resolution in Shasta County uncertain – Record Searchlight

Shasta County Supervisor Patrick Jones brought a Second Amendment resolution to Tuesday evenings board meeting, and he was confident he had the votes to pass it.

But the fate of the resolution is in limbo after Supervisor Kevin Crye chose to abstain because he wanted to seek personal legal advice and asked for more time to decide how he will vote.

Among Cryes concerns is whether ignoring the advice of County Counsel Rubin Cruse Jr. could expose him to personal liability.

Crye abstaining resulted in a 2-2 vote. Jones and Supervisor Chris Kelstrom voted to approve the resolution. Supervisors Tim Garman and Mary Rickert voted no.

Jones, who is the chairman of the board, was critical of Crye for abstaining, saying, Supervisor Crye, you are paid to make decisions and a yes or no should be the appropriate response.

Crye countered with, Im paid to make good decisions, well-informed decisions.

The deadlock capped two-plus hours of public comment in a packed meeting chambers, which were festooned with red-white-and-blue balloons brought by supporters of the Second Amendment resolution who anticipated supervisors passing it.

They argued it was not a gun-rights issue, but a moral issue and passing the resolution would protect Shasta County from the tyrannical state of California.

Detractors countered that what the board wanted to do was an overreach and redundant because when supervisors take the oath of office, they vow to defend the Constitution and all its amendments, including the Second.

More:Dj vu: Shasta supervisor wants to allow county employees to carry guns to work

Many who spoke out against the resolution also said they support the Second Amendment.

Kelstrom said the Second Amendment is unique and deserves to be spotlighted and supported by Shasta County because its under siege in California.

At one point Jones argued with Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson over the meaning of the Second Amendment before the two agreed to disagree.

Supervisors did vote 3-2 to revisit the resolution at their March 14 meeting. Garman and Rickert voted no.

Jones and Kelstrom wanted to pass a Second Amendment resolution that in large part kept the wording brought by the California Rifle & Pistol Association, not the red-line edited version Cruse and Johnson endorsed.

Jones put more stock in the opinion of the California Rifle & Pistol Associations legal counsel, which he characterized as experts on the Second Amendment.

Cruse said supervisors dont have the authority to determine what is constitutional, and what the California Rifle & Pistol Association submitted would put the county in legal jeopardy. His edited version included language that said county officials have the right not to enforce any laws that violate the Second Amendment, as determined by precedential decisions made by courts of competent jurisdiction.

I am for you guys passing this (resolution) but I am also for it with the edits by staff for all the legal reasons that were put forth and I could go over those again, Johnson said.

Like it or not, California does recognize your rights to bear arms. They do it via CCW (concealed carry weapons permits). The Supreme Court has not ruled on the opinion of open carry versus concealed carry, the sheriff added.

Johnson said he will not let California, or any other legislative body erode the right to bear arms. But he said he will not do that if it means violating his oath or if it violates current federal or state laws.

He made some news when he announced that if the courts rule that open carry is a constitutional right, then stand by, folks, well be going to open carry.

Johnson added that the conflict of the Second Amendment comes down to interpretation and those interpretations can lead to the struggles and differing opinions.

Ironically, that was on display when Jones questioned Johnson about concealed carry laws, noting that the Constitution doesnt say you need a CCW permit.

I dont see anywhere in the Constitution in the Second Amendment where it says you can open carry or conceal carry, Johnson said.

It says you have the right to keep and bear arms, period, Jones said.

It doesnt say you can walk around with it openly or concealed or anything else, Johnson said.

Exactly, Jones said.

Supervisor Garman agreed with Cruse and Johnson and said endorsing the California Rifle & Pistol Association version could cost taxpayers money in legal fees to fight the courts over the issue.

I think we owe it to our county to be fiscally responsible, Garman said.

Supervisor Rickert called the resolution an overreach.

I do believe in and support the Second Amendment, she said. As a board we dont have the ability to interpret the Constitution to meet our own personal agenda. Im a concealed weapons permit holder. Our family has three gun cases full of firearms.

We cant supersede what the courts designate, she added.

About three hours before Tuesday evenings meeting, Shasta County Citizens for Stable Government announced it had served supervisors with a cease-and-desist letter that said the Second Amendment resolution, as agendized, violated Californias open meeting law, the Brown Act.

Cruse said the item as it appeared on the agenda was not a violation of the Brown Act. He also said Jones did not have a conflict of interest by bringing the resolution to the board.

Jones helps manage his family's gun shop, Jones' Fort in east Redding.

Before the meetings, some three-dozen people signed a petition supporting the restriction of firearms in public buildings.

Jones has said he plans to bring a proposal to the board in March that would allow county employees to carry concealed weapons on county property. He said county employees have as much a right as the general public to carry at county buildings.

At the meeting, Shasta County Citizens for Stable Government spokeswoman Susanne Baremore told supervisors that including a loyalty oath for county employees in the resolution would be unconstitutional.

In the end, Jones and Kelstrom agreed to remove that clause in the resolution.

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Fate of 2nd Amendment resolution in Shasta County uncertain - Record Searchlight

Washington business owners fed up with crime turn to the Second Amendment for protection – Fox Business

Gun sales see a surge amid coronavirus, riots

Crime-weary business owners in Washington state are reportedly arming themselves to protect their stores against robberies and other offenses as overall gun permits surged 7% in just one year.

"There are store owners and store clerks who want that additional protection," Tom Matos, owner of Securit Gun Club in Woodinville, told King 5.

Matos said that he saw an increase in business owners visiting his shooting range and gun store back in 2020, in the wake of mass protests and unrest after the killing of George Floyd. Woodinville is located about 20 miles outside of Seattle, which was a national focal point of 2020s violent summer.

"Once the pandemic started and once the riots started in Seattle, we did notice an increase in store owners coming in and purchasing firearms at that time," Matos said.

2ND AMENDMENT STEPS IN AFTER COPS STEP BACK IN WAKE OF DEFUND MOVEMENT IN CHICAGO

Handguns for sale at gun shop. (Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images / Getty Images)

The trend has slowed down in the years following, but he believes those store owners still have their firearms to defend their businesses.

INCREASED GUN SALES 'DON'T FIT THE CARICATURE' OF THE TYPICAL OWNER, ONLINE FIREARM RETAILER SAYS

On Monday, the co-owner of a smoke shop in Seattles Ballard neighborhood was involved in a shoot-out with a would-be robber. The suspected criminal was shot dead, while the co-owner is in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound, according to King 5.

The King Smoke Shop in Seattle, where a shootout took place between the co-owner and a would-be robber. (Google Maps)

Data from the Seattle Police Department show robberies slightly ticked up in 2022. There were 1,755 robberies in the city in 2021, compared to 1,760 in 2022.

FIRST-TIME GUN OWNERS TOTALED AT LEAST 5.4M IN 2021, GROUPS SAYS

The entrance for Securit Gun Club in Woodinville, Washington. (Google Maps)

Data from the Washington State Department of Licensing, according to King 5, found that there were 643,317 active concealed pistol licenses in 2021. As of September 2022, there were 688,440 such licenses.

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

King 5 reported that other gun stores in the area reported that, overall, the gun owner demographic is shifting. One business, which did not disclose its name, reported it has seen more members of the Asian American and LGBTQ communities purchasing guns over fears of being targeted.

Read the rest here:

Washington business owners fed up with crime turn to the Second Amendment for protection - Fox Business

Want Meaningful Gun Regulations? First Rein in the Supreme Court. – The Bulwark

The 79th mass shooting of the year occurred early Sunday morning, when a gunman killed one person and left seven injured in Memphis, Tennessee. (The Gun Violence Archive defines mass shootings as involving a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter.) This was less than a week after three Michigan State University students were killed in a firearms rampage on campusand five years to the day after seventeen people were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. With hundreds of millions of firearms in circulation in the United Statesa 2018 analysis put the number over 390 million, meaning that there are more guns than there are Americans, and that was before the huge pandemic-era spike in gun salesthe upward trend of senseless gun massacres in America shows no signs of abating.

To be sure, a major barrier to reform is that right-leaning politicians are afraid to support even the most basic restrictions on gun possession for fear of losing power. President Joe Biden signed into law the most significant gun legislation bill in thirty years, but relative to gun restrictions in other countries, its provisionssuch as tougher background checks for buyers under 21 and funding to encourage states to implement red flag laws to remove guns from those considered a threatare dismayingly weak.

In June of last year, the U.S. Supreme Court made things immeasurably worse. Prior to New York Rifle & Pistol Assn v. Bruen, voters had space to elect representatives in state and federal legislatures who might be collectively willing to pass reasonable gun safety laws. That changed when the Supreme Courts six-justice conservative majority constitutionally tied the hands of state legislatures, ensuring they cannot achieve meaningful public safety reform around gun violence.

The most obvious answer to the Supreme Courts clampdown on gun reform would be a constitutional amendment to the Second Amendment. Good luck with that.

But there is another option, having to do with Congresss express constitutional power to restrict the federal judiciarys ability to review Second Amendment cases in the first place. It sounds far-fetched, but the existing precedent on this issuealbeit thin and datedgives Congress loads of authority here.

Lets start with a few words about the implications of the Bruen decision. More than a century ago, New York state enacted laws making it a crime to possess a firearm in public without a license, but allowed individuals to have or carry a concealed pistol or revolver if they could demonstrate proper causea term that subsequent state court decisions defined as a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community. In its Bruen ruling last year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the New York statutes on Second and Fourteenth Amendment grounds, effectively drawing a barrier of constitutional protection around guns that could prove legislatively insurmountable.

In Justice Clarence Thomass opinion for the 6-3 majority, he laid out a new test for laws that bump against what he called the Second Amendments unqualified command to protect public carry: The government, he wrote, must now justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nations historical tradition of firearm regulation. Applying the new test to New Yorks lawwhich, again, was not new but had been on the books for half the age of our constitutional systemhe concluded that American governments simply have not broadly prohibited the public carry of commonly used firearms for personal defense or made public carry contingent on a showing of a special need. So under the Bruen holding, when judges are asked to rule on whether a particular gun law is constitutionally permissible, they must dig into the history books (or maybe jump into a time machine) to determine whether there is an American tradition of analogous gun laws. Thomas does not offer specific criteria for determining what snippets of history will now make a particular gun restriction part of a historical tradition (and therefore okay) instead of a dispensible rule from an outlier jurisdiction (and therefore not okay)but there is no escaping the fact that it is a significantly subjective call. Under his own test, Thomas acknowledged the support that postbellum Texas provides for New Yorks proper-cause requirement. He simply chose to ignore it.

It didnt have to be this way. Prior to 2008, the Court construed the Second Amendments obvious purpose as to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of militias, which were composed of civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion who when called for service . . . were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time. The longstanding militias-only reading was scrapped in District of Columbia v. Heller, when the Court for the first time read the Second Amendment to protect the individual right to bear armsbut only for handguns and only in the home for self-defense.

Bruen extended the self-defense rationale outside the home, paving the way for other sensible public safety laws to be declared unconstitutional and precluding legislaturesand votersfrom curbing guns in the streets. Applying Bruen, a federal judge in West Virginia ruled in October that a law prohibiting possession of firearms with altered or removed serial numbers was unconstitutional. In November, a federal district judge in Texas ruled that a federal law prohibiting people with restraining orders against them from possessing firearms was unconstitutional. This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned the conviction of a man who had violated the same federal lawwith the judges noting that the laws aims of keeping domestic abusers from possessing firearms were laudable and salutary, but that they were forced by the Bruen decision to deem it unconstitutional.

So if anything is to be done about guns in America, something needs to be done about the Supreme Court.

While Congress has discretion to create the lower federal courts, which it did starting in 1789 with the first Judiciary Act, the Constitution specifically establishes one Supreme Court. With rare exceptions, the Constitution also confines the Supreme Courts authority to reviewing cases filed in the first place in the lower courts. Article III, section 2, clause 2 specifically provides that such appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, is restrained by such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. This so-called Exceptions Clause means that Congress can narrow the categories of cases the Supreme Court can consider on appeal.

In 1869, the Court thus held in Ex parte McCardle that Congress had the constitutional power to strip the Court of its authority to hear petitions under the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867, which provided access to Supreme Court review for persons in custody denied a constitutional right. During post-Civil War Reconstruction, William McCardle, a newspaper editor, was arrested and jailed for sedition after criticizing a Union military commander and Congress. After the Court had already heard the case, Congress passed and President Andrew Johnson signed legislation removing the Supreme Courts jurisdiction to hear appeals under the 1867 law. In its opinion, the Court reasoned that without jurisdiction, the court cannot proceed at all in any cause and refused to inquire into the motives of the legislature. In language that seems strikingly textualist (and thus conservative) to the modern ear, it wrote of Congresss constitutional authority: We can only examine into its power under the Constitution, and the power to make exceptions to the appellate jurisdiction of this court is given by express words.

Republicans in Congress have tried to strip the federal courts of their jurisdiction many times since. In 2003, for example, Rep. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced a bill to ban federal courts from hearing First Amendment challenges to mandates that public school students cite the Pledge of Allegiance, including its under God verbiage. No shortage of other Republicans have in recent decades called for jurisdiction stripping to keep the courts out of areas where conservatives dislike how they have tended to ruleincluding abortion, same-sex marriage, prayer in school. Indeed, back in the 1980s, when congressional Republicans were considering several jurisdiction-stripping laws, a young Reagan administration lawyer named John Roberts defended the constitutionality of such measures.

And jurisdiction-stripping isnt the only kind of restraint on the courts that Republicans have proposed. In 2005, Rep. Ron Lewis (R-Ky.) introduced the Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act, which would have allowed Congress to reverse a Supreme Court judgment by two-thirds vote. Although Lewiss proposal might not survive McCardle, Congress could, at least in theory, pass a law mandating that Supreme Court decisions on constitutional issues be unanimous, as the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights once argued.

More to the point, if Congress somehow managed to reinstate its 1994 bipartisan law banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, it could prevent the Supreme Court from striking it down on appeal by exceptingor taking awaythat class of cases from the Courts jurisdiction. Likewise, if a state legislature were to pass a restrictive gun law in the name of public safety, Congress could protect it from Supreme Court interference by altering its appellate job description.

No doubt, as with the debate over whether Congress should legislatively increase the number of Supreme Court justices (i.e., Court-packing), critics would argue that a jurisdiction-stripping law aimed at the Second Amendment would turn the scope of the Courts docket into a political football, vulnerable to the whims of congressional majorities and White House occupants. Moreover, given what little precedent exists on the subject of congressional attempts to strip the Court of its jurisdiction, the current majority could vote to strike down a law that restricts its power. But nothing in the Constitutions text gives it the final say on these matters. The Court gave itself that role in the landmark 1803 decision, Marbury v. Madison, and no enforcement mechanism exists to ensure that the other branchesor the peoplefollow its edicts.

