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Continuing a myth
From an NPR interview:
"As a matter of history, we didn't really see anything like the individual point of view emerge until the 20th century," he says.... The modern debate about individual rights pertaining to guns, he says, began in the aftermath of Congress' enactment of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which attempted to control crime in the aftermath of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy."
I've tracked the history pretty extensively, and am working on an article on the subject right now. Essentially, the individual rights understanding dominated everywhere until the 20th century. You see a few glimmers of a collective rights view in the early 20th century, but it really doesn't become serious until the 1940s, as federal appeals courts grappled with the ambiguities of US v. Miller, and sought to uphold the National Firearms Act. It becomes the dominant federal (but not state) view only after 1968, as appeals courts tried to uphold various features of the Gun Control Act. Heller was of course its downfall. So the collective rights view really is widespread only from 1940 or 1968 until 2007, and then only in the federal courts and a handful of state ones. For the rest of the history of the Republic, the individual rights view held sway.
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The anti-gun professorate have no shame. Not one bit. As I once had said to me after I demonstrated the falsity of his remarks, "the truth doesn't support my conclusions!" so ... I'll twist it as much as necessary. These guys all believe that the end does justify the means IF YOUR GOAL IS A "BETTER" WORLD.
Here are my comments to NPR about Professor Spitzer's Second Amendment related views:
This is a comment regarding Professor Robert J. Spitzer's statements in an npr interview on January 27, 2011 entitled "After the Tucson Shootings, NRA Again Shows Its Strength". This was posted at http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=133247508&m=133247558
Professor Spitzer stated that the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment in the Supreme Court's Heller case was a departure from "a militia based interpretation" that "all" prior federal court decisions supported. His assertion is factually incorrect. Two prior federal district courts and two federal circuit courts of appeals previously adopted an individual rights interpretation. The latter include the DC Circuit's Parker vs District of Columbia decision that directly led to the Heller decision. There was also a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' October 2001 U.S. vs Emerson decision, which cited over 100 period historical sources backing up its individual right interpretation of the Second Amendment.
These particular decisions as well as that in Heller are very familiar to me because historical sources quoted in each were cited from a period document collection, The Origin of the Second Amendment, that I edited and published.
The point here is that Professor Spitzer is not always correct in his beliefs and statements.
Professor Spitzer was a signatory to a historical amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the McDonald case supporting Chicago's gun control law. His brief contained a number of historical errors that have been documented in a series of 6 short articles entitled, Historians Try to Sell London Bridge to U.S. Supreme Court, posted at On Second Opinion Blog. The URL for the first article in the series is: http://onsecondopinion.blogspot.com/2010/01/historians-offer-to-sell-brooklyn.html
The problem with Professor Spitzer's views about the original intent of the Second Amendment is that the founding period sources directly contradict him and instead confirm that the intent was protection of a private right to possess and use arms.
Terry Gross is completely anti-gun; I don't think I've every heard anything pro or even balanced about the issue on Fresh Air.
"...as federal appeals courts grappled with the ambiguities of US v. Miller, and sought to uphold the National Firearms Act."
That is the core of the problem.
The record of the discussions leading up to the NFA make it clear that the FDR Administration's initial intent was to control all firearms through the NFA - then they realized they couldn't (as it people wouldn't stand for it) nd they devised the fiction of the NFA as a revenue process (tax) to control certain firearms.
Miller required the SCOTUS to exercise a level of Constitutional sophistry that makes the decision ridiculous when compared to the historical record. Merchant vessel owners routinely put cannon on them until the late 1800s! Firearms in "common use" that can't be in "common use" because they are controlled?
So, when the statist-dominated judiciary began to "...grapple[d] with the ambiguities of US v. Miller, and sought to uphold the National Firearms Act" the statist had to create the "collective rights" fiction.
This extends to all of the "progressive" statist decisions handed down by courts that seek to transform our Constitution into a meaningless document and our Republic into a communitarian neo-European "social democracy" lead by oligarchs. There, I said it.
The Hughes Amendment (18 USC 922(o)) ended the legal fiction that the NFA was a revenue act (at least for MGs) because the "Secretary" cannot / will not accept the "revenue" (the stamp tax payment) on a post May 19, 1986 MG.
Unless there is a Constitutional bases for any Federal law it is merely the exercise of naked power.
"As a matter of history, we didn't really see anything like the individual point of view emerge until the 20th century,"
Call me crazy, but doesn't that sounds a lot like it was extracted from Michael A. Bellesiles' book Arming America? Could they be so dumb as using that book as reference?
Have they heard of James Madison or Thomas Jefferson?
Only when the government is attempting to expand its power over EVERYONE and EVERYTHING. Then the gun grabbers come out of the woodwork. It's much easier to subdue the unarmed.
And of course the judges are part of the annointed. They side with the governmetn the majority of the time and pull crap out of the Constitution that is not there and was never intended to be there such as "reasonable gun control". Ain't no such animal.