Op-Ed piece on 2nd Amendment

Good job, Mr. Hardy!

All of us informal students of the Second Amendment appreciate the work you do to champion the cause.

POST MY COMMENT AT CONTR COSTA TIMES:

While everyone is on Second Amendment bandwagon for Heller at the U.S. Supreme Court we still have to fight off the United Nations flanking attack on our Second Amendment. The United Nations will continue pushing their global gun control until it becomes a Customary International Law. The only way to individuals can effectively fight off this attack is with human rights complaints against the United States and United Nations through the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In that regard I have my own human rights complaint as a U.S. merchant seaman primarily against the United States and secondarily against the United Nations with Petition No. 1142-06 for the Second Amendment as a universal human right from a merchant seaman's point of view. My human rights complaint follows another human rights complaint against the United States, Jessica Gonzales (now Lenahan) with her Petition No. 1490-05 (No Constitutional Right to Police Protection: Her ex-husband violated a restraining order, kidnapped and killed her 3 young daughters). The IACHR has accepted her Petition for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Her Petition has opened the door to a Second Amendment as a human rights case. My petition is already in and is still pending review. I began my litigious journey through the federal courts in 2002 before I filed my human rights complaint in 2006. I have done all this without an attorney because the NRA refuses to get involved.

Does anyone care to notify Wayne LaPierre of this of my Second Amendment case at IACHR's international level? So far, Wayne LaPierre and Robert Dowlut is still refusing to get involved in my case because I am pushing "National Open Carry" as a universal human right as opposed to the NRA's National Reciprocity for Concealed Carry. I have the moral correctness over the NRA.

Any gun control that incrementally infringes upon the Second Amendment brings us incrementally closer to genocide under the Law of Nations. Hence the Genocide Convention.

When will it be easy for the United States to committ genocide of the American people? How many more gun control laws will it take before we are disarmed as a people? Why hasn't the United States challenged the United Nations for breach of treaty under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties between States and International Organizations or between International Organizations of 1986 for violating Article 2, Section 7 of the U.N. Charter for their global gun control agenda?

The United States is complicit with the United Nations in human rights violations under the Genocide Convention because any and all gun control laws facilitate the commision of genocide. If the United States had any real backbone for human rights we would not now be fighting for Second Amendment rights at the U.S. Supreme Court. But the United States has a poor human rights record in league with China and other countries of ill repute in their human rights record.

David B. Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne D. Eisen's law review article "The Human Right of Self Defense" (forthcoming in the BYU Journal of Public Law 2007) stop short of claiming "that the evidence produced thus far proves the existence of a universal international human right to possess and carry firearms in all circumstances."

I disagree. If the Genocide Convention cannot be a source of authority or proof of the human right to possess and carry firearms in all circumstances the we all live die by the whims of government and criminals alike, especially when they are one and the same. We as a people will never arrive at such a fundamental agreement of such universal application of human rights. We all forever by divided on this life and death matter.

Good job with your refuting op-ed.

I recently listened to a lecture by Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago in which he claims that the text of the 2nd amendment is hopelessly confusing and not susceptible of being understood. We simply can't ever know what it means, according to Sunstein. But whatever it means, it depends entirely on the existence of militias and since militias are no longer maintained it really doesn't matter what it means because it is simply a dead letter.

He also claims that no court has ever, not since the ratification of the Constitution until the Parker case, held that the 2nd amendment embodies an individual right. [I guess Sunstein missed that part of the Dred Scott case where Taney said Dred Scott could not be a citizen or even a human being because if so he would have the right to own a gun]

Finally, he claims that the current scholarship finding that an individual right is the "standard model" is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people. He made a special point to emphasize that the whole argument for an individual right is not just wrong, but a fraud on a massive scale.

I wish I could have got paid for sitting through Sunstein's lecture. No one should have to endure such an ordeal without payment of damages.

A quick tech note. If you trim the fat off of the URL of the column, you'll avoid the login/registration page, thusly:

http://www.contracostatimes.com/opinion/ci_7610129

I've read Gura's filings, and I've read the filings by the DC attorneys.

Gura's filings make me say, "Glad I'm not trying to argue against that."

The DC lawyers evoke, "Can't these whiners stick to the topic?"