Limiting the Supreme Courts jurisdiction on Second Amendment matters would at least have the benefit of keeping voters in the loop. As it stands, the Court has so severely constrained the ability of the elected officials in state legislatures and in Congress to restrict guns that law-abiding parents are mostly left to just teach their children to duck, run, and hide.

See the original post here:

Want Meaningful Gun Regulations? First Rein in the Supreme Court. - The Bulwark

Gun-Selling Supervisor’s 2nd Amendment Resolution Polarizes Citizens. (Will Unpermitted Weapon-Toting … – A News Cafe

iTuesday evening in Redding, hundreds of concerned, curious citizens arrived early to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors vestibule outside the board chambers. The expectant crowd crammed together to secure seats inside for a politically polarizing popular agenda item: R4, a Second-Amendment resolution sponsored by Redding gun-seller/Shasta County Supervisor chair Patrick Jones.

Soon after Tuesdays board agenda became public, agenda item R4 became the shorthand nickname for Jones proposed resolution.

Citizens gathered outside the Shasta County Board chambers in anticipation of the meeting to decide the fate of agenda item R4.

There seemed little gray area; people were either passionately for R4 or vehemently against it.

(Click here to read journalist R.V. Scheides story about the Second Amendment, what happened with Jones resolution and the meetings outcome.)

The audience contained the usual cast of such now-familiar ultra-conservative local personalities as the Plumbs (if the 1rst Amendment doesnt work, weve got the 2nd Amendment), the Rapozas (the time has come for 51 State of Jefferson devotees) and the Gallardos (citizen journalists/identical twins), who came bearing party balloons.

Richard Gallardo untangles patriotic party balloons as KCNR radio host Win Carpenter joins others waiting to enter the board chambers.

The list goes on. There was Lori Bridgeford, the anti-vax citizen journalist; Kathy Stainbrook, cheerleader for the lie-based recall of former Dist. 2 Supervisor Leonard Moty; Woody Clenenden, Cottonwood Militia leader; Lani Bangay, Patriot State of Mind co-host; Mark Kent and Win Carpenter, KCNR radio co-hosts: Bob Holsinger, failed Shasta County Clerk candidate, and many more.

However, this meeting was unique for its considerable number of relatively rare faces, many of whom carried anti-R4 signs, some of whom were last seen inside the chambers protesting Shasta County Health Officer Karen Ramstroms baseless 2022 firing.

Citizens attended a spring 2022 Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting with signs that protested her dismissal.

A folding table outside the board chambers held anti-R4 petitions signed by people, some of whom were unable to stay for the meeting as there were no more available seats.

Judging by the comments and the crowd, there seemed about a 50/50 split between those who were in favor of R4 and those who were not.

Before the board proceeded any further regarding the resolution, Jones asked for Shasta County Counsel Rubin Cruses input on whether those whod accused Jones of having a disqualifying financial conflict of interest he sells guns were correct.

Cruse put Jones mind at rest. Cruse said that in order for there to be a disqualifying financial conflict of interest, the boards decision must have a material financial effect on Jones that is distinguishable from its effect on the general public.

Some might dispute Cruse on that point, and argue that a board-approved Second Amendment resolution would absolutely financially benefit Jones, starting with the fact that fundamentally, Jones Second Amendment resolution is about guns. Jones sells guns in his family-owned Jones Fort, one of the best-known North State gun stores, a firearms community staple thats been in business for more than 50 years.

Jones Fort gun shop

A recent Google search of Shasta County gun store put Jones Fort in second place. Jones Fort receives free publicity every time a news story mentions Jones occupation as a gun salesman at his family-owned gun store (A News Cafe is guilty as charged). Jones couldnt buy better advertising than what he gains at no charge as a board chair with a lifelong gun-store affiliation. The more guns he sells, the more money he makes.

Also, Cruse mentioned the general public in his disqualifying-financial-conflict-of-interest litmus test. But how many people out of more than 182,000 Shasta County residents sell guns from namesake businesses?

Maybe this is an apples-and-oranges comparison, but Rickert leaves the board chambers and recuses herself from voting on anything remotely related to her ranching business.

Alas, that theoretical debate is moot. Cruse provided the final word as Shasta County Counsel: No, Jones Second Amendment resolution does notpresent a disqualifying financial conflict of interest for Jones.

From left: Shasta County Dist. 1 Supervisor Kevin Crye, Dist. 5 Supervisor Chris Keltstrom, Dist. 2 Supervisor Tim Garman and Dist. 3 Supervisor Mary Rickert.

Eventually, Jones addressed the meetings main event: his long-awaited Second Amendment resolution, which Jones said was two-and-a-half years in the making.

Perhaps youve already heard that by the meetings end, Jones Second Amendment resolution wasnt approved. However, the resolution wasnt completely rejected, either. Rather, the resolution is now in limbo, thanks to a decision made by Crye, something so unexpected that it caught approximately 99.999 percent of the spectators by surprise.

Nope. Didnt see that one coming.

Todays post wont get into the weeds of Jones resolution, since A News Cafe journalist R.V. Scheide already covered the big picture.

A standing-room-only crowd awaited the Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting that would vote on the controversial 2nd Amendment resolution sponsored by Supervisor Patrick Jones. Photos by Doni Chamberlain

More than 30 citizens commented on R4. Some people brought signs that detailed their opinions.

Although roughly two-thirds of the commenters said they were in favor of Jones resolution, the majority of them seemed ignorant of the Jones intentions for the resolutions. Some speakers waxed poetic about the virtues of guns. A few offered well-worn phrases proclaiming guns dont kill people; people kill people. Others addressed mass shootings. Yet others went off on tangents about arming teachers.

Even Siskiyou County resident Jess Harris, who introduced himself as affiliated with the Northern California Rifle and Pistol Association, missed the point of Jones resolution. Instead, he focused on the benefits of self-defense.

A lot of this has to do with protecting our way of life, Harris said. I know Sacramento doesnt get it, I know San Francisco doesnt get it. I dont care. I dont care what they think. They dont live here. We do. The Second Amendment is not up for interpretation tonight. (Hear his complete comments at 3:09:47.)

Numerous speakers emphasized that they were strongly in favor of the Second Amendment, but strongly opposed to Jones Second Amendment resolution.

Im not against the Second Amendment, said one woman. But I am against our county government being the interpreters of the Second Amendment.

Stainbrook received loud cheers of approval when she said Shasta County should play by Gov. Gavin Newsoms rules and make Shasta County a Second Amendment sanctuary region.

Chair Jones interrupted one womans comments when she mentioned her disappointment in the board majoritys recent vote to ditch the Dominion voting machines. Jones scolded her for being off topic. However, never was heard a discouraging word from Jones when Lori Bridgeford veered sharply off topic and referred to several key former county road block employees by name who either no longer work for the county or will soon leave. Likewise, it was radio silence from Jones when Bridgeford promoted the militia.

Were all part of the militia, Bridgeford said. So when this street jungle happens, when it hits the fan and the collapse happens and the shelves are empty and trains through town blow up whatever were on our own.

Conservative radio host Mark Kent saw another benefit for Jones Second Amendment resolution.

Mark Kent.

The state needs you unarmed and obedient how else are they gonna control you? Kent said. I think you guys need to get this thing in place for no other reason than just give the middle finger of defiance to all these people who are trying to take our rights away.

On and on it went.

Ultimately, as speaker Judy Salter reiterated, nobody in that room was against the Second Amendment. On that point, everyone agreed.

Watch the entire Feb. 21, 2023 Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting here.

More evidence of chair Jones selective, double-standard admonitions arose when speakers Missy McArthur and Salter each made references to feelings of discomfort to imagine guns inside the board chambers.

Jones piped up and schooled McArthur and Salter. He said the resolution discussion wasnt about firearms in the countys administrative building, and perhaps they were unaware that properly permitted people were carrying weapons at that very moment during the meeting.

Jones message garnered raucous, sustained applause and hoots of approval. But Jones wasnt finished.

So Im very happy to hear that youre in support of our Second Amendment resolution, Jones said, clearly enjoying the dig. Back in the audience Salter corrected Jones.

I do not support your resolution, Salter countered, as Jones talked over her thank you Judy and literally turned his head and attention to the next speaker.

Redding resident Ray Thomas, president of the Five Counties Central Labor Council, was one of several speakers who cautioned the supervisors that adopting Jones resolution could embroil the county in costly, inevitable litigation.

Ray Thomas.

Thomas began by reminding the supervisors of previous emails hed sent them that outlined potential labor-relations issues that would surely follow the adoption of Jones resolution. Thomas spelled out just one example.

You would not only be in violation of over 30 provisions of your nine labor agreements, you would be in violation of governmental code 35.04, Thomas said. (Hear his complete statement at 3:04:51 on the streaming video.)

Jeff Gorder.

Retired attorney and former Shasta County public defender Jeff Gorder delivered a lively impassioned speech steeped in legal explanations.

This strikes me as not about the Second Amendment, Gorder said of the R4 resolution.

Everybody agrees we all support the Second Amendment. We support the First Amendment, we support the Fourth Amendment. Lets have resolutions that everybody supports all the amendments. What this is about is Patrick Jones is trying to have it so that the board of supervisors will be the determinant of what is constitutional. Mr. Cruse is trying to save the board from legal jeopardy. I guarantee you that if the board votes against the redlined edition, it will be clearly unconstitutional because many of you dont seem to understand that we are a rule-of-law nation; that the legislature makes the laws, the executive enforces the laws, the judiciary interprets the laws. Not the board of supervisors; the judiciary. So, what youre trying to do is unconstitutional, Mr. Jones.

Gorder then directed his next comments to supervisors Crye and Garman, men he hoped were independent thinkers.

I would just caution you, dont go down the road of Mr. Jones and Mr. Kelstrom, Gorder said. Its only going to lead to bad things.

Some members of the crowd heckled Gorder, who responded with a chuckle.

Im just here to tell you that Ill come out of retirement and sue the county if this resolution is passed with the language as it stands, he said. Its going to cost you money, just as its going to cost you money with the Dominion voting machines.

Approximately half of the audience laughed, while the other half shouted and booed.

Out of left field, Jones rudely quipped, as Gorder left the lectern, There once was a lawyer I thought I liked, but I was wrong.

Approximately half of the audience clapped and cheered, while the other half shook their heads and half groaned.

(Go to the 3:45:10 mark of the meetings recording for Gorders full statement.)

After more than an hour of public comments, Sheriff Michael Johnson approached the lectern. Before the meeting, there was much social-media speculation about how the sheriff would react to Jones Second Amendment resolution. Would he show up? Would he speak? Would he side with Jones? Would he reject or accept the resolution?

Johnson did speak, and when he did, he performed an artful verbal tightrope walk; as if balanced over a tank of sharks, trying with all his might to not fall in. Johnsons a confident speaker. Tuesday he was a one-man good-cop bad-cop who frequently tossed chum nuggets into both sides of the tank. His comments had something for nearly everyone.

He started with bold statements in which he described himself as a staunch Second Amendment advocate. He received instant applause when Johnson said he supported Shasta County being a Second Amendment sanctuary county. In fact, Johnson recalled that while he was Andersons police chief he tried to get the NRA to make Anderson a Second Amendment sanctuary city.

Johnson talked about his sworn oath to follow and enforce laws, but he did not talk about the fact that by its very definition, a Second Amendment sanctuary region does not recognize or obey restrictive gun control laws.

Johnson briefly made the pro-R4 folks happy when he said he was in favor of the Second Amendment resolution. However, their elation soon evaporated when Johnson clarified that because of the potential legal ramifications to the county, he was only for the Second Amendment resolution version with the redlined edits suggested by county counsel and staff. Almost as an aside, he reminded the group that California already does recognize citizens rights to bear arms albeit with proper permitting. Johnson said hes personally not afraid of CCW-permitted gun owners, because theyve been vetted by his office.

I know that they are responsible citizens that have gone through the process, and have firearms and will be my backup be your backup, Johnson said. God forbid we need them to.

Pro-R4 folks loved that line. Anti-R4 folks winced.

Johnson made a pitch for people to go through the training and obtain a CCW permit. He explained why permits were necessary, namely to ensure the safety of all citizens, and to prevent firearms from getting into the wrong hands.

The pro-R4 folks werent thrilled to hear what Johnson had to say next about the issue of open carry, a topic especially popular during the 2022 election debates. Johnson said he would not allow open carry until it was deemed legal by the courts, but if the day arrived when open-carry was deemed constitutional, then hed welcome that ruling.

Johnsons closing statement was the first of two particularly stunning declarations made that evening.

But first, some context: Supervisors Kelstrom and Jones (unsure about Crye) have openly boasted their refusal to apply for a CCW permit. They say its their God-given right to carry guns without the governments permission.

With that fact in mind, the unpermitted supervisors had rude awakening with Johnsons next statement.

Make no mistake about it, the laws that are on the books are on the books, Johnson said. If you carry a gun loaded or unloaded, open or concealed without a permit currently, the Shasta County Sheriffs Department will enforce that law. You will be arrested. We will take your gun as evidence and you will be prosecuted. That is hard and fast right now.

Cue crickets. At least until Jones snapped out of it, put the sheriff on the spot and took him to task.

By now, anyone whos listened to Jones speak for any length of time knows that when Jones says, with all due respect that what follows next is probably anything but. Jones, who apparently considers himself a legal scholar, pushed back against the sheriff.

No constitutional right has to have a permit, Jones argued, to loud applause. Logic would say that concealed weapon permits are not a constitutional right. Its not a constitutional right. No permit.

Johnson waited until Jones was finished.

Thats your interpretation, Johnson said, which prompted Jones assertion that eight of the nine circuit courts agreed with Jones.

Johnson replied that he didnt see anywhere in the Constitution where it says people can open-carry or concealed-carry. So it went, back and forth, until Johnson said he wouldnt debate it; that theyd have to disagree.

When Jones asked if any of the other supervisors had further questions, only Crye spoke up. He told Johnson he appreciated him being there. Not exactly a question, but it would be one of Cryes last noncontroversial statements of the night.

You didnt have to come, Crye said to the sheriff, stating the obvious.

Moderate applause followed Johnson as he exited the board chambers, only for him to be quickly buttonholed in the hallway for several minutes by Terry Rapoza, who gave the sheriff a booming what-for about the Constitution.

Newly appointed Dist. 1 Supervisor said he struggled with the R4 agenda decision. Photo by Doni Chamberlain.

At last, after County Counsel Rubin Cruse had painstakingly combed over the redlined resolution chapter and verse, line by line, and patiently responded to all Jones queries, questions and lawyer-splaining, it was nearly time for the supervisors to decide upon Jones Second Amendment resolution.

Crye, whos already demonstrated his tendency to be consistently incongruent, offered yet more evidence that his words and claims often dont jibe with his actions. Likewise, Cryes frequent lofty descriptions of himself are sometimes diametrically opposed to his actual persona and track record.

Exhibit A: Cryes opening statement about the R4 decision.

Ive never cowered from a fight on a purpose I felt strongly about, Crye said.

