kcbrown
Super Genius
- Jun 16, 2012
- 1,393
I did not claim you were totally wrong, only "partially incorrect."
I have to repeatedly bring up the fact that rights are not absolute because many here including yourself don't seem to understand it. Stating that
is arguing from an absolute position. There are limitations to our rights and I even provided examples.
Not everything is "relative". Without any fixed point of reference, everything is arbitrary.
Rights are limited by each other. That is why they are not "absolute". There is obviously reasonable disagreement as to where the boundaries of one right end and those of another begin. But that is very different from claiming that the boundaries of a right are defined by things that are lesser than rights.
Rights stand above all else. They wouldn't be rights otherwise.
"Dangerous and unusual" is not really arbitrary. You don't seem to grasp what it really means. I have stated that it is not really a numerical number yet you proceed to tell me it is not about popularity, which is about numerical numbers. What is absurd is to think that "weaponry that the founders won their liberty in the first place" is somehow unusual. What is absurd is to think that the arms that the government uses is somehow unusual.
Is that so? Then explain why the Supreme Court in Heller called out the M-16 as a potentially prohibitable weapon, when it is the most used weapon in the military, thus making it as an individual weapon and its features common unless you exclude government weapons and their features from what defines "common".
No, clearly "unusual" in Heller is measured with respect to what the citizenry possesses. Government weapons are excluded from the "unusual" test by the Supreme Court's own wording. The M-16 also proves that the "unusual" test doesn't include features of government arms, because none of the features of the M-16 are unusual except if you insist on limiting "usual" to only those things the citizenry possesses.
And of course it's arbitrary. If it weren't arbitrary, then it would be possible to articulate an objective and logical rule which would allow one to distinguish "usual" from "unusual" and which wouldn't have internal dependencies on things that are arbitrary (such as judicial judgment, statistics, numeric cutoffs, etc.). But I've seen no indication whatsoever that any such thing is possible. You're welcome to give it a shot, of course. I think you'll find it impossible to achieve.
There are social standards. We created chemical weapons, yet today we have decided that they are inappropriate to use in society. In the past we decided that concealed carry was inappropriate, yet today we do not. Things like this can change depending on social standards.
That's true, but it's also beside the point. It is not social standards that determined that machine guns are prohibitable. It was the government's unilateral actions that did that.
You're also failing to account for the effects of government actions on social standards. Presuming that rights can be limited by those social standards which do not themselves have a right as a basis, something that I do not yet concede, it is clearly inappropriate for the government to bootstrap a law into Constitutionality by changing laws so as to yield changes in social standards.
What cannot change is the ability of the people to keep and bear common arms for appropriate purposes.
And if "common" is measured by ownership by the citizenry, then clearly it follows that the government can prohibit ownership of any and all newly-developed weapons and/or features and not face a valid 2nd Amendment challenge, right? That's exactly what the "common" requirement implies.
A weapon and/or feature cannot become "common" with respect to citizen ownership unless the citizenry are allowed to possess it in the first place. Your argument enables the government to bootstrap prohibitions into Constitutionality merely by getting them in early enough.
In any case, the "common" (or “not unusual”, or whatever phrasing you wish to use) requirement is invalid on its face, because it would have resulted in allowable prohibition of some of the very arms the founders used to secure their liberty, which is a situation that the founders themselves most certainly did not agree with. One would have to argue that gunships and artillery were somehow magically "common" to get out from underneath this. Good Luck With That, because if those were “common", then M-16s (and mortars, and SAMs, and all other heavily used military arms) most certainly are “common” today, and thus M-16 (etc.) ownership by the citizenry is protected by the 2nd Amendment.
Last edited: