Interesting news story yesterday. The Seattle police had sued over the new “use of force” rules, saying in part that it violated their 2nd Amendment rights.
The judge’s decision came down, and she (judge Marsha Pechman) dismissed the suit. According to the KOMO article :
The judge also dismissed the officers’ constitutional arguments, saying that while the Second Amendment ensures the right to keep and bear arms, it doesn’t protect the right to use the weapons.
Ummmm…. Excuse me? That’s like saying you have the right to free speech as long as you don’t say anything.
You know, I think she’s right. The Second Amendment doesn’t protect the use of weapons. If it did, murdering someone with a gun would be legal.
Trolling again?
I think you are having difficulty in understanding rights you don’t agree with. Try rewording Second Amendment rights into First Amendment analogies. For example in this case, “Free speech doesn’t guarantee a right to incite a riot. But it does guarantee the right to speak in public.”
Basically, we are agreeing that rights can be regulated. No right is absolute.
We agree there can be regulation as long as certain restrictions on the regulation are met. For example regulations may not render the right meaningless. It may not cast a chilling effect on the exercise of that right, etc.
That does not mean I agree with your original statement. We do have the right to use weapons. That right is protected by the Second Amendment.
No you idiot! Murder is ILLEGAL! it doesn’t matter if you use a gun, a knife, or a giant butt-plug. (again “Progressives” are fixated on “Gun Death”, all the other death and violent crime is irrelevant to them)
Same goes with threats, or creating a negligently dangerous environment. (It doesn’t matter if you keep your 1911 race gun with a 1.5lb trigger loaded in the kids toy chest, or you just decide to keep a bottle of windex there…it’s a CRIME)
None of the enumerated rights trump the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they ENABLE those things.
I can’t take somebody’s life (tool irrelevant) for an unjustified reason. Meanwhile the JUSTIFIED reasons to take somebody’s life (tool irrelevant again) always are under circumstances where your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is in the gravest of jeopardy.
The other reasons to discharge a firearm LEGALLY like target, sport shooting, hunting, eliminating pests, don’t harm any other person, so they are also protected.
“Same goes with threats, or creating a negligently dangerous environment. (It doesn’t matter if you keep your 1911 race gun with a 1.5lb trigger loaded in the kids toy chest, …it’s a CRIME)” – your statement is rather narrow sighted. For example you assume that a child would have access to the toy chest and also that the “kid” would be dangerous whit said 1911 gun. We all know recently a 10 year old girl won a national shooting contest using a 1911 race gun.
I agree that we need to keep dangerous items, of all kinds, from children too young to safely access them. However, new laws is not the way to accomplish such.
Every right is absolute. A “right” that is not absolute is a permission.
Anti-gun idiots are the lowest of all forms.
Lee, “Safe Storage” Laws are illegal per Heller and McDonald, and in a state that still has the illegal laws on the books I am strongly opposed to it.
I’m not talking about such mandates, hell I knew kids who had full access to the guns and ammunition at an early age, and there was nothing wrong with that, they knew what they were doing, and the more woodchucks on the farm that got drilled, the better.
Still there is such a thing as creating a dangerous environment. Leaving a pot of hot oil at the edge of the stove, or a container of poison, or a loaded gun in a home where a child doesn’t know better than to play with those objects IS a criminal act.
That’s all I was talking about.
*ahem*
“”You know, I think she’s right. The First Amendment doesn’t protect the use of speech. If it did, hiring a hitman to murder someone would be legal.””
See how easy it is!
Though with the “campaign finanance” amendment that the Left is pushing, one wonders how much they think acutally *speaking* isn’t protected.
Ubu52 is right, we don’t have a right to discharge our guns in public absent a justifiable reason.
Remember, SPD got hit with the new rules for playing fast & loose with the justifiable bit. I’ve long held that we’d have less trouble with police if they were held to the same use of force standard us lowly civilians are, but by & large they work with a different standard.
I disagree, ubu is wrong, as usual. Completely off on the wrong foot.
We do have the right to use our borne arms, but in the proverbial “my right to swing my fist ends at your nose” sense, we cannot use them indiscriminately to injure another person, or damage his stuff, or act in a manner highly likely to do so. The exceptions are when you’re doing so to stop a crime of violence, or when you’ve controlled the situation such that you aren’t going to damage unintended objects, such as at a firing range.
To the extent that police officers can do so with deference not extended to other citizens, that is a exercise of civil power. Those powers can be regulated, constrained, and reviewed for reasonableness. If those powers cannot be used with discretion, they can be removed, but they could not be reduced to less that that of any other citizen. To do so would be a infringement of one of the central purposes of the Second Amendment, self-defense and the defense of others.
Fair point. So the judges statement was inaccurate, but I don’t think her dismissal was, since I don’t think the rules of force that SPD is being told to operate under are materially any tighter than what I operate under.
Ubu52 said if the Second Amendment protected the use of weapons then murdering someone with a gun would be legal and she gave no qualifiers such as “absent a justifiable reason”. She is therefore wrong without qualification.
This is such an obvious error on her part that I can’t help but think it was deliberate trolling.
Again, fair point
The kid is teething again, 2 days with bad sleep starts mushing up the brain
I feel your pain, Brother. Day 3 here!
It’s a fucking canine tooth too, you’d think those pointy fuckers would just SLIDE right out without so much trouble, but that little girl is HURTING.
Hopefully tonight is the night I’ll get some uninterrupted sleep. But then again she just got another round of vaccines, so I’m probably fucked.
Final molars for the Bug, and they are taking for-fucking-ever to cut through.
At least he slept through the night last night.
I hope you got enough rest.
Reading the article isn’t a great indicator of what the judge actually said. It would be better to read the actual ruling. There you would find:
As you read further it becomes clear she says you have a right to use the weapons but that use can be regulated. Such as concealed carry could be restricted as long as open carry was not (or perhaps not overly) restricted. In this case the Feds gave SPD rules on the use of force. As long as those rules are not overly burdensome they do not infringe upon the officers Second Amendment rights. Presumably, had the Feds said the officers could not carry weapons of any sort then the Second Amendment claim would be valid. But in this case, she claims, it is not.
I have not read the actual rules regulating SPD use of force and have no opinion as to whether the rules might be an infringement of their rights.
I really don’t think the police have a legit constitutional claim no matter what the restrictions are. The restrictions are only applicable in how they do the JOB they’re employed for, not their conducts as private individuals. If they don’t like the conditions of their employment, the solution is to quit….
The notion that regulation is ok is a dangerous trap. For one thing, it directly contravenes “shall not be infringed”. Now if the 2nd Amendment said “shall not be infringed overly much” that would be different — but that’s not what it says.
Similarly free speech. The 1st Amendment says “Congress shall make NO law” (emphasis added). What part of “NO” does McCain not understand?
There is a simple principle at work here. One that liberals such as Ubu pretend not to understand (after all, principles are such a nuisance when you want to impose your will on others). http://www.down-with-power.com/0-zap.html says it well. You may not initiate force against another; you may defend yourself with force against those who initiate it. That’s all you need to understand to see why Ubu is full of it.
Neil also had another good point (in “Hope”): “Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was wrong. You have an absolute and perfect right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater — and to accept responsibility for the consequences.”
Indeed. If you accept regulation of your human rights, whether those are rights explicitly protected by a specific Amendment, or implicitly by the 9th, you’re yielding to those who would take your rights away entirely. At that point it becomes just a negotiation about how far they may go. If regulation of free speech is acceptable, is it ok to ban Hustler magazine? How about Mad magazine? How about all publications rated R and up? If not, what principle says “no”? If you allow regulation, there isn’t any principle you can apply. You’re in exactly the same spot as the lady in the famous Churchill quote: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/300099-churchill-madam-would-you-sleep-with-me-for-five-million
Similarly the right to arms. Subject to regulation, you say? “Reasonable regulation” even? We all know about that canard. Is it acceptable regulation to have “shall issue” permits? What about “may issue” permits? What about “will never issue” permits (as practiced in Hawaii and parts of California)? What about rules that guns may only be kept in safes, at licensed gun clubs, unloaded and with the bolt removed? After all, that’s considered “reasonable” in other countries, why not here? What principle says “ok to that point but no further”?
The only good answer to all of these theories is that our rights are NOT negotiable, NOT subject to regulation, NOT in shades of gray. The Constitution, and the human rights principle underlying it, are perfectly black and white. No regulation, no negotiation, no infringement of any form in any degree.
I think that is a reasonable working hypothesis of the way things should work. But current SCOTUS interpretation of the Bill of Rights is much easier to defend in public and adequate in the current context.
True, while it stands for the moment. The trouble with unprincipled people is that you have no way to predict where they will swerve next. Justice Kennedy is a perfect example of this. Today we have Heller, but tomorrow we may have the opposite. Since most of the people writing the decisions aren’t governed by any principles, there’s no way to know what will happen.
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Anything that LIBERAL DEMOCRATS do not agree with are subject to restriction. Anything to do with LIBERAL CAUSES are absolute. This is the message liberals want everyone to believe.
They will tell us all how to live, eat, work, believe, and behave if we keep voting these people in power. The “bluedog” democrats are gone. They have completely surrendered to progressive liberals. Vote all democrats out of office. They will listen to that message.
1. Arguing with a troll and wrestling with pigs is amusing to see, but don’t get caught up in trying to stay clean in either case.
2. Government restrictions on fundamental rights must be as narrowly tailored as possible to meet the purpose of the restriction.
Also again note that Shrodinger’s “Progressive” has struck again!
http://www.weerdworld.com/2011/schrodingers-progressive/
She’ll be back again like nothing happened.
A reminder…THE BILL OF RIGHTS…..is NOT negotiable or open to interpertation…and it IS absolute…..to me….Molon Lobe
The right to “keep and bear” is an absolute. Because exercising that right harms NOBODY. However the right to USE arms can and should be subjected to controls. Do you really want someone sighting in their 300WSM elk rifle in their backyard 50 feet from your kids sandbox? Do you really think it’s ok to just wander around firing random rounds into the air in celebration ala a Baghdad wedding celebration? That is why there are laws governing discharge of arms in city limits, prohibiting hunting within a specified distance of an occupied dwelling etc. etc. In some ways the various rights can be compared to each other but in other just as important ways they cannot. The men who penned the Constitution and the Second Amendment were very very bright and the way they worded the Second Amendment makes the right crystal clear.