See original here:

Gun-Selling Supervisor's 2nd Amendment Resolution Polarizes Citizens. (Will Unpermitted Weapon-Toting ... - A News Cafe

The Second Amendment isn’t a public health problem – Washington Examiner

What is the nation's greatest public health threat?Axios, an online political publication, commissioned a survey by Ipsos asking this and other health questions. The opioid crisis (26%) and obesity (21%) took first and second place overall. That should be no surprise, for they are dire problems, directly or indirectly responsible for much suffering and hundreds of thousands of deaths annually. Opioids in particular, despite being smaller than the others, are alarming for their sudden onset.

What is astounding, however, is what is evident when breaking down the survey answers based on political affiliation. It is Republicans alone who make opioids and obesity the top two concerns. Democrats have entirely different priorities than the average respondent.

RED STATES CAN LEAD THE WAY IN PROTECTING MARRIAGE

Among Republicans, the greatest threat to public health is "opioids/fentanyl" (37%), followed by obesity (25%) and cancer (17%). Those are all reasonable answers that reflect serious health problems.

A plurality of Democrats, on the other hand, lists "gun or firearm access" (35%) as the No. 1 threat to public health.

Of course, "gun access" is not a health problem not a disease, not a condition, but a constitutional right that can be taken away only through due process. At least 37% of households take advantage of that right, according to the survey. Gun access also does not cause diseases or deaths. People can use guns to cause deaths out of malice, self-defense, a desire to self-harm, which actually is a health problem, and carelessness.

The second-most common way to die by gunshot, after suicide, is in the commission of a crime. Crime also isn't a health problem. But even if one treats it as a health problem, it does not mean that guns cause crime. Democratic prosecutors who go easy on dangerous criminals cause crime. Even though mass shootings are exceedingly rare, even many of them can be placed at the feet of prosecutors for example, the Michigan State University shooter would have been in jail or at least deprived of his right to own firearms had he been properly prosecuted for previous crimes and not allowed to plead down to a misdemeanor. The man who roamed the East Coast shooting defenseless homeless people was likewise let off the hook by a liberal prosecutor in northern Virginia, allowed to plead his way out of a kidnapping and attempted rape charge. Such examples abound.

The fentanyl and opioid overdose issue is a genuine and serious health threat. Opioids are extremely addictive, and addiction is common because they have been so dramatically overprescribed. Fentanyl is a deadly threat, far more potent than anything people had seen before. Opioid overdoses killed more than 100,000 people between April 2020 and April 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Likewise, those who gave obesity as the answer are spot on, given the appalling rate of death due to heart disease, the nation's leading killer, complications from diabetes, and other obesity-related ailments. Cancer is the second-leading cause of death.

But every Democrat who claims that the biggest health problem is "gun access" is burying his or her head in the sand on matters of health. Whether this is due to President Joe Biden exacerbating the opioid problem or to ideological hatred that other people have gun rights, 35% of them answered this question as if they did not live in the real world. That's generously assuming that it is reasonable to consider COVID-19 the nation's most serious health risk in 2023 a dubious proposition, to which another 9% of Democratic respondents subscribe.

It is at least heartening that almost as many Democrats cited real health threats, such as opioids, obesity, and cancer (43% combined), as the most serious health problems facing the nation. But it is clear that Democrats' thinking has been deeply infected by the fallacy that everything is political or that woke Twitter is real life.

Indeed, maybe more people should have offered "social media" in answer to the survey's main question.

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The Second Amendment isn't a public health problem - Washington Examiner

Shasta County Second Amendment resolution pushed to March 14th – KRCR

One man at the supervisors meeting held up a sign saying "Hey white nationalists fascists, stop killing us" at the top of the sign.

There was barely any standing room inside the packed board chambers during the first nighttime Shasta County Supervisors Meeting of 2023. Many hot topics were discussed, ranging from the Palo Cedro Town Center Specific Plan to the California Conservation Corps. However, one of the biggest items on the agenda, drawing in the large crowd, was the item related to the Second Amendment Resolution.

The resolution was not approved but voted to be brought back to the agenda at the March 14th meeting.

KRCR

Properly permitted visitors can carry their weapons onto county property, however, licensed county employees cannot. Supervisor, and Owner of"Jones' Fort" Gun Store, Patrick Jones wanted to change that and brought a resolution to the board prohibiting officials from enforcing any law deemed "unconstitutional," in regards to the Second Amendment.

However, after hours of discussion and public comment, it did not pass: two yeas and two nays with an abstention from Kevin Crye. Instead it was voted on to be brought back so that Supervisor Crye could speak with his lawyer. The vote was made to bring back the item for a possible vote on March 14th.

The resolution was initially drafted and submitted by the California Rifle and Pistol Associationin collaboration with the Shasta County Gun Owners. County staff also revised the resolution to make sure it does not exceed the board's legal authority.

Patrick Jones address the crowd before pubic comment about the resolution he brought forward.{{ }}

This is not the first time an item like this has come up.The board considered adopting a similar resolution almost two years ago. However, Supervisor Joe Chimenti, who was the chairman at that time, pulled the agenda because of the 2021 Boulder Colorado mass shooting, which occurred just a day prior.

During Tuesday's meeting, the public shared mixed opinions. Some held signs saying, "No! On R4!" Some shared their opposition with the board about supporting the second amendment but not the resolution.

Others shared they believed this resolution was the right move and urged the board to vote for it.

The supervisors board room was full with only standing room left.{{ }}

A group of concerned residents are speaking out against the proposed amendment. The Shasta County Citizens for Stable Government filed a cease and desist letter to supervisors Tuesday morning.

According to the Brown Act, agendas for public meetings of governing boards much accurately describe an issue and the actions to be taken, the group said in a release. While the proposed resolution has been heavily edited by Shasta County Counsel, the group expects the board majority will ignore most, if not all, the changes recommended to ensure the document is legally compliant."

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Shasta County Second Amendment resolution pushed to March 14th - KRCR

COLUMN: Protecting our Second Amendment rights | Free … – ECM Publishers

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Letters sound off on gun violence and voting – South Bend Tribune

Letters to the Editor| South Bend Tribune

At the risk of sounding jaded, callous and cynical, the solution to mass shootings seems simple to me.

1)Change Congress, and

2) Change gun laws

Nothing will change until American voters vote the rascals out of office who are bought by the NRA and elect congressmen(and women) who want to change the laws.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right to own a weapon but does not guarantee the right to own a military-style assault rifle.

Dave Rohrer

Plymouth

I read recently that state Rep. Tim Wesco has authored a bill to make voting by mail in Indiana harder. I guess the 23 measures that our Secretary of State advertised that had made our elections safe and secure are not enough. We need to take even more measures to make voting even harder. I do not remember hearing or reading that there was any voter fraud in Indiana, so why is Indiana falling for conspiracy theories or is it just an excuse to actually make voting harder?Being a property-owning white male, I am among the people the Constitution gave the right to vote to originally. I am disappointed that one of the only two major political parties we have is doing everything it can to make voting harder. Every person over the age of 18 who has not committed election fraud should have easy access to vote for the government representation they want.

Don't worry, I will figure out how to photocopy my drivers license to send in with my application to vote absent. Because I plan on always being out of town on Election Day, and voting by mail is easier and more secure or at least it has been before the Republicans came along to change the laws.So, after you make voting by mail insecure, what is next? Voting Democrat? I wish I was able to move away from Indiana; this state is becoming increasingly hostile to fairness and equality, as the only people with a voice are fearmongering conspiracy theorists.

Howard Turner

Elkhart

Recent news shows we have more than 50 mass killings across our country this year. We are in the 21st century, and still have barbaric behavior in the USA. Contrary to political rhetoric, this indicates we are not the greatest country in the world, but compete with Second World. People are being killed by semiautomatic weapons in groups, there are daily shootings in our cities and even a 6-year-old shoots his teacher.

Current gun rules are too shallow to be useful. Many in Congress are practicing hypocrites by what they do and dont do to make our country better. Leadership? What happened to respect? Many describe themselves as right to life, yet do nothing to diminish this problem of losing lives. The Second Amendment is 232 years old, antiquated and irrelevant. A reason to have a gun is to kill someone.

With all such killings, they have one thing in common: the tools they use are guns. To help solve this problem, we need to remove these tools from our society. Can we do it? It might be difficult but we are the USA and we can do anything if we wish. As a country, are we safer with no guns or if all of us have guns?

Tom Nowak

South Bend

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Letters sound off on gun violence and voting - South Bend Tribune

This Isn’t Your (Founding) Fathers’ Originalism – The Bulwark

In Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the federal law preventing domestic abusers from possessing firearms is now void. Thats thanks to a recent ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Rahimi, in which the court clearly indicated discomfort with the conclusion the Supreme Court forced it to reach.

A court order barred Zackey Rahimi from stalking a former girlfriend and from possessing a firearm. But Rahimi demonstrated spectacularly that he still had a gun. Within a two-month period, he fired multiple shots into the home of a narcotics customer, shot at the driver of a car involved in an accident with his car, returned after leaving the accident scene to fire more shots at the drivers car, shot at a Texas constables vehicle, and fired multiple shots in the air when a friends credit card was declined at a restaurant. After a trial court rejected Rahimis claim that the Constitution entitled him to keep and bear his gun, he pleaded guilty to violating 18 U.S.C. 922, which makes it illegal for those under court orders like his to possess any firearm orammunition.

Even if prohibiting the possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order is a laudable policy goal, the Fifth Circuit ruled earlier this month, the statute violated the Second Amendment. The court reachedor was forced to reachthat conclusion in a troubling way.

For most of our nations history, the victims of domestic violence were entitled to little legal protection. In 1874, the North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the assault and battery conviction and $10 fine of Richard Oliver after he came home drunk, criticized the bacon and coffee, cut two four-foot switches, and whipped his wife. The court wrote: We may assume that the old doctrine, that a husband had a right to whip his wife, provided he used a switch no larger than his thumb, is not the law in North Carolina. But it added: If no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty, nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forgive and forget.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, public officials became less inclined to draw the curtain. In 1994, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which contained the language the Fifth Circuit struck down. The court noted that this law embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society, but it said a recent Supreme Court decision tied its handsNew York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which the Court handed down one day before it overruled Roe v. Wade.

Before Bruen, eleven federal courts of appeals had agreed on a standard for judging whether firearms restrictions violate the Second Amendment. This standard would have allowed judges to take account of the interest of domestic-violence victims in not being shot. But Justice Thomass opinion for the Court forbade judge-empowering interest-balancing. It declared that judges may consider only the Second Amendments text and its history.

To justify a firearms regulation, the government now must prove that this regulation is consistent with the Nations historical tradition of firearm regulation. And to make this showing, the government must point to analogous regulations that were in place before 1900.

The Courts scavenger hunt standard seems likely to mark the end of many firearms regulations. In June, a special session of the New York legislature enacted a new firearms law to replace the one the Supreme Court struck down in Bruen. But a federal judge provisionally held twelve provisions of this new law unconstitutional, including its prohibitions of carrying concealed handguns at airports, zoos, parks, bars, buses, churches, theaters, and political demonstrations.

Another federal judge wrote of a federal statute that outlaws the possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number: Certainly, the usefulness of serial numbers in solving gun crimes makes [this statute] desirable for our society. But he then held the statute unconstitutional.

A third federal judge put the issue this way when, a few months before the Fifth Circuit ruling, he became the first to strike down the federal statute protecting the victims of domestic violence: Domestic abusers are not new. But until the mid-1970s, government interventionmuch less removing an individuals firearmsbecause of domestic violence practically did not exist. The judge observed that, although the historical tradition of disregarding domestic violence was likely unthinkable today, the Supreme Court had made this tradition decisive.

Its sometimes the duty of courts to strike down salutary and well-intentioned laws that violate the Constitution, but the current Court is interpreting the Constitution in a new way. The interpretive doctrine of originalism championed by the late Justice Antonin Scalia and others emphasizes that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the original public meaning of its texthence the term originalism. But Bruen identifies no prevailing public understanding of the Second Amendments text at the time of its enactment. Instead, it focuses on whether a particular sort of firearms regulation was in place at that time or shortly thereafter, and it treats the failure of early legislatures to act as determinative of the amendments meaning. In fact, the failure of a legislature to approve a regulation provides almost no evidence that this regulation would be unconstitutional or that anyone thought it would be. If early American legislatures didnt require background checks or outlaw gun possession by the mentally ill, those omissions neither establish nor indicate that these regulations violate the Second Amendment. Its far more likely that legislators simply saw no need for them or saw no way to implement them. The Court appears to have missed the distinction between declining to act and lacking the power to do so.

The Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit have construed the Second Amendment to require continued adherence to a long tradition of legislative inaction, however shameful this tradition and however determined to end it the peoples elected representatives eventually became.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has promised to seek review of the Fifth Circuit ruling. The Justice Department may soon give the Court an opportunity to establish a more historically justified and less peculiar interpretive standard.

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This Isn't Your (Founding) Fathers' Originalism - The Bulwark

Floridians want open carry, and lawmakers should listen to them – Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Luis Valdes| Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Only three states fully prohibit the open carry of firearms by citizens, and I bet youd be surprised to hear Florida is among them. Yes, we frustratingly find ourselves in the company of New York and Illinois on this issue. And Republican leaders, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, appear poised to keep it that way under the misnamed constitutional carry bill that is expected to pass this session.

Gun owners saw right through the faade when House Speaker Paul Renner threw a press conference at the end of January to celebrate introduction of the constitutional carry bill.

On the one hand, it does go a long way in restoring the rights of our residents and visitors alike to carry arms in public for self-defense without a permit. On the other hand, the bill falls short of every constitutional carry law in the country by quietly omitting the right to carry openly. So our leaders are trying to appease one side and fool the other.

I drove eight hours to testify at a hearing earlier this month on the current bill, and walked away ecstatic when witness after witness demanded the addition of open carry. In contrast, when pressed about open carry afterward, sponsor state Rep. Chuck Brannan (R-Macclenny) apathetically stated the bill is what it is as filed. Meanwhile, Brannan's sentiments were shared by Florida Senate President Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples).

This indifferent attitude is standing in the way of what the majority wants and are united in demanding.

Republicans, who are members of the party that champions the Second Amendment, hold a supermajority in our Legislature. Instead of taking insignificant baby steps they hope will appease their base, they should take the large leaps for freedom which they have promised the voters. Lawmakers in more politically divided states have introduced and passed the very policy we are demanding and guess what it's popular!

Forty-seven states have open carry on the books in some fashion, including 25 via authentic constitutional carry laws. Even Hawaii, a Democrat supermajority-run state whose entire economy relies on tourism, has open carry.

The same old arguments about bad people getting guns and Wild West shootouts materializing in the streets will be raised, but we have a mountain of evidence from other states to refute these claims. And to clarify, this legislation has nothing to do with acquiring firearms rather it only authorizes those who already own firearms legally to carry them in public without government permission.

Now is the chance for Gov. DeSantis to once again step in and snag victory from the clutch of defeat by the members of his own party in the Legislature. While hes catching some flak over other Second Amendment missteps, DeSantis can prove the doubters wrong with this issue by demanding open carry before anything gets his signature.

We dont want watered down legislation. We want the great leap that other states have taken, which will put Florida at the forefront of liberty on another critical issue and far away from New York, Illinois and Washington, D.C. Im urging Floridas leadership to get it done the right way!

Luis Valdes is the Florida state director for Gun Owners of America, a nonprofit, grassroots lobbying organization. He is a former police officer and detective.

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Floridians want open carry, and lawmakers should listen to them - Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Why the Mainstream Media Refuses to Learn Anything About Guns … – America’s 1st Freedom

When The New York Times tweeted out a photo of shotgun shells last December as art to promote an editorial arguing that America needs another ban on popular, semi-automatic rifles, anyone with even a little firearms knowledge laughed.

If the editorial board at The New York Times had the gun expertise to quibble, they might have tried to weasel out of the gaffe by noting there are quite a few tactical shotguns made to look and function something like the AR-type rifles on the market todayand, certainly, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would be happy to point out that such shotguns have almost always been included in any proposed assault-weapons ban.

But then, a semantic game like that would make the Times ignorance even funnier. It would be like that Monty Python skit about the dead parrot. When a dissatisfied customer returns to a pet shop after recently buying a parrot that actually had been dead for some time, the shop owner tells him the dead bird is just resting. The skit keeps getting funnier because, even as the customer insists, as well as clearly demonstrates, that parrot should be pushing up the daisies, the pet-store owner just keeps right on insisting it is only resting.

Like the shop-owners unflinching persistence in the skit with the dead parrot, the mainstream medias plainly obvious ignorance of firearms and everything to do with the Second Amendment is, nevertheless, often tossed at us with a straight-faced insistence that, regardless, they are right about everything. They continue to insist that theyre right even as the policies they embraceso-called bail-reform laws that allow caught criminals to walk right back onto the streets, woke prosecutors who refuse to prosecute violent criminals and moreare clearly harming law-abiding citizens.

Is It Just BecauseThey Can Get Away With It?This ignorance of guns posing as informed righteousness is so pervasive among the gun-control elite that former President Barack Obama (D) didnt realize he was about to make a fool of himself in 2013.

Obama responded to a question asking whether hed ever fired a gun by saying, Up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time.

Former President Barack Obama (D) once had this photo taken to prove hed shot a gun. Look closely, and youll see why this photo was mocked.

At first, his reply sounded like it had just the right amount of you-dont-know-me savoir-faire to not only deflect the question, but to make the person who asked it look like foolish. But then it turned out that Obama couldnt back up the claim.

Someone soon called his bluff. On CNN, then-Rep.Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) challenged Obama to prove he had shot a gun by showing everyone a photoshe even challenged him to a skeet-shooting competition.

With Obamas man card in question, he responded.

A few days later, the White House released a photo of Obama skeet shooting. Only, it was a very odd photo. The over/under shotgun he was shown shooting only had an extended choke in the top barrel. There could have conceivably been a flush choke in the bottom, but that would be odd, as skeet is typically shot with the same choke in both barrelsand skeet does require doubles. Obama also holds the shotgun nearly parellel to the ground and he looks uncomfortable with it. Still, in the photo, gas can be seen shooting from the shotguns top barrel, so yes, he certainly shot the gun, at least once.

So, why didnt Obamas White House call in an experienced shotgunner to make sure they got it right? Why didnt The New York Times seek just one fact checker who could help them get basic firearms details right? Why dont all of the outlets that pretend that popular semi-automatic rifles are a big problem (when rifles of all types, according to FBI Uniform Crime Reports, are used in less than 3% of homicides each year) at least try to get this stuff right? Why didnt New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) consult county sheriffs or a myriad of other people who are knowledgeable about guns, crime and our constitutional rights before hastily writing and signing the Orwellian-named Concealed Carry Improvement Act?

These questions go on and on; indeed, whenever a mainstream-news outlet dives into issues related to firearms, gun owners see less-humorous versions of the mainstream medias wanton ignorance of guns, coupled with obnoxious preaching about what laws must be passed to punish lawful gun owners, on display.

Its impossible for an informed person not to notice that gun-control proponents want to take away Second Amendment rights, even though they dont understand the difference between a rifle and a shotgun or a semi-automatic and a machine gun. Politicians like President Joe Biden (D) say they are for the Second Amendment, but then, in the next breath, they tell us the Second Amendment doesntdespite what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Heller (2008)protect the ownership of commonly owned firearms. They refuse to look at the data showing that the citizens who lawfully carry concealed basically dont commit crimes, and then, in the same series of talking points, they tell us that lawful gun ownership is fueling a crime wave.

Now, the entire reason for this willful ignorance of an important topic cant just be that they dont think they have to get this stuff right, as few in popular culture or the mainstream media will call them out on it; after all, they must find some of these gaffes embarrassingthe Times tweet with the shotgun shells ended up on top of Fox News webpage!

Surely, part of the explanation is they see themselves as the college-educated class, the new smart set, and so they just assume they know more than those deplorable gun owners possibly could. But that cant be the whole answer, as again, they dont likely enjoy playing the fool.

What Lies Beneath This IgnoranceIve probed for answers to these questions many times when interacting with mainstream news journalists around tables in congressional hearings, on media junkets to visit government agencies and even during a long wait in the White House press room. Ive often found that the power structure of their workplace hierarchies insists that they stay in step with a gun-control orthodoxythey are less likely to be promoted if they dont adhere to the tenets of gun-control politics. This is the explanation Stephen Hunter, the author of the Bob Lee Swagger series of thrillers and a now-retired Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic for The Washington Post, gave me when I interviewed him for my book The Future of the Gun.

But, along with this self-protective reason for conformity from the mainstream-media members Ive encountered is often a smug expression, a contempt-loaded shrug, a snarky smile or an I-know-better-than-you disdain. They are sure they are rightso certain they dont need to even debate the point. So insecure, actually, they view debating this issue as slumming or even as dangerous. Or, perhaps, they sense their own ignorance, and so shy away.

What this comes down to, as far as they are concerned, is they are right and enlightened therefore any counterpoints they might encounter are simply the opinions of extremists, or even just thoughts from the less-educated; after all, a majority of college graduates voted for President Bidens campaign promises for more gun-control (indoctrination in academia has had its impact) in 2020.

Now, a lot of opinion writers and social scientists have explained this political conformity by noting that many Americans prefer to stay in news bubbles, echo chambers, or information silos. They explain this by noting that those on the left watch CNN, PBS and MSNBC and read, say, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times; whereas those on the right watch Fox News and Newsmax, listen to talk radio and read a growing number of conservative news sites. Meanwhile, adding to this bifurcation of national opinion is the fact that social-media algorithms spit out certain politics to target users who have shown they like particular points of viewthese algorithms are designed to get more clicks by feeding people what they like to consume.

All of that is true up to a point, but, as Barton Swaim recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, when you look at the country as a whole, this echo-chamber explanation has its limits.

The fact is, the left controls much of popular culture today; therefore, the gun-control-promoting bubble is just about everywhere they go. If a gun-control supporter is exposed to a competing opinionor just the plain facts on crimeits likely from some CNN talking head or an NPR show host mocking the opinion or simply talking it away; typically, these show hosts call anything they dont understand or agree with on guns extreme, and, just like that, its swept from their minds.

Even if a gun-control proponent runs into a gun owner in a store, sporting event or restaurantwhich must happen all the timegun owners tend to be quiet about the fact that they own, and perhaps carry, firearms, so the gun-control backer wont even know they are in the company of a gun owner.

In contrast, someone who appreciates their right to keep and bear arms runs into anti-Second Amendment opinions everywhere they go. Its on TV. Its constantly on the networks nightly news. Its on the local news. It was blaring on CNN in airport terminals as we waited for flights until the CNN Airport Network shut down in 2021. Now and then, even sports casters repeat it before games. Hollywood films and shows are full of it. YouTube, Facebook and more censor gun ads, but not the gun-control point of view. A gun owner, or anyone who appreciates this basic freedom, cant just hide in a gun-rights bubble.

This enables the gun-control elitist to actually think their views are enlightened, even though they are so often uninformed, as their point of view on the Second Amendment is championed in all the smart and snarky places across popular culture. So, then, given that their views, by their definition, are enlightened, why should they bother to try to understand those with actual experience with guns?

This impasse can be frustrating for anyone who appreciates their right to ownor to potentially defend themselves withmodern and popularly owned firearms because not only are gun-control groups insisting that the good armed citizens in our society are, despite all evidence, actually bad; and not only are they actually insisting that the real bad actors (the criminals in our society) are mostly just misunderstood; but they also insist on all of this with the raised chin and haughty smile of a superiority complex.

Now, surely, a gun-control purist on the editorial board of The New York Times and like publications can conceivably have their anti-Second Amendment belief system rattled to the core by any criminal who tries to break into their home, attempts to carjack them, robs them on the street or otherwise shows them firsthand that the police cant protect them instantaneously wherever they are. But, without such a confrontation (and we dont wish that on anyone), a gun-control-believing elitist can just assume they are right.

So, What Can We Do About This Impasse?Gun owners do need to mock gun-control elitists in the media and in politics, at least a little. Teasing them with memes or sly and funny remarks and critiques with links to the facts (such as to articles at A1F.com) on social media can be helpful, as this is the language they understand. Anecdotally, it feels to me like this is happening more on Twitterthanks Elon Muskthan it used to, which is a big deal. But a light-hearted approach is best. No trolling or meanness, pleasethat isnt helpful. Gun-control supporters actually need help. They need an education. It is easy to be turned off by harsh and snarky ridicule, but a lighthearted poke can make someone stop and thinkmaybe even click on a link.

There are millions of new gun ownersmany bought guns for self-defense when riots exploded in 2020. These millions of people need to learn how to be responsible gun owners. They need to learn how to use this freedom and they need to learn about this freedom. Every breakthrough to an individual who once thought the mainstream-media narratives on guns were, despite all the evidence, right, is a small step in the right direction. This is a civil-rights movement, after all, and the NRA is the association leading the way. Let people know this by telling them to join and by pointing them to NRA resources, such as nrainstructors.org.

This needs to be a nonpartisan issue again. And it can be. Even HBOs Bill Maher recently noticed that the far-lefts politics, which includes a hatred for the right to keep and bear arms, have become so obnoxiously woke that theyre not funny anymore. They are preachy. They are dishonest. They insist on a narrow orthodoxy thats stifling. This has made non-woke shows and movies that treat guns like tools, not as talismans of evil, such as Paramounts Yellowstone, feel so good. Such examples are freeing, as they are not restricted to a body of lies.

Such is how, over time, the mainstream culture can swing back to something more reasonable on this fundamental issue. It has happened before in America. There are, conservatively, over 100 million law-abiding gun owners in the U.S. right now. Thats a lot of potential influencers.

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Why the Mainstream Media Refuses to Learn Anything About Guns ... - America's 1st Freedom

SBHE: Amendments to the higher education budget bill would … – Prairie Public Broadcasting

The state Board of Higher Education is formally opposing amendments to the higher education funding bill, concerning how payment of non-renewed college presidents is handled.

This comes after some Legislators questioned the package given to former NDSU President Dean Breschani. Breschani was paid for the remainder of his contract, and became a tenured professor at NDSU.

In response, the House passed an amendment to HB 1003, saying the University System has to reimburse NDSU for that agreement something Chancellor Mark Hagerott says would be a big hit to the central office budget. A second amendment would require approvals of those kinds of agreements by the states Emergency Commission, and the Legislatures Budget Section.

Hagerott told the Board this is an erosion of the Constitutional authority of the Board.

"This is not how to transition long-serving, or even short-serving, presidents," Hagerott said. "I've talked to several senior legislators, and people in other branches of government involved in the Emergency Commission, saying 'That's the Board's job you need to defend yourself. We can't get into that business.'"

The measure will now be in the state Senate and the Board is hoping the amendments will be removed there.

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SBHE: Amendments to the higher education budget bill would ... - Prairie Public Broadcasting

Effort to ban paramilitary groups from mobilizing in New Mexico progresses through Roundhouse – KRQE News 13

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.(KRQE) Theres a push in the roundhouse to essentially ban private militias in New Mexico. In the past few years, weve seen controversy as armed and uniformed paramilitary groups showed up at protests, and along the border. This bill is partially in response to what happened in Albuquerque in 2020 when a group calling themselves the New Mexico Civil Guard got involved in the Oate statue protest.

The state constitution prohibits private paramilitary activity, but today New Mexico doesnt have a law thats tailored to effectively preventing paramilitary groups from mobilizing for acts of intimidation and violence, says Mark Baker, Albuquerque attorney and expert witness for the bill.

House Bill 14 defines a paramilitary organization as a group with three or more people associating under a command structure. It stops people from publicly patrolling or drilling as a paramilitary group, interfering with government operations, pretending to be peace officers, or intimidating other people.

The discussion also cited an incident when a paramilitary group was stopping and detaining people on the Mexican borderexperts saying that case led to federal charges, but not state.

No one from the public spoke in opposition to this bill, but Republican Representatives John Block and Martin Zamora voiced their concerns about Second Amendment rights and how much latitude this would give prosecutors. Im thinking of rural areas. It may be a very long time until police can get there to the scene. And [an] insurrection that happens, people start storming a building and good Samaritans, Madam Chair, Representative, who may or may not be armed are protecting that building and the public employees within itI think that this could potentially charge them when theyre just trying to do a civic duty as an American to protect their fellow Americans, Block said.

The bill calls for charges ranging from a misdemeanor to a first-degree felony depending on the severity of the violation.

Baker said this law does fall within constitutional parameters, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paramilitary activity can be regulated by the states. It also falls within constitutional parameters. Justice Scalia in District of Columbia vs. Heller recognized the Second Amendment as an individual right; in that decision, cited an 1886 case noting that private paramilitary activity can be regulated by the states, Baker said.

The bill passed the House Government Committee on a six to two-vote. It heads to the House Judiciary Committee.

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Effort to ban paramilitary groups from mobilizing in New Mexico progresses through Roundhouse - KRQE News 13

Second Amendment | Text, Meaning, Definition, & History

Top Questions

What does the Second Amendment say?

The original text for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Does the Second Amendment allow owning guns for self-defense?

Who wrote the Second Amendment?

The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, was proposed by James Madison to allow the creation of civilian forces that can counteract a tyrannical federal government. Anti-Federalists believed that a centralized standing military, established by the Constitutional Convention, gave the federal government too much power and potential for violent oppression.

Which U.S. Supreme Court justices think the Second Amendment recognizes the individuals right to bear arms in self-defense?

Do militias exist in the United States today?

Modern militias are most commonly known as State Defense Forces (SDFs). As of 2010, 23 states and territories maintained their own SDFs. Unlike federal organizations such as the National Guard, SDFs are under the sole jurisdiction of state or territorial governments and cannot be commanded by the federal government.

Is ownership of an assault weapon constitutional?

The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act in 1994 banned private use of assault weapons, such as certain semiautomatic rifles. This federal ban expired in 2004. Some U.S. states have laws that prohibit assault weapons.

Second Amendment, amendment to the Constitution of the United States, adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, that provided a constitutional check on congressional power under Article I Section 8 to organize, arm, and discipline the federal militia. The Second Amendment reads, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Referred to in modern times as an individuals right to carry and use arms for self-defense, the Second Amendment was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, according to College of William and Mary law professor and future U.S. District Court judge St. George Tucker in 1803 in his great work Blackstones Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as the true palladium of liberty. In addition to checking federal power, the Second Amendment also provided state governments with what Luther Martin (1744/481826) described as the last coup de grace that would enable the states to thwart and oppose the general government. Last, it enshrined the ancient Florentine and Roman constitutional principle of civil and military virtue by making every citizen a soldier and every soldier a citizen. (See also gun control.)

Until 2008 the Supreme Court of the United States had never seriously considered the constitutional scope of the Second Amendment. In its first hearing on the subject, in Presser v. Illinois (1886), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment prevented the states from prohibit[ing] the people from keeping and bearing arms, so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security. More than four decades later, in United States v. Schwimmer (1929), the Supreme Court cited the Second Amendment as enshrining that the duty of individuals to defend our government against all enemies whenever necessity arises is a fundamental principle of the Constitution and holding that the common defense was one of the purposes for which the people ordained and established the Constitution. Meanwhile, in United States v. Miller (1939), in a prosecution under the National Firearms Act (1934), the Supreme Court avoided addressing the constitutional scope of the Second Amendment by merely holding that the possession or use of a shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length was not any part of the ordinary military equipment protected by the Second Amendment.

For more than seven decades after the United States v. Miller decision, what right to bear arms that the Second Amendment protected remained uncertain. This uncertainty was ended, however, in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), in which the Supreme Court examined the Second Amendment in exacting detail. In a narrow 54 majority, delivered by Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court held that self-defense was the central component of the amendment and that the District of Columbias prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court also affirmed previous rulings that the Second Amendment ensured the right of individuals to take part in the defending of their liberties by taking up arms in an organized militia. However, the court was clear to emphasize that an individuals right to an organized militia is not the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendments guarantee.

Because the Heller ruling constrained only federal regulations against the right of armed self-defense in the home, it was unclear whether the court would hold that the Second Amendment guarantees established in Heller were equally applicable to the states. The Supreme Court answered that question in 2010, with its ruling on McDonald v. Chicago. In a plurality opinion, a 54 majority held that the right to possess a handgun in the home for the purpose of self-defense is applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendments due process clause.

However, despite the use of person in that clause, the McDonald decision did not apply to noncitizens, because one member of the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas, refused in his concurring opinion to explicitly extend the right that far. Thomas wrote, Because this case does not involve a claim brought by a noncitizen, I express no view on the difference, if any, between my conclusion and the plurality with respect to the extent to which States may regulate firearm possession by noncitizens. Thomass conclusion was also supported by his view that the Second Amendment should be incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendments privileges or immunities clause, which recognizes only the rights of citizens.

The relatively narrow holdings in the Heller and McDonald decisions left many Second Amendment legal issues unsettled, including the constitutionality of many federal gun-control regulations, whether the right to carry or conceal a weapon in public was protected, and whether noncitizens are protected through the Fourteenth Amendments equal protection clause.

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Second Amendment | Text, Meaning, Definition, & History

Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

1791 amendment protecting the right to keep and bear arms

The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution protects the right to keep and bear arms. It was ratified on December 15, 1791, along with nine other articles of the Bill of Rights.[1][2][3] In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court affirmed for the first time that the right belongs to individuals, for self-defense in the home,[4][5][6][7] while also including, as dicta, that the right is not unlimited and does not preclude the existence of certain long-standing prohibitions such as those forbidding "the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill" or restrictions on "the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons".[8][9] In McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) the Supreme Court ruled that state and local governments are limited to the same extent as the federal government from infringing upon this right.[10][11] New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (2022) assured the right to carry weapons in public spaces with reasonable exceptions.

The Second Amendment was based partially on the right to keep and bear arms in English common law and was influenced by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Sir William Blackstone described this right as an auxiliary right, supporting the natural rights of self-defense and resistance to oppression, and the civic duty to act in concert in defense of the state.[12] Any labels of rights as auxiliary must be viewed in the context of the inherent purpose of a Bill of Rights, which is to empower a group with the ability to achieve a mutually desired outcome, and not to necessarily enumerate or rank the importance of rights. While both James Monroe and John Adams supported the Constitution being ratified, its most influential framer was James Madison. In Federalist No. 46, Madison wrote how a federal army could be kept in check by state militias, "a standing army... would be opposed [by] a militia." He argued that state militias "would be able to repel the danger" of a federal army, "It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops." He contrasted the federal government of the United States to the European kingdoms, which he described as "afraid to trust the people with arms", and assured that "the existence of subordinate governments... forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition".[13][14]

By January 1788, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and Connecticut ratified the Constitution without insisting upon amendments. Several amendments were proposed, but were not adopted at the time the Constitution was ratified. For example, the Pennsylvania convention debated fifteen amendments, one of which concerned the right of the people to be armed, another with the militia. The Massachusetts convention also ratified the Constitution with an attached list of proposed amendments. In the end, the ratification convention was so evenly divided between those for and against the Constitution that the federalists agreed to the Bill of Rights to assure ratification. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that, "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendments [sic] means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress, and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government."[15] In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment did not protect weapon types not having a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia".[16][17]

In the 21st century, the amendment has been subjected to renewed academic inquiry and judicial interest.[17] In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision that held the amendment protects an individual's right to keep a gun for self-defense.[18][19] This was the first time the Court had ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's right to own a gun.[20][21][19] In McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Supreme Court clarified that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Second Amendment against state and local governments.[22] In Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016), the Supreme Court reiterated its earlier rulings that "the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding" and that its protection is not limited to "only those weapons useful in warfare". The debate between various organizations regarding gun control and gun rights continues.[23]

There are several versions of the text of the Second Amendment, each with capitalization or punctuation differences. Differences exist between the version passed by Congress and put on display and the versions ratified by the states.[24][25][26][27] These differences have been a focus of debate regarding the meaning of the amendment, particularly regarding the importance of what the courts have called the prefatory clause.[28][29]

The final, handwritten original of the Bill of Rights as passed by Congress, with the rest of the original prepared by scribe William Lambert, is preserved in the National Archives.[30] This is the version ratified by Delaware[31] and used by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.[32]

Some state-ratified versions, such as Maryland's, omitted the first or final commas:[31][33][25]

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The ratification acts from New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina contained only one comma, but with differences in capitalization. Pennsylvania's act states:[34]

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.[35][36]

The ratification act from New Jersey has no commas:[31]

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

The right for Protestants to bear arms in English history is regarded in English common law as a subordinate auxiliary right of the primary rights to personal security, personal liberty, and private property. According to Sir William Blackstone, "The... last auxiliary right of the subject... is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is... declared by... statute, and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression."[a]

The English Bill of Rights of 1689 emerged from a tempestuous period in English politics during which two issues were major sources of conflict: the authority of the King to govern without the consent of Parliament, and the role of Catholics in a country that was becoming ever more Protestant. Ultimately, the Catholic JamesII was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution, and his successors, the Protestants WilliamIII and MaryII, accepted the conditions that were codified in the Bill. One of the issues the Bill resolved was the authority of the King to disarm his subjects, after King Charles II and JamesII had disarmed many Protestants that were "suspected or knowne" of disliking the government,[37] and had argued with Parliament over his desire to maintain a standing (or permanent) army.[b] The bill states that it is acting to restore "ancient rights" trampled upon by JamesII, though some have argued that the English Bill of Rights created a new right to have arms, which developed out of a duty to have arms.[38] In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court did not accept this view, remarking that the English right at the time of the passing of the English Bill of Rights was "clearly an individual right, having nothing whatsoever to do with service in the militia" and that it was a right not to be disarmed by the Crown and was not the granting of a new right to have arms.[39]

The text of the English Bill of Rights of 1689 includes language protecting the right of Protestants against disarmament by the Crown, stating: "That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law."[40] It also contained text that aspired to bind future Parliaments, though under English constitutional law no Parliament can bind any later Parliament.[41]

The statement in the English Bill of Rights concerning the right to bear arms is often quoted only in the passage where it is written as above and not in its full context. In its full context it is clear that the bill was asserting the right of Protestant citizens not to be disarmed by the King without the consent of Parliament and was merely restoring rights to Protestants that the previous King briefly and unlawfully had removed. In its full context it reads:

Whereas the late King James the Second by the Assistance of diverse evil Councillors Judges and Ministers employed by him did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant Religion and the Laws and Liberties of this Kingdom (list of grievances including)... by causing several good Subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when Papists were both Armed and employed contrary to Law, (Recital regarding the change of monarch)... thereupon the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons pursuant to their respective Letters and Elections being now assembled in a full and free Representative of this Nation taking into their most serious Consideration the best means for attaining the Ends aforesaid Doe in the first place (as their Ancestors in like Case have usually done) for the Vindicating and Asserting their ancient Rights and Liberties, Declare (list of rights including)... That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defense suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.[40]

The historical link between the English Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment, which both codify an existing right and do not create a new one, has been acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court.[c][d]

The English Bill of Rights includes the proviso that arms must be as "allowed by law". This has been the case before and after the passage of the Bill. While it did not override earlier restrictions on the ownership of guns for hunting, it is subject to the parliamentary right to implicitly or explicitly repeal earlier enactments.[42]

There is some difference of opinion as to how revolutionary the events of 168889 actually were, and several commentators make the point that the provisions of the English Bill of Rights did not represent new laws, but rather stated existing rights. Mark Thompson wrote that, apart from determining the succession, the English Bill of Rights did "little more than set forth certain points of existing laws and simply secured to Englishmen the rights of which they were already posessed [sic]."[43] Before and after the English Bill of Rights, the government could always disarm any individual or class of individuals it considered dangerous to the peace of the realm.[44] In 1765, William Blackstone wrote the Commentaries on the Laws of England describing the right to have arms in England during the 18th century as a subordinate auxiliary right of the subject that was "also declared" in the English Bill of Rights.[45][46]

The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the same statute 1 W. & M. st.2. c.2. and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.[47]

Although there is little doubt that the writers of the Second Amendment were heavily influenced by the English Bill of Rights, it is a matter of interpretation as to whether they were intent on preserving the power to regulate arms to the states over the federal government (as the English Parliament had reserved for itself against the monarch) or whether it was intent on creating a new right akin to the right of others written into the Constitution (as the Supreme Court decided in Heller). Some in the United States have preferred the "rights" argument arguing that the English Bill of Rights had granted a right. The need to have arms for self-defence was not really in question. Peoples all around the world since time immemorial had armed themselves for the protection of themselves and others, and as organized nations began to appear these arrangements had been extended to the protection of the state.[48] Without a regular army and police force, it had been the duty of certain men to keep watch and ward at night and to confront and capture suspicious persons. Every subject had an obligation to protect the king's peace and assist in the suppression of riots.[49]

In 1757 Great Britain's Parliament created "An Act for better ordering of the militia forces in the several counties of that part of Great Britain called England".[50] This act declared that a well-ordered and well-disciplined militia was essentially necessary to the safety, peace and prosperity of the English Kingdom, and that the current militia laws for the regulation of the militia were defective and ineffectual. Influenced by this act, in 1775 Timothy Pickering created "An Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia".[51] Greatly inhibited by the events surrounding Salem Massachusetts, where the plan was printed, Pickering submitted the writing to George Washington.[52] On May 1, 1776, the Massachusetts Bay Councell resolved that Pickering's discipline, a modification of the 1757 act, be the discipline of their Militia.[53] On March 29, 1779, for members of the Continental Army this was replaced by Von Steuben's Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States.[54] With ratification of the Second Amendment, after May 8, 1792, the entire United States Militia, barring two declarations, would be regulated by Von Steuben's Discipline.[55]

Settlers in Colonial America viewed the right to arms and/or the right to bear arms and/or state militias as important for one or more of these purposes (in no particular order):[e][f][57][58][59][60][61][62]

Which of these considerations were thought of as most important and ultimately found expression in the Second Amendment is disputed. Some of these purposes were explicitly mentioned in early state constitutions; for example, the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 asserted that, "the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state."[69]

During the 1760s pre-revolutionary period, the established colonial militia was composed of colonists, including many who were loyal to British rule. As defiance and opposition to British rule developed, a distrust of these Loyalists in the militia became widespread among the colonists known as Patriots, who favored independence from British rule. As a result, some Patriots created their own militias that excluded the Loyalists and then sought to stock independent armories for their militias. In response to this arms build-up, the British parliament established an embargo of firearms, parts and ammunition against the American colonies.[70] King George III also began disarming individuals who were in the most rebellious areas in the 1760s and 1770s.[71]

British and Loyalist efforts to disarm the colonial Patriot militia armories in the early phases of the American Revolution resulted in the Patriot colonists protesting by citing the Declaration of Rights, Blackstone's summary of the Declaration of Rights, their own militia laws and common law rights to self-defense.[72] While British policy in the early phases of the Revolution clearly aimed to prevent coordinated action by the Patriot militia, some have argued that there is no evidence that the British sought to restrict the traditional common law right of self-defense.[72] Patrick J. Charles disputes these claims citing similar disarming by the patriots and challenging those scholars' interpretation of Blackstone.[73]

The right of the colonists to arms and rebellion against oppression was asserted, for example, in a pre-revolutionary newspaper editorial in 1769 objecting to the Crown suppression of colonial opposition to the Townshend Acts:

Instances of the licentious and outrageous behavior of the military conservators of the peace still multiply upon us, some of which are of such nature, and have been carried to such lengths, as must serve fully to evince that a late vote of this town, calling upon its inhabitants to provide themselves with arms for their defense, was a measure as prudent as it was legal: such violences are always to be apprehended from military troops, when quartered in the body of a populous city; but more especially so, when they are led to believe that they are become necessary to awe a spirit of rebellion, injuriously said to be existing therein. It is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.[72][74]

The armed forces that won the American Revolution consisted of the standing Continental Army created by the Continental Congress, together with regular French army and naval forces and various state and regional militia units. In opposition, the British forces consisted of a mixture of the standing British Army, Loyalist militia and Hessian mercenaries. Following the Revolution, the United States was governed by the Articles of Confederation. Federalists argued that this government had an unworkable division of power between Congress and the states, which caused military weakness, as the standing army was reduced to as few as 80 men.[75] They considered it to be bad that there was no effective federal military crackdown on an armed tax rebellion in western Massachusetts known as Shays' Rebellion.[76] Anti-federalists, on the other hand, took the side of limited government and sympathized with the rebels, many of whom were former Revolutionary War soldiers. Subsequently, the Constitutional Convention proposed in 1787 to grant Congress exclusive power to raise and support a standing army and navy of unlimited size.[77][78] Anti-federalists objected to the shift of power from the states to the federal government, but as adoption of the Constitution became more and more likely, they shifted their strategy to establishing a bill of rights that would put some limits on federal power.[79]

Modern scholars Thomas B. McAffee and Michael J. Quinlan have stated that James Madison "did not invent the right to keep and bear arms when he drafted the Second Amendment; the right was pre-existing at both common law and in the early state constitutions."[80] In contrast, historian Jack Rakove suggests that Madison's intention in framing the Second Amendment was to provide assurances to moderate Anti-Federalists that the militias would not be disarmed.[81]

One aspect of the gun control debate is the conflict between gun control laws and the right to rebel against unjust governments. Blackstone in his Commentaries alluded to this right to rebel as the natural right of resistance and self preservation, to be used only as a last resort, exercisable when "the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression".[82] Some believe that the framers of the Bill of Rights sought to balance not just political power, but also military power, between the people, the states and the nation,[83] as Alexander Hamilton explained in his Concerning the Militia essay published in 1788:

...it will be possible to have an excellent body of well-trained militia, ready to take the field whenever the defence of the State shall require it. This will not only lessen the call for military establishments, but if circumstances should at any time oblige the Government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the People, while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights, and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.[83][84]

Some scholars have said that it is wrong to read a right of armed insurrection into the Second Amendment because clearly the founding fathers sought to place trust in the power of the ordered liberty of democratic government versus the anarchy of insurrectionists.[85][86] Other writers, such as Glenn Reynolds, contend that the framers did believe in an individual right to armed insurrection. They cite examples, such as the Declaration of Independence (describing in 1776 "the Right of the People to... institute new Government") and the Constitution of New Hampshire (stating in 1784 that "nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind").[87]

There was an ongoing debate beginning in 1789 about "the people" fighting governmental tyranny (as described by Anti-Federalists); or the risk of mob rule of "the people" (as described by the Federalists) related to the increasingly violent French Revolution.[88] A widespread fear, during the debates on ratifying the Constitution, was the possibility of a military takeover of the states by the federal government, which could happen if the Congress passed laws prohibiting states from arming citizens,[g] or prohibiting citizens from arming themselves.[72] Though it has been argued that the states lost the power to arm their citizens when the power to arm the militia was transferred from the states to the federal government by ArticleI, Section8 of the Constitution, the individual right to arm was retained and strengthened by the Militia Acts of 1792 and the similar act of 1795.[89][90]

Note: On May 10, 1776, Congress passed a resolution recommending that any colony with a government that was not inclined toward independence should form one that was.[91]

Virginia's Constitution lists the reasons for dissolving its ties with the King in the formation of its own independent state government. Including the following:

* These same reasons would later be outlined within the Declaration of Independence.

A Declaration of Rights. Section 13. That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free State; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.[92]

Article 13. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.[93]

This is the first instance in relationship to U.S. Constitutional Law of the phrase "right to bear arms".

Article 43. The inhabitants of this state shall have the liberty to fowl and hunt in seasonable times on the lands they hold, and on all other lands therein not inclosed;[94]

It is relevant that Pennsylvania was a Quaker Colony traditionally opposed to bearing arms. "In settling Pennsylvania, William Penn had a great experiment in view, a 'holy experiment', as he term[ed] it. This was no less than to test, on a scale of considerable magnitude, the practicability of founding and governing a State on the sure principles of the Christian religion; where the executive should be sustained without arms; where justice should be administered without oaths; and where real religion might flourish without the incubus of a hierarchical system."[95] The Non-Quaker residents, many from the Western Counties, complained often and loudly of being denied the right to a common defense. By the time of the American Revolution, through what could be described as a revolution within a revolution, the pro-militia factions had gained ascendancy in the state's government. And by a manipulation through the use of oaths, disqualifying Quaker members, they made up a vast majority of the convention forming the new state constitution; it was only natural that they would assert their efforts to form a compulsory State Militia in the context of a "right" to defend themselves and the state.[96]

Articles XXVXXVII. 25. That a well-regulated militia is the proper and natural defence of a free government. 26. That standing armies are dangerous to liberty, and ought not to be raised or kept up, without consent of the Legislature. 27. That in all cases, and at all times, the military ought to be under strict subordination to and control of the civil power.[97]

A Declaration of Rights. Article XVII. That the people have a right to bear arms, for the defence of the State; and, as standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.[98]

Article XL. And whereas it is of the utmost importance to the safety of every State that it should always be in a condition of defence; and it is the duty of every man who enjoys the protection of society to be prepared and willing to defend it; this convention therefore, in the name and by the authority of the good people of this State, doth ordain, determine, and declare that the militia of this State, at all times hereafter, as well in peace as in war, shall be armed and disciplined, and in readiness for service. That all such of the inhabitants of this State being of the people called Quakers as, from scruples of conscience, may be averse to the bearing of arms, be therefrom excused by the legislature; and do pay to the State such sums of money, in lieu of their personal service, as the same; may, in the judgment of the legislature, be worth. And that a proper magazine of warlike stores, proportionate to the number of inhabitants, be, forever hereafter, at the expense of this State, and by acts of the legislature, established, maintained, and continued in every county in this State.[99]

Chapter 1. Section XVIII. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of the themselves and the State; and as standing armies, in the time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.[100]

A Declaration of Rights. Chapter 1. Article XVII. The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority and be governed by it.[101]

In March 1785, delegates from Virginia and Maryland assembled at the Mount Vernon Conference to fashion a remedy to the inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. The following year, at a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, 12 delegates from five states (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia) met and drew up a list of problems with the current government model. At its conclusion, the delegates scheduled a follow-up meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for May 1787 to present solutions to these problems, such as the absence of:[105][106]

It quickly became apparent that the solution to all three of these problems required shifting control of the states' militias to the federal Congress and giving it the power to raise a standing army.[107] Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution codified these changes by allowing the Congress to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States by doing the following:[108]

Some representatives mistrusted proposals to enlarge federal powers, because they were concerned about the inherent risks of centralizing power. Federalists, including James Madison, initially argued that a bill of rights was unnecessary, sufficiently confident that the federal government could never raise a standing army powerful enough to overcome a militia.[109] Federalist Noah Webster argued that an armed populace would have no trouble resisting the potential threat to liberty of a standing army.[110][111] Anti-federalists, on the other hand, advocated amending the Constitution with clearly defined and enumerated rights providing more explicit constraints on the new government. Many Anti-federalists feared the new federal government would choose to disarm state militias. Federalists countered that in listing only certain rights, unlisted rights might lose protection. The Federalists realized there was insufficient support to ratify the Constitution without a bill of rights and so they promised to support amending the Constitution to add a bill of rights following the Constitution's adoption. This compromise persuaded enough Anti-federalists to vote for the Constitution, allowing for ratification.[112] The Constitution was declared ratified on June21, 1788, when nine of the original thirteen states had ratified it. The remaining four states later followed suit, although the last two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, ratified only after Congress had passed the Bill of Rights and sent it to the states for ratification.[113] James Madison drafted what ultimately became the Bill of Rights, which was proposed by the first Congress on June8, 1789, and was adopted on December15, 1791.

The debate surrounding the Constitution's ratification is of practical importance, particularly to adherents of originalist and strict constructionist legal theories. In the context of such legal theories and elsewhere, it is important to understand the language of the Constitution in terms of what that language meant to the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution.[114]

Robert Whitehill, a delegate from Pennsylvania, sought to clarify the draft Constitution with a bill of rights explicitly granting individuals the right to hunt on their own land in season,[115] though Whitehill's language was never debated.[116]

There was substantial opposition to the new Constitution because it moved the power to arm the state militias from the states to the federal government. This created a fear that the federal government, by neglecting the upkeep of the militia, could have overwhelming military force at its disposal through its power to maintain a standing army and navy, leading to a confrontation with the states, encroaching on the states' reserved powers and even engaging in a military takeover. Article VI of the Articles of Confederation states:

No vessel of war shall be kept up in time of peace by any State, except such number only, as shall be deemed necessary by the united States in congress assembled, for the defense of such State, or its trade; nor shall any body of forces be kept up by any State in time of peace, except such number only, as in the judgement of the united States, in congress assembled, shall be deemed requisite to garrison the forts necessary for the defense of such State; but every State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public stores, a due number of field pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage.[117][118]

In contrast, Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 of the U.S. Constitution states:

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.[119]

A foundation of American political thought during the Revolutionary period was concerned about political corruption and governmental tyranny. Even the federalists, fending off their opponents who accused them of creating an oppressive regime, were careful to acknowledge the risks of tyranny. Against that backdrop, the framers saw the personal right to bear arms as a potential check against tyranny. Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts expressed this sentiment by declaring that it is "a chimerical idea to suppose that a country like this could ever be enslaved... Is it possible... that an army could be raised for the purpose of enslaving themselves or their brethren? Or, if raised whether they could subdue a nation of freemen, who know how to prize liberty and who have arms in their hands?"[120] Noah Webster similarly argued:

Before a standing army can rule the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States.[13][121]

George Mason also argued the importance of the militia and right to bear arms by reminding his compatriots of the British government's efforts "to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them... by totally disusing and neglecting the militia." He also clarified that under prevailing practice the militia included all people, rich and poor. "Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers." Because all were members of the militia, all enjoyed the right to individually bear arms to serve therein.[13][122]

Writing after the ratification of the Constitution, but before the election of the first Congress, James Monroe included "the right to keep and bear arms" in a list of basic "human rights", which he proposed to be added to the Constitution.[123]

Patrick Henry argued in the Virginia ratification convention on June 5, 1788, for the dual rights to arms and resistance to oppression:

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.[124]

In the slave states, the militia was available for military operations, but its biggest function was to police the slaves.[125][126] According to Dr Carl T. Bogus, Professor of Law of the Roger Williams University Law School in Rhode Island,[125] the Second Amendment was written to assure the Southern states that Congress would not undermine the slave system by using its newly acquired constitutional authority over the militia to disarm the state militia and thereby destroy the South's principal instrument of slave control.[127]In his close analysis of James Madison's writings, Bogus describes the South's obsession with militias during the ratification process:[127]

The militia remained the principal means of protecting the social order and preserving white control over an enormous black population. Anything that might weaken this system presented the gravest of threats.

This preoccupation is clearly expressed in 1788[127] by the slaveholder Patrick Henry:

If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress ... Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution; addition not mentioned in source], can call forth the militia.[125]

Therefore, Bogus argues, in a compromise with the slave states, and to reassure Patrick Henry, George Mason and other slaveholders that they would be able to keep their slave control militias independent of the federal government, James Madison (also slave owner) redrafted the Second Amendment into its current form "for the specific purpose of assuring the Southern states, and particularly his constituents in Virginia, that the federal government would not undermine their security against slave insurrection by disarming the militia."[127]

Legal historian Paul Finkelman argues that this scenario is implausible.[68] Henry and Mason were political enemies of Madison's, and neither man was in Congress at the time Madison drafted Bill of Rights; moreover, Patrick Henry argued against the ratification of both the Constitution and the Second Amendment, and it was Henry's opposition that led Patrick's home state of Virginia to be the last to ratify.[68]

Most Southern white men betweenthe ages of 18 and 45 were required to serve on "slave patrols" which were organized groups of white men who enforced discipline upon enslaved blacks.[128] Bogus writes with respect to Georgia laws passed in 1755 and 1757 in this context: "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."[129][130][unreliable source]

Finkelman recognises that James Madison "drafted an amendment to protect the right of the states to maintain their militias," but insists that "The amendment had nothing to do with state police powers, which were the basis of slave patrols."[68]

Firstly, slave owners feared that enslaved blacks might be emancipated through military service. A few years earlier, there had been a precedent when Lord Dunmore offered freedom to slaves who escaped and joined his forces with "Liberty to Slaves" stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. Freed slaves also served in General Washington's army.

Secondly, they also greatly feared "a ruinous slave rebellion in which their families would be slaughtered and their property destroyed." When Virginia ratified the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791, the Haitian Revolution, a successful slave rebellion, was under way. The right to bear arms was therefore deliberately tied to membership in a militia by the slaveholder and chief drafter of the Amendment, James Madison, because only whites could join militias in the South.[131]

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson had submitted a draft constitution for Virginia that said "no freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms within his own lands or tenements". According to Picadio, this version was rejected because "it would have given to free blacks the constitutional right to have firearms".[132]

James Madison's initial proposal for a bill of rights was brought to the floor of the House of Representatives on June 8, 1789, during the first session of Congress. The initial proposed passage relating to arms was:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.[133]

On July 21, Madison again raised the issue of his bill and proposed that a select committee be created to report on it. The House voted in favor of Madison's motion,[134] and the Bill of Rights entered committee for review. The committee returned to the House a reworded version of the Second Amendment on July 28.[135] On August 17, that version was read into the Journal:

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms.[136]

In late August 1789, the House debated and modified the Second Amendment. These debates revolved primarily around the risk of "mal-administration of the government" using the "religiously scrupulous" clause to destroy the militia as British forces had attempted to destroy the Patriot militia at the commencement of the American Revolution. These concerns were addressed by modifying the final clause, and on August 24, the House sent the following version to the Senate:

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

The next day, August 25, the Senate received the amendment from the House and entered it into the Senate Journal. However, the Senate scribe added a comma before "shall not be infringed" and changed the semicolon separating that phrase from the religious exemption portion to a comma:

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.[137]

By this time, the proposed right to keep and bear arms was in a separate amendment, instead of being in a single amendment together with other proposed rights such as the due process right. As a representative explained, this change allowed each amendment to "be passed upon distinctly by the States".[138] On September 4, the Senate voted to change the language of the Second Amendment by removing the definition of militia, and striking the conscientious objector clause:

A well regulated militia, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.[139]

The Senate returned to this amendment for a final time on September 9. A proposal to insert the words "for the common defence" next to the words "bear arms" was defeated. A motion passed to replace the words "the best", and insert in lieu thereof "necessary to the" .[140] The Senate then slightly modified the language to read as the fourth article and voted to return the Bill of Rights to the House. The final version by the Senate was amended to read as:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The House voted on September 21, 1789, to accept the changes made by the Senate.