The DC lawyers are seriously overmatched.

Here come the judges...

Almost forgot...

Yes, very nice job David. Keep up the good fight.

Cass Sunstein needs to step away from the crack pipe. Even though I didn't graduate from an Ivy League law school, I can read.

David:

Two questions please:

1) When I submit articles/letters to papers, I have to agree that my article is unique and will not be published elsewhere. Chemerinsky's article in the Contra Costa times is very similar to this one...not exactly ver batim, but very close.

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071127/OPINION01/711270352/1036/OPINION

2) I question whether you considered a very central part of his argument. The angle that Chemerinsky is taking...that firearm regulations need not be subject to "strict scrutiny", but rather, that "rational basis review" suffices...

Is it possible that argument will gain traction with the Supreme Court? Not knowing the basis for review, my own hope is that 2A restrictions be subject to strict scrutiny, in that they must demonstrably do what they are established to do (e.g. firearm restrictions reduce violent crime). Right now, it seems, they are only subject to a majority who thinks "will this gun ban reduce crime?...yeah, that seems reasonable."

Here is my own letter to the Professor:

27 November 2007

Dear Prof. Chemerinsky:

Hello from a fellow academic. I too love academic freedom and I am sorry that UC-Irvine retracted their offer of employment. To the extent that you comment on public policy, I am supportive.

But I must take issue with some recent commentary. It regards the Heller case and appeared in Des Moines Register entitled "Second amendment isn't absolute..." Is there any indication whatsoever that the DC District court ruled that gun ownership rights were absolute? Absolutely not! I'm stupefied that you'd even pitch the issue in those terms.

More importantly, regarding the statement (from your article): "...there is no need for the Supreme Court to face that divisive question [individual right or not] because it should hold that even if there is such a right, the government can adopt reasonable regulations of firearms." I could hardly believe you wrote that! Legislative powers (reasonable regulations) necessarily are limited when they violate the rights of people, and that is EXACTLY what's at issue here. You seem to be saying that the people's rights don't matter and that legislation can trump them. There is indeed very good reason for the SCOTUS to hear this case, to define the right protected by the 2A, and correct the current circuit split. The second amendment is no more a "puzzle" than certain people have contorted it to be...and I suspect you know that to be true.

In fact, your article reminded me of the "bet hedging" that was done in the State's (including my AG Madigan) amicus curiae at the petition stage of Heller. They loaded their brief with language such as: "the Second Amendment permits reasonable regulation of firearms to protect public safety and does not guarantee individuals the absolute right to own the weapons of their choice" (emphasis mine). Of course there is no absolute right...talk about creative argument!

Your mention of "absolute" is similar to the State's brief, and both are as disingenuous as the question DC posed to the Supreme Court, which omitted the fact that their "allowed" rifles and shotguns were not functional arms, and that the court below had ruled their ordinance as illegal. The Supreme Court wisely re-wrote the question to reflect that the DC ban on functional long guns was indeed an issue here.

For your information I've attached my letter to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, a statement by Mike Cox, Michigan Attorney General, and for reference, the State's amicus brief.

Best regards,

The very fact that SCOTUS has agreed to hear Heller is a strong indication that they will confirm that the Second Amendment is an individual right. If it is NOT an individual right, then Mr. Heller, as an individual, does not have standing and cannot bring this matter before the court.

This quote from one of Judge Alex Kozinki's dissents aptly describes what Cass Sunstein was doing when he claimed in his lecture at the University of Chicago that the individual rights view of the 2nd Amendment is a "fraud." I copied this from Clayton Cramer's blog:

Judges [and liberal University professors] know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or . . . the press" also means the Internet, and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths. When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases--or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel [and Cass Sunstein] amply demonstrates, when we're none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

The very fact that SCOTUS has agreed to hear Heller is a strong indication that they will confirm that the Second Amendment is an individual right. If it is NOT an individual right, then Mr. Heller, as an individual, does not have standing and cannot bring this matter before the court.

The Court has not agreed to hear heller's appeal, not has Heller brought this matter to the Court. Rather, it is the District of Columbia that has brought the matter before the court and whose appeal the Court has agreed to hear. It could go either way, though I tend believe it will go in our favor.