Background Material for an Exploration and Treatise on the Right to Bear Arms

Goal:

To discover what the original developers of our system of federal government meant for the general population, regarding the right to bear arms:

• Are gun rights as set out in the Constitution belonging to the individual, and to militia groups unaffiliated with official organizations?  -- or is the right to bear arms exclusive to government and official organizations such as the police or military? Do we no longer need an armed population for defense against all threats, foreign or domestic? Does the Constitution protect the rights of the individual or does it protect the rights of the government?
  
• What meaning could be extrapolated regarding modern arms ownership could be extrapolated from the context of the original intent of the Constitution? Since we are technologically far in advance of the kinds of arms available when the Constitution and Amendments were written, how should modern-day and future arms be regulated?
• For what purpose should an individual or official entity be able to bear and use arms under Constitutional protection? Are individuals limited to bearing arms only for self-defense or protection of loved ones, home, or personal property? Are individuals prohibited from bearing arms which are the same used by the police? -- or are arms meant to be used only in official capacities, to be used on unarmed citizenry in pursuit of duties pertaining to enforcement of local, state, and federal laws and mandates?

2nd Amendment Annotations

The following is taken from FindLaw.com. It is a summation of court decisions so far pertaining to the questions being examined:

"Prior to the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller,1 the courts had yet to definitively state what right the Second Amendment protected. The opposing theories, perhaps oversimplified, were (1) an "individual rights" approach, whereby the Amendment protected individuals' rights to firearm ownership, possession, and transportation; and (2) a "states' rights" approach, under which the Amendment only protected the right to keep and bear arms in connection with organized state militia units.2 Moreover, it was generally believed that the Amendment was only a bar to federal action, not to state or municipal restraints.3

However, the Supreme Court has now definitively held that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that weapon for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Moreover, this right applies not just to the federal government, but to states and municipalities as well.

In Heller, the Court held that (1) the District of Columbia's total ban on handgun possession in the home amounted to a prohibition on an entire class of "arms" that Americans overwhelmingly chose for the lawful purpose of self-defense, and thus violated the Second Amendment; and (2) the District's requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock also violated the Second Amendment, because the law made it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense.

The Court reasoned that the Amendment's prefatory clause, i.e.,"[a] well regulated  Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," announced the Amendment's purpose, but did not limit or expand the scope of the operative clause, i.e., "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Moreover, the prefatory clause's history comported with the Court's interpretation, because the prefatory clause stemmed from the Anti-Federalists' concern that the federal government would disarm the people in order to disable the citizens' militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule.

Further, the Court distinguished United States v.Miller,4 in which the Court upheld a statute requiring registration under the National Firearms Act of sawed-off shotguns, on the ground that Miller limited the type of weapon to which the Second Amendment right applied to those in common use for lawful purposes.

In McDonald v. Chicago,5 the Court struck down laws enacted by Chicago and the village of Oak Park effectively banning handgun possession by almost all private citizens, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Second Amendment right, recognized in Heller, to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense.

The Court reasoned that this right is fundamental to the nation's scheme of ordered liberty, given that self-defense was a basic right recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present, and Heller held that individual self-defense was "the central component" of the Second Amendment right. Moreover, a survey of the contemporaneous history also demonstrated clearly that the Fourteenth Amendment's Framers and ratifiers counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to the Nation's system of ordered liberty."*

 To be continued...

*From FindLaw.com, founded in 1996. The website and publications are a free legal information resource for legal professionals and the general public

Combat Fatigue in the War on Women's Rights

A friend posted this with a response to this post in I love it when I wake up in the morning and Barack Obama is President.  My friend disagreed with these comments, and accused the nun of being a poor Catholic. She stresses that adoption should be the only legal option for pregnant women who don't want a baby. She is both Catholic and anti-abortion, and I respect her opinions, though I don't agree. My comment was: 

I believe the point Sister Chittister was trying to make is that many people condemn those who seek abortions while also turning their backs on the needs of parents and their unplanned children. Not just the cute, young, adoptable ones; but those who will have to become latch-key kids as early as possible; the underfed, neglected, and sometimes abused children of poor families who often have few options for daycare and must leave their kids with less than optimal providers (like people who molest them or beat them to death); the kids who often end up in the judicial system sooner rather than later. Adoption is not always the rosy picture painted by pro-life advocates who say "there are no unwanted children, only unfound families." Jerry Sandusky, of Penn State, adopted 6 children, one of whom has joined the number of young men accusing him of sexual abuse. While this doesn't represent all adoptive families, the same statistics which apply to natural family-child abuse apply to adoptive families. 