The enrolled original Joint Resolution passed by Congress on September 25, 1789, on permanent display in the Rotunda, reads as:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.[141]

On December 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) was adopted, having been ratified by three-fourths of the states, having been ratified as a group by all the fourteen states then in existence except Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Georgia which added ratifications in 1939.[142]

During the first two decades following the ratification of the Second Amendment, public opposition to standing armies, among Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike, persisted and manifested itself locally as a general reluctance to create a professional armed police force, instead relying on county sheriffs, constables and night watchmen to enforce local ordinances.[70] Though sometimes compensated, often these positions were unpaid held as a matter of civic duty. In these early decades, law enforcement officers were rarely armed with firearms, using billy clubs as their sole defensive weapons.[70] In serious emergencies, a posse comitatus, militia company, or group of vigilantes assumed law enforcement duties; these individuals were more likely than the local sheriff to be armed with firearms.[70]

On May 8, 1792, Congress passed "[a]n act more effectually to provide for the National Defence, by establishing an Uniform Militia throughout the United States" requiring:

[E]ach and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia... [and] every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.[143]

The act also gave specific instructions to domestic weapon manufacturers "that from and after five years from the passing of this act, muskets for arming the militia as herein required, shall be of bores sufficient for balls of the eighteenth part of a pound."[143] In practice, private acquisition and maintenance of rifles and muskets meeting specifications and readily available for militia duty proved problematic; estimates of compliance ranged from 10 to 65percent.[144] Compliance with the enrollment provisions was also poor. In addition to the exemptions granted by the law for custom-house officers and their clerks, post-officers and stage drivers employed in the care and conveyance of U.S. mail, ferrymen, export inspectors, pilots, merchant mariners and those deployed at sea in active service; state legislatures granted numerous exemptions under Section2 of the Act, including exemptions for: clergy, conscientious objectors, teachers, students, and jurors. Though a number of able-bodied white men remained available for service, many simply did not show up for militia duty. Penalties for failure to appear were enforced sporadically and selectively.[145] None is mentioned in the legislation.[143]

The first test of the militia system occurred in July 1794, when a group of disaffected Pennsylvania farmers rebelled against federal tax collectors whom they viewed as illegitimate tools of tyrannical power.[146] Attempts by the four adjoining states to raise a militia for nationalization to suppress the insurrection proved inadequate. When officials resorted to drafting men, they faced bitter resistance. Forthcoming soldiers consisted primarily of draftees or paid substitutes as well as poor enlistees lured by enlistment bonuses. The officers, however, were of a higher quality, responding out of a sense of civic duty and patriotism, and generally critical of the rank and file.[70] Most of the 13,000 soldiers lacked the required weaponry; the war department provided nearly two-thirds of them with guns.[70] In October, President George Washington and General Harry Lee marched on the 7,000rebels who conceded without fighting. The episode provoked criticism of the citizen militia and inspired calls for a universal militia. Secretary of War Henry Knox and Vice President John Adams had lobbied Congress to establish federal armories to stock imported weapons and encourage domestic production.[70] Congress did subsequently pass "[a]n act for the erecting and repairing of Arsenals and Magazines" on April 2, 1794, two months prior to the insurrection.[147] Nevertheless, the militia continued to deteriorate and twenty years later, the militia's poor condition contributed to several losses in the War of 1812, including the sacking of Washington, D.C., and the burning of the White House in 1814.[145]

In the 20th century, Congress passed the Militia Act of 1903. The act defined the militia as every able-bodied male aged 18 to 44 who was a citizen or intended to become one. The militia was then divided by the act into the United States National Guard and the unorganized Reserve Militia.[148][149]

Federal law continues to define the militia as all able-bodied males aged 17 to 44, who are citizens or intend to become one, and female citizens who are members of the National Guard. The militia is divided into the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and Naval Militia, and the unorganized militia.[150]

In May of 1788, the pseudonymous author "Federal Farmer" (his real identity is presumed to be either Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith) wrote in Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer #169 or Letter XVIII regarding the definition of a "militia":

Read the original here:

Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

What Is the Second Amendment? | Second Amendment Rights – Reader’s Digest

The answer to that question is as old as the country itself, and it continues to evolve as Americans debate the right balance of individual freedom and public safety.

After every mass shooting and subsequent examination of gun violence statistics, a predictable argument is sure to follow as gun-rights advocates and gun-control advocates square off over what should be done next. Each side speaks with passion and fire about rights and law and the Constitution, the meaning of the right to bear arms and a well-regulated militia, and what these terms mean in the context of our Second Amendment rights.

But does anyone really know what those rights are? Even the experts cant say for certain because the Constitution is constantly being reviewed and reinterpreted. Some commonly held myths about the Constitution also cloud what we think we know about our rights, and that goes for our First Amendment rights as well as our Second.

A lot of people forget that the Supreme Court didnt recognize an individual right to own guns until 2008, says Adam Winkler, professor of Constitutional Law at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. That was when the Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller. The 54 ruling found that the Second Amendment protects the individuals right to bear arms for self-defense, and overturned a Washington, D.C., law that prohibited people from keeping handguns in their homes.

Nowhere else in the Constitutiondoes the people refer to anything other than an individual right, the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. And thus the right to bear arms came to include the right of the individual to own a gun for protectionsomething that had never been articulated by the Supreme Court before.

RELATED: What Would It Take to Amend the Constitution?

The Constitution is a remarkably brief founding documentjust 7,591 words stretched over seven articles defining the authority invested in the government and 27 amendments generally laying out the rights retained by the people. Its brevity is both the beauty and the burden of the Constitution since it allows for interpretation in response to changing circumstances but also lacks specificity to easily settle disputes. When it comes to Second Amendment rights, the tension between these two traits is particularly sharp.

Heres what Second Amendment actually says: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. That short sentence has sparked endless discussion and disagreement.

The gun debate has been going in circles for decades, and it certainly doesnt bring us together as a society, Winkler says, noting that absolutists on both extremes often drown out more moderate discussion. Nonetheless, he says its important to let every side be heard when deciding which policy to pursue: Thats what makes us a democracy.

RELATED: Interesting Facts and Figures About the Constitution

Another key part of democracy is its ability to adapt to new conditions and societal norms. As attitudes that were once thought of as perfectly natural become abhorrent in more enlightened times, the law can change to reflect that. The subject of race relations is a perfect example.

In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that state-mandated racial segregation did not offend the Constitution. But in 1954, when civil rights advocates argued in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal was a fiction that legalized unconstitutional discrimination, a unanimous Supreme Court agreed. Government-sanctioned segregation was outlawed, in the North and the South, less than 60 years after Plessy.

That same changing dynamic could exist in the context of the Second Amendment. Will the next mass shooting change the hearts and minds of so many Americans that the right to own guns has to change to accommodate this new reality? Its possible. After all, its sometimes said amongst Constitutional scholars that all it takes to change the Constitution is the ability to count to five. In other words, can you get five Supreme Court justices to agree with what you think the Constitution means? Ultimately, the right to bear arms means what a majority of the Court says it means, and that can shift relatively quickly.

But the Courts respect for precedent and history is meant to prevent our fundamental rights from getting blown away too easily by political winds. Justices often look to the Founders struggle in crafting the Constitution for guidance.

RELATED: Why I No Longer Think Guns Are a God-Given Right

The gun control debate frequently focuses on what the Founders intended when they wrote the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights, as the first 10 amendments are called. Was it so the people could take up arms to fight their own government gone tyrannical, or was the establishment of a well-regulated militia a way to discourage foreign threats? As Winkler and co-author Nelson Lund, a law professor at George Mason University, wrote for the non-partisan National Constitution Center, its a little of both.

While the Constitution and the amendments that would become the Bill of Rights were being debated in the earliest days of the republic, two factions emerged with very different views of what the new nation should look like. What would the relationship between the individual states and the federal government be? Should one be superior to the other? Who should have the firepower to maintain that balance?

States rights advocates, the Anti-Federalists, argued that the proposed Constitution would leave the states vulnerable to federal force, while pro-centralized-government Federalists responded that the people were armed and therefore not easily controlled by a federal army. But the lessons of the Revolutionary War showed that building an army was difficult and a ready militia was necessary for national defense.

Implicit in the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists were two shared assumptions, Winkler and Lund wrote. First, that the proposed new Constitution gave the federal government almost total legal authority over the army and militia. Second, that the federal government should not have any authority at all to disarm the citizenry.

RELATED: The Difference Between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

But while the Federalists and Anti-Federalists were hashing out the right to bear arms, the states were already regulating who could own guns and how they could keep them, Winkler notes. In 1776, Massachusetts required an oath of loyalty to the Cause of America from anyone who wanted to own a gun, with Pennsylvania passing similar laws to disarm those disaffected by the fight for independence.

Even after the Second Amendment became law, states were in the business of deciding who could own and keep firearms. In slave states like Virginia, for example, African Americans, even freedmen, were barred from possessing weapons.

In 2016s Caetano v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court extended the Second Amendment right to own weapons for self-defense to include all instruments that constitute bearable arms. But does that mean every individual has the right to own any weapon? The short answer is, no.

Like all of our rights, the Second Amendment is subject to commonsense restrictions, Winkler says.

Just as the First Amendment right to free speech doesnt protect perjury and the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination doesnt cover voluntary confessions, the individual right to own guns can be regulated without offending the Second Amendment, he says. The Court has approved laws preventing convicted felons and the mentally ill from owning guns, for instance, a position not considered controversial except by the most ardent gun advocates.

Except for the few who favor totally banning firearms on one end of the debate, and the few who favor completely unregulated weapons on the other, the vast majority of Americans fall somewhere in between. They favor reasonable laws targeted at keeping guns out of the most dangerous hands while recognizing law-abiding citizens right to own firearms for self-defense, hunting, and sport. According to a November 2020 Gallup poll, 91 percent of Americans want gun laws to be stricter or to stay as they are, while just 9 percent want looser regulations.

But Winkler says revoking or significantly changing the Second Amendment is highly unlikely. The truth is, there are only about 10 states with restrictive gun laws, he says, including Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. Notably, California is known for the strictest regulations, and it also has the seventh-lowest rate of deaths by gun violence. Since it takes a super-majority of 38 states to repeal an amendment, and roughly 40 states are gun-friendly, Winkler says the Second Amendment is more likely to be amended to expand gun rights than revoke them. Instead, we will have to continue talking about it and trying to find the sweet spot where our right to individual security and public safety are in balance.

RELATED: Why Is It So Hard to Stop Gun Violence in America?

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What Is the Second Amendment? | Second Amendment Rights - Reader's Digest

Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution

1951 amendment limiting presidents to two terms

The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) to the United States Constitution limits the number of times a person is eligible for election to the office of President of the United States to two, and sets additional eligibility conditions for presidents who succeed to the unexpired terms of their predecessors.[1] Congress approved the Twenty-second Amendment on March 21, 1947, and submitted it to the state legislatures for ratification. That process was completed on February 27, 1951, when the requisite 36 of the 48 states had ratified the amendment (neither Alaska nor Hawaii had yet been admitted as states), and its provisions came into force on that date.

The amendment prohibits anyone who has been elected president twice from being elected again. Under the amendment, someone who fills an unexpired presidential term lasting more than two years is also prohibited from being elected president more than once. Scholars debate whether the amendment prohibits affected individuals from succeeding to the presidency under any circumstances or whether it applies only to presidential elections. Until the amendment's ratification, the president had not been subject to term limits, but both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (the first and third presidents) decided not to serve a third term, establishing the two-term tradition. In the 1940 and 1944 presidential elections, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the only president to win third and fourth terms, giving rise to concerns about a president serving unlimited terms.[2]

Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Section 2. This Article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the states by the Congress.[3]

The Twenty-second Amendment was a reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt's election to an unprecedented four terms as president, but presidential term limits had long been debated in American politics. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 considered the issue extensively (alongside broader questions, such as who would elect the president, and the president's role). Many, including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, supported lifetime tenure for presidents, while others favored fixed terms. Virginia's George Mason denounced the life-tenure proposal as tantamount to elective monarchy.[4] An early draft of the U.S. Constitution provided that the president was restricted to one seven-year term.[5] Ultimately, the Framers approved four-year terms with no restriction on how many times a person could be elected president.

Though dismissed by the Constitutional Convention, term limits for U.S. presidents were contemplated during the presidencies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. As his second term entered its final year in 1796, Washington was exhausted from years of public service, and his health had begun to decline. He was also bothered by his political opponents' unrelenting attacks, which had escalated after the signing of the Jay Treaty, and believed he had accomplished his major goals as president. For these reasons, he decided not to run for a third term, a decision he announced to the nation in his September 1796 Farewell Address.[6] Eleven years later, as Thomas Jefferson neared the halfway point of his second term, he wrote,

If some termination to the services of the chief magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally for years, will in fact, become for life; and history shows how easily that degenerates into an inheritance.[7]

Since Washington made his historic announcement, numerous academics and public figures have looked at his decision to retire after two terms, and have, according to political scientist Bruce Peabody, "argued he had established a two-term tradition that served as a vital check against any one person, or the presidency as a whole, accumulating too much power".[8] Various amendments aimed at changing informal precedent to constitutional law were proposed in Congress in the early to mid-19th century, but none passed.[4][9] Three of the next four presidents after JeffersonJames Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jacksonserved two terms, and each adhered to the two-term principle;[1] Martin Van Buren was the only president between Jackson and Abraham Lincoln to be nominated for a second term, though he lost the 1840 election and so served only one term.[9] At the outset of the Civil War the seceding States drafted the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, which in most respects resembled the United States Constitution, but limited the president to a single six-year term.

In spite of the strong two-term tradition, a few presidents before Roosevelt attempted to secure a third term. Following Ulysses S. Grant's reelection in 1872, there were serious discussions within Republican political circles about the possibility of his running again in 1876. But interest in a third term for Grant evaporated in the light of negative public opinion and opposition from members of Congress, and Grant left the presidency in 1877 after two terms. Even so, as the 1880 election approached, he sought nomination for a (non-consecutive) third term at the 1880 Republican National Convention, but narrowly lost to James Garfield, who won the 1880 election.[9]

Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency on September 14, 1901, following William McKinley's assassination (194 days into his second term), and was handily elected to a full term in 1904. He declined to seek a third (second full) term in 1908, but did run again in the election of 1912, losing to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson himself, despite his ill health following a serious stroke, aspired to a third term. Many of his advisers tried to convince him that his health precluded another campaign, but Wilson nonetheless asked that his name be placed in nomination for the presidency at the 1920 Democratic National Convention.[10] Democratic Party leaders were unwilling to support Wilson, and the nomination went to James M. Cox, who lost to Warren G. Harding. Wilson again contemplated running for a (nonconsecutive) third term in 1924, devising a strategy for his comeback, but again lacked any support; he died in February of that year.[11]

Franklin Roosevelt spent the months leading up to the 1940 Democratic National Convention refusing to say whether he would seek a third term. His vice president, John Nance Garner, along with Postmaster General James Farley, announced their candidacies for the Democratic nomination. When the convention came, Roosevelt sent a message to the convention saying he would run only if drafted, saying delegates were free to vote for whomever they pleased. This message was interpreted to mean he was willing to be drafted, and he was renominated on the convention's first ballot.[9][12] Roosevelt won a decisive victory over Republican Wendell Willkie, becoming the first (and to date only) president to exceed eight years in office. His decision to seek a third term dominated the election campaign.[13] Willkie ran against the open-ended presidential tenure, while Democrats cited the war in Europe as a reason for breaking with precedent.[9]

Four years later, Roosevelt faced Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 election. Near the end of the campaign, Dewey announced his support of a constitutional amendment to limit presidents to two terms. According to Dewey, "four terms, or sixteen years (a direct reference to the president's tenure in office four years hence), is the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed."[14] He also discreetly raised the issue of the president's age. Roosevelt exuded enough energy and charisma to retain voters' confidence and was elected to a fourth term.[15]

While he quelled rumors of poor health during the campaign, Roosevelt's health was deteriorating. On April 12, 1945, only 82 days after his fourth inauguration, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died, to be succeeded by Vice President Harry Truman.[16] In the midterm elections 18 months later, Republicans took control of the House and the Senate. As many of them had campaigned on the issue of presidential tenure, declaring their support for a constitutional amendment that would limit how long a person could serve as president, the issue was given priority in the 80th Congress when it convened in January 1947.[8]

The House of Representatives took quick action, approving a proposed constitutional amendment (House Joint Resolution27) setting a limit of two four-year terms for future presidents. Introduced by Earl C. Michener, the measure passed 285121, with support from 47 Democrats, on February 6, 1947.[17] Meanwhile, the Senate developed its own proposed amendment, which initially differed from the House proposal by requiring that the amendment be submitted to state ratifying conventions for ratification, rather than to the state legislatures, and by prohibiting any person who had served more than 365 days in each of two terms from further presidential service. Both these provisions were removed when the full Senate took up the bill, but a new provision was, however, added. Put forward by Robert A. Taft, it clarified procedures governing the number of times a vice president who succeeded to the presidency might be elected to office. The amended proposal was passed 5923, with 16 Democrats in favor, on March 12.[1][18]

On March 21, the House agreed to the Senate's revisions and approved the resolution to amend the Constitution. Afterward, the amendment imposing term limitations on future presidents was submitted to the states for ratification. The ratification process was completed on February 27, 1951, 3years, 343days after it was sent to the states.[19][20]

Once submitted to the states, the 22nd Amendment was ratified by:[3]

Conversely, two statesOklahoma and Massachusettsrejected the amendment, while five (Arizona, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Washington, and West Virginia) took no action.[18]

Because of the grandfather clause in Section 1, the amendment did not apply to Harry S. Truman, the incumbent president at the time it was submitted to the states by the Congress. Without this full exemption, Truman would not have been eligible to run again in 1952. He had served nearly all of Franklin Roosevelt's unexpired 19451949 term and had been elected to a full four-year term beginning in 1949.[13] But with his job approval rating at around 27%,[21][22] and after a poor performance in the 1952 New Hampshire primary, Truman chose not to seek his party's nomination. Since becoming operative in 1951, the amendment has been applicable to six presidents who have been elected twice: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

As worded, the focus of the 22nd Amendment is on limiting individuals from being elected to the presidency more than twice. Questions have been raised about the amendment's meaning and application, especially in relation to the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, which states, "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."[23] While the 12th Amendment stipulates that the constitutional qualifications of age, citizenship, and residency apply to the president and vice president, it is unclear whether someone who is ineligible to be elected president due to term limits could be elected vice president. Because of the ambiguity, a two-term former president could possibly be elected vice president and then succeed to the presidency as a result of the incumbent's death, resignation, or removal from office, or succeed to the presidency from another stated office in the presidential line of succession.[9][24]

Some argue that the 22nd Amendment and 12th Amendment bar any two-term president from later serving as vice president as well as from succeeding to the presidency from any point in the presidential line of succession.[25] Others contend that the original intent of the 12th Amendment concerns qualification for service (age, residence, and citizenship), while the 22nd Amendment concerns qualifications for election, and thus a former two-term president is still eligible to serve as vice president. Neither amendment restricts the number of times someone can be elected to the vice presidency and then succeed to the presidency to serve out the balance of the term, although the person could be prohibited from running for election to an additional term.[26][27]

The practical applicability of this distinction has not been tested, as no twice-elected president has ever been nominated for the vice presidency. While Hillary Clinton once suggested she considered former President Bill Clinton as her running mate,[28] the constitutional question remains unresolved.[1]

Over the years, several presidents have voiced their antipathy toward the amendment. After leaving office, Harry Truman described the amendment as stupid and one of the worst amendments of the Constitution with the exception of the Prohibition Amendment.[29] A few days before leaving office in January 1989, President Ronald Reagan said he would push for a repeal of the 22nd Amendment because he thought it infringed on peoples democratic rights.[30] In a November 2000 interview with Rolling Stone, President Bill Clinton suggested that the 22nd Amendment should be altered to limit presidents to two consecutive terms but then allow non-consecutive terms, because of longer life expectancies.[31] Donald Trump questioned presidential term limits on multiple occasions while in office, and in public remarks talked about serving beyond the limits of the 22nd Amendment. During an April 2019 White House event for the Wounded Warrior Project, he suggested he would remain president for 10 to 14 years.[32][33]

The first efforts in Congress to repeal the 22nd Amendment were undertaken in 1956, five years after the amendment's ratification. Over the next 50 years, 54 joint resolutions seeking to repeal the two-term presidential election limit were introduced.[1] Between 1997 and 2013, Jos E. Serrano, Democratic representative for New York, introduced nine resolutions (one per Congress, all unsuccessful) to repeal the amendment.[34] Repeal has also been supported by Representatives Barney Frank and David Dreier and Senators Mitch McConnell[35] and Harry Reid.[36]

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Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution

Second Amendment | Text, Meaning, Definition, & History …

Top Questions

What does the Second Amendment say?

The original text for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Does the Second Amendment allow owning guns for self-defense?

Who wrote the Second Amendment?

The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, was proposed by James Madison to allow the creation of civilian forces that can counteract a tyrannical federal government. Anti-Federalists believed that a centralized standing military, established by the Constitutional Convention, gave the federal government too much power and potential for violent oppression.

Which U.S. Supreme Court justices think the Second Amendment recognizes the individuals right to bear arms in self-defense?

Do militias exist in the United States today?

Modern militias are most commonly known as State Defense Forces (SDFs). As of 2010, 23 states and territories maintained their own SDFs. Unlike federal organizations such as the National Guard, SDFs are under the sole jurisdiction of state or territorial governments and cannot be commanded by the federal government.

Is ownership of an assault weapon constitutional?

The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act in 1994 banned private use of assault weapons, such as certain semiautomatic rifles. This federal ban expired in 2004. Some U.S. states have laws that prohibit assault weapons.

Second Amendment, amendment to the Constitution of the United States, adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, that provided a constitutional check on congressional power under Article I Section 8 to organize, arm, and discipline the federal militia. The Second Amendment reads, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Referred to in modern times as an individuals right to carry and use arms for self-defense, the Second Amendment was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, according to College of William and Mary law professor and future U.S. District Court judge St. George Tucker in 1803 in his great work Blackstones Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as the true palladium of liberty. In addition to checking federal power, the Second Amendment also provided state governments with what Luther Martin (1744/481826) described as the last coup de grace that would enable the states to thwart and oppose the general government. Last, it enshrined the ancient Florentine and Roman constitutional principle of civil and military virtue by making every citizen a soldier and every soldier a citizen. (See also gun control.)

Until 2008 the Supreme Court of the United States had never seriously considered the constitutional scope of the Second Amendment. In its first hearing on the subject, in Presser v. Illinois (1886), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment prevented the states from prohibit[ing] the people from keeping and bearing arms, so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security. More than four decades later, in United States v. Schwimmer (1929), the Supreme Court cited the Second Amendment as enshrining that the duty of individuals to defend our government against all enemies whenever necessity arises is a fundamental principle of the Constitution and holding that the common defense was one of the purposes for which the people ordained and established the Constitution. Meanwhile, in United States v. Miller (1939), in a prosecution under the National Firearms Act (1934), the Supreme Court avoided addressing the constitutional scope of the Second Amendment by merely holding that the possession or use of a shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length was not any part of the ordinary military equipment protected by the Second Amendment.

For more than seven decades after the United States v. Miller decision, what right to bear arms that the Second Amendment protected remained uncertain. This uncertainty was ended, however, in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), in which the Supreme Court examined the Second Amendment in exacting detail. In a narrow 54 majority, delivered by Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court held that self-defense was the central component of the amendment and that the District of Columbias prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court also affirmed previous rulings that the Second Amendment ensured the right of individuals to take part in the defending of their liberties by taking up arms in an organized militia. However, the court was clear to emphasize that an individuals right to an organized militia is not the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendments guarantee.

Because the Heller ruling constrained only federal regulations against the right of armed self-defense in the home, it was unclear whether the court would hold that the Second Amendment guarantees established in Heller were equally applicable to the states. The Supreme Court answered that question in 2010, with its ruling on McDonald v. Chicago. In a plurality opinion, a 54 majority held that the right to possess a handgun in the home for the purpose of self-defense is applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendments due process clause.

However, despite the use of person in that clause, the McDonald decision did not apply to noncitizens, because one member of the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas, refused in his concurring opinion to explicitly extend the right that far. Thomas wrote, Because this case does not involve a claim brought by a noncitizen, I express no view on the difference, if any, between my conclusion and the plurality with respect to the extent to which States may regulate firearm possession by noncitizens. Thomass conclusion was also supported by his view that the Second Amendment should be incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendments privileges or immunities clause, which recognizes only the rights of citizens.

The relatively narrow holdings in the Heller and McDonald decisions left many Second Amendment legal issues unsettled, including the constitutionality of many federal gun-control regulations, whether the right to carry or conceal a weapon in public was protected, and whether noncitizens are protected through the Fourteenth Amendments equal protection clause.

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Second Amendment | Text, Meaning, Definition, & History ...

The Second Amendment: What Are the Limits on the Right to …

The meaning and scope of the Second Amendment has long been one of the most hotly contested constitutional issues in the United States. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the amendment protects the rights of individuals to have and use guns for legal purposes. At the same time, however, the Court clearly said that the Second Amendment right isnt unlimited. Since that decision, other courts in the country have upheld mostbut not allfederal, state, and local gun control laws.

The long-running argument over the Second Amendment largely stems from its language, especially at the beginning: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. For decades, many scholars and courts interpreted the amendment as preserving states authority to keep militias, which would mean that the right to have firearms was linked to militia service. But in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), the Supreme Court opted for a broader interpretation, finding that the Second Amendment gave individuals a right to have gunsunconnected to any militia serviceand to use them for traditionally legal purposes like self-defense.

The Supreme Court said that the law involved in Heller was unconstitutional because it essentially banned all handgunsthe most popular type of gun Americans choose for the core lawful purpose of self-defense. It also kept people from using their guns to defend their families and property by requiring them to keep all firearms trigger-locked or dissembled, even in the home.

Like most constitutional rights, the Second Amendment rights is not unlimited.

What about other kinds of guns and other reasons for having them? Like most constitutional rights, the Heller Court explained, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. In the years since that decision, theres been a flood of legal challenges to federal and state gun control laws. According to one study, in 94 percent of those cases, courts have found that reasonable gun regulations didnt violate the Second Amendment. Theyve mostly relied on the Heller Courts explanation that its ruling shouldnt cast doubt on several longstanding gun restrictions, including bans on gun ownership by certain individuals (like felons), prohibitions on some types of dangerous and unusual weapons, limits on carrying firearms in certain public places, and requirements for gun sales. Although federal law covers some of these restrictions, most gun control is a patchwork of state and local laws and regulations. That means it can be wildly different from place to place.

Federal law outlaws the possession of firearms or ammunition by several categories of people, including:

(18 U.S.C. 922(g).)

Many states prohibit or restrict gun possession by other groups of people, such as stalkers and people subject to other kinds of restraining orders, minors, juvenile offenders, and those convicted of alcohol- and/or drug-related crimes.

Several states also allow courts to order some people to give up their guns temporarily if they pose an immediate risk to themselves or others (under so-called "red flag laws").

Under federal law, its illegal for civilians to have fully automatic weapons (referred to as machine guns in 18 U.S.C. 922(l)). In a rule that became effective in March 2019, the federal government outlawed "bump stock" devices (which attach to semiautomatic weapons to produce automatic firing with one pull of the trigger) by defining them as machine guns for purposes of federal law (27 C.F.R. 447.11).

Another federal law that banned assault weapons (semiautomatic firearms with certain features) expired in 2004, and attempts to renew it have failed so far.

Still, a handful of states and local governmentsincluding California, New Jersey, and New Yorkhave their own prohibitions or restrictions on assault weapons that have withstood court challenges. And although the Heller Court ruled out blanket bans on handguns, many states regulate handguns by requiring permits to buy them.

As the Supreme Court recognized in Heller, guns have traditionally been prohibited or restricted in certain public places under federal, state, and local laws. These sensitive places include schools, government buildings and courtrooms, public transit facilities, airports, and polling stations.

A U.S. appellate court has held that the Second Amendment doesnt protect carrying a concealed weapon in public (Peterson v. Martinez, 707 F.3d 1197 (10th Cir. 2013)). Most states require a concealed-carry permit, but the conditions vary a lot from state to state. The strictest laws allow authorities to deny a permit when the applicant doesnt have a good moral character or a good reason for carrying a gun in public. The most lenient require authorities to issue the permit to anyone who applies, with little or no discretion. Nearly all states restrict concealed weapons in some places, such as bars, hospitals, and public sporting events. But several states allow concealed weapons on public college campuses, under legislation or state court rulings that overturned longtime bans.

Finally, some states have open carry laws that ban or set conditions on openly carrying certain types of guns in public or in private cars.

Licensed gun dealers have to meet several requirements under federal law, including performing background checks, keeping records of sales, and reporting multiple sales of handguns to the same person (18 U.S.C. 923). But those requirements dont apply to private sellers, including those at gun shows. Some states have stronger laws, and a few require licensing for the sale of all guns.

If you believe that a local law or regulation infringes on your Second Amendment rights as a gun owner, you might want to speak with a civil rights attorney about your options for challenging the restriction. And if youve been charged with a crime related to owning, carrying, or using a gun, you should strongly consider consulting with a criminal defense lawyer. The circumstances in each case are unique, and the laws vary in different states and localities. An attorney whos experienced in this area can explain how the relevant laws apply in your situation and what defenses you might have.

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The Second Amendment: What Are the Limits on the Right to ...

Second Amendment Caucus – Wikipedia

Political party in United States

The Second Amendment Caucus, also known as the House Second Amendment Caucus, is a congressional caucus consisting of conservative and libertarian Republican members of the United States House of Representatives who support Second Amendment rights.[1] It was formed in 2016 to "promote a pro-gun agenda" according to founding chairman Thomas Massie.[2]

The Second Amendment Caucus was originally established in 2004 by Representative Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO) and existed under that name until 2008. Representative Paul Broun (R-GA) recreated it in 2009 and titled it the Second Amendment Task Force. Thomas Massie reestablished it in December 2016 in light of the 2016 election results with 13 other congressmen.

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Ideological caucuses in the United States Congress

Caucuses with no known membership as of the 117th Congress do not have memberships listed.

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Second Amendment Caucus - Wikipedia