Charitable and government assistance is plentiful for children up to age five. But raising kids is a life-long commitment. Recent research estimates the cost of raising a child to age 18 to be $235K, not including college! With wealth and family stability come better employment opportunities and better schools and neighborhoods. The causes of income disparity in our society are complex and are closely tied with the need for legal abortion, at least 21% of women seeking abortion in the US cited economic need, while the other reasons given may raise that number significantly. 

Children of poor families face enormous obstacles in every respect, and like the children of wealthy families who've had the legacy of wealth passed down for generations, so too, the children of poor families have suffered the legacy of poverty. Some families can point all the way back to the devastation of the South during the Civil War for their present reduced net worth and income disparity; some were reduced to poverty because of the loss or maiming of fathers and husbands in foreign wars; others are trying to recover from the handicaps of immigration from impoverished and war-torn nations. 

But so many who thump the pro-life drum have the old prejudice that people are poor or disadvantaged because they are inferior beings, because they make poor choices, because they're lazy, drug abusers, or drunks. They ignore the problems of lay-offs and prolonged unemployment, uncompensated accidents and the onset of physical disabilities, divorce, deadbeat parents, the impact of war and separation on families, and so many other factors which contribute to what is often a sudden slide into poverty. In this economy, "the poor" is beginning to include the formerly middle-class. One out of every 45 children – some 1.6 million – is homeless, according to a December 2011 article in The Christian Science Monitor.

Extremist anti-abortion supporters view pregnancy and childbirth as a punishment a woman "deserves" for fornication, when such views are religious judgments which we all don't believe in, & should not be the basis of law or medicine. My own mother, unwed at 17, was denied an episiotomy by an obstetrician because he disapproved of her, causing a wound that she never fully recovered from. The years have become kinder to single mothers, but there is a groundswell of disapproval coming from these same anti-abortion zealots, who want to impose their morality and religious beliefs on our entire nation. If unchecked, they will drive women's place in society back at least 40 years, during this critical time when single women must work and two wage-earners is a necessity in most families. While there are many charities who serve the poor, all of those charities were feeling strained even before these economic conditions worsened. Most school budgets in lower-income neighborhoods are so straitened they don't even have full-time nurses on campuses, much less pre-school or after-school programs to give safe and positive educational complements to the school day. While the socio-economic environment encourages self-medication with drugs and alcohol among pre-teens through adults, access to counseling and psychiatric intervention is limited for the majority who need it.

Aside from the women or girls who are victims of rape or incest, and females who face health risks, which Mitt Romney concedes should be allowed abortions, there are a host of others with legitimate needs for safe and legal abortions. Many are married or in a relationship, but are important bread-winners for their families; some would be overwhelmed by adding another child to their family, particularly a child with birth defects; others simply don't want to be mothers; some are women who are being abused because they're pregnant and don't want to have a child which would give their abuser unsafe and traumatic leverage over their lives.  One woman I know had an IUD, but still got pregnant, which would have been an unsafe pregnancy for both the baby and herself. Failures in birth control methods are a frequent reason for seeking an abortion.

These same supercilious anti-abortion supporters have no problem with the death penalty, even though there are more and more cases of the wrong person being executed proven every day. These people seem to value only the lives of the unborn, not the living, and certainly not the pregnant woman's. Once pregnant, she ceases to be a person, but only a vessel for the unborn, according to passed and proposed legislation and the proposed constitutional amendment.

 

I assure you, I'm not pro-abortion, but I am pro-choice. I believe it should be legal, unstigmatized, and safely performed by a medical professional when women feel there are no other acceptable options in their own personal circumstances. I think it's a medical procedure and, like all medical procedures, should be a matter for a woman & her doctor to decide. The state has no business intruding on such a personal matter, much less requiring doctors to force insertion of ultrasound probes into the vaginas of females who may be underage or the victims of rape. It's a violation akin to rape, no matter what the circumstances. Doctors and the health care system are already overburdened, performing medically unnecessary procedures against the patient's consent should not be added to their burden. Choosing abortion isn't an easy decision: most women who've had abortions are still heartbroken about it, just as women don't forget the babies they miscarried.

The most important thing that should be done to see fewer abortions is not to make them illegal -- but to widen the availability of birth control education & access to birth control products. Planned Parenthood, now struggling because of anti-abortion lobbyist-targeted defunding, has been a resource for women's health and family planning, evolving from Margaret Sanger's founding of the American Birth Control League in 1921. I know the Catholic Church & some other Christian churches don't at this time approve of birth control, & that's their choice, but it's blind to think abstinence-only programs & keeping birth control access out of the hands of teenagers or affordable is working. And even the Catholic Church is evolving, didn't the Pope recently condemn the death penalty? We can only hope that this evolution will widen and reach the point where the religious-right realizes that we already have, as of this date, 314,272,306 people living in the United States; there are 7,036,307,560 people in the world. Do we really want to force people to have more babies?