Exercise of rights at a minimum

This is very telling:

Wide-open policies on gun laws do not reflect the mood or makeup of most New Jerseyans. While they are not always successful, New Jersey gun laws are written to help keep the number of guns at a minimum. Fewer guns will make our law enforcement officers’ jobs that much easier, and make our streets that much safer.

What if the same principle was applied to other specific enumerated rights:

  • Keep books at a minimum (and ban the exceptionally dangerous ones such as The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, The Little Red Book, and all religious books)
  • Keep political speech at a minimum (and ban the most dangerous speech—that which advocates the policies of the political left (see the books above)
  • Keep the right to a lawyer present while being questioned at a minimum
  • Keep people of color from voting at a minimum

There are no second class rights. All these rights must respected and preserved. Essentially all New Jersey politicians need to be either prosecuted and/or be declared varmints with no bag limits and a decent bounty paid.

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13 thoughts on “Exercise of rights at a minimum

  1. “There are no second class rights.”
    Preach it brother!
    This is why the whole Supreme Court-invented system of “Strict Scrutiny”, “Intermediate Scrutiny” and “Rational Basis Test” is just a way for the Reds in Black Robes to support the rights they like and cripple the riights they’d rather not have to face. Rational Basis Test is the worst of all to use on Constitutional Rights, as it means that ANY reason that passes the grammar test (not the giggle test) is good enough to uphold the restriction.
    Intermediate is some mish-mash, and Strict Scrutiny test is that there is NO Other way to meet the important governmental objective that is less restrictive.
    EVERY right the Nine Old Men (and women) EVER read about or discovered in the pages of the Constitution must be protected with the Strict Scrutiny Test, or the Supreme Court is a band of banana republic apologists, Leftists pretending to be intellectuals and constitutional scholars.

    • I disagree.

      Strict scrutiny is no more Constitutional than any other form of scrutiny. It still amounts to “the government can trample on the Constitution if it comes up with a good enough excuse”. The only difference is how good the “good enough” excuse needs to be.

      The actual plain English text of the Constitution permits no “scrutiny” type of analysis, strict or otherwise. It contains plain English phrases like “shall not be infringed”. It does not say “may be infringed with a sufficiently good excuse”. The fact that all the courts have acted contrary to the plain English text for 225 years does not change this fact in any way at all — it merely demonstrates the lawlessness of the 3rd branch.

      The other issue is that there is no such thing as an “important government objective”. The government is the servant of the people, the tool responsible for faithfully executing the laws made under the Constitution. Nothing more. It has no objectives of its own. And before you say “well, yes, that’s what I meant” please remember that most of the people who refer to “important government objective” are not so honest and do want the government to be able to do things “because it’s a good idea”, never mind what the letter of the Supreme Law of the Land has to say about it.

      • “The fact that all the courts have acted contrary to the plain English text for 225 years does not change this fact in any way at all.”
        In Heller, Alan Gura said something similar to this in response to (I think Ruth Bader Ginsberg), that 225 years of precedent don’t allow the Supreme Court to bootstrap its way to legality.

        I guess the real question then, for instance, is how do we balance the citizens’ right to be secure in their papers and places, with the fact that this right to be secure is often threatened by other citizens . A small problem compared to the weaponizing of the FBI, but a problem nonetheless for the citizen who lives in Detroit or Washington DC.

        • While “balancing” is a word much abused by judges (justice Kennedy is a case in point), the example you gave doesn’t involve any balancing at all. Everyone has an inherent natural right to defend against initiation of force against him, with all suitable tools. “Secure in their papers and places” is not the real question here; the natural right to preserve life and property is.
          Since there is no right to initiate force against others, there isn’t any “balancing”; the right is entirely at the side of the victim of the attack and whatever force is needed to stop the attack is fully authorized by natural law, morality, and the Constitution.

  2. You have part of that backwards, Joe. Mein Kampala and Mao’s book would be held in high esteem, it’s those subversives like Jefferson, and books like Unintended Consequences that need to be suppressed.

    • That is what some of those in power would want. This illustrates one of the reasons for freedom of speech and thought. Limitations on such freedoms quickly devolve into civil war over what those limitations ought to be. It is much better to tolerate the existence of bad ideas than to give government the power to decide which ideas to allow.

  3. “Fewer guns will make our law enforcement officers’ jobs that much easier, and make our streets that much safer.”

    Please cite your source material for this assertion, including any and all studies, research, and statistics.

    • Uh-uh-uh.
      It’s self-evident! Do you think it wouldn’t be that way? You bad person!
      In ever increasing volume.

    • No source required, silly boy. It’s just “common sense” that would occur.

    • You are a heretic for one reason and one reason alone; for questioning the pope. What the Bible says does not matter, for the pope is the supreme authority. Any authority that the Bible has comes from the pope, you see.

      So it is with the constitution and those who presume to be our masters and caretakers. YOU don’t get to decide what the constitution says, THIEY do. The constitution gets it’s authority from THEM.

      The more I study this, the more I see a perfect parallel between the two. The Reformation was brutally suppressed in the Old World and it eventually fled in large part to America, where it is has been surreptitiously eroded, corroded and corrupted ever since.

      There’s the connecting point, and just as the a Protestant Reformation has now been all but totally surrendered back to the papacy, so too are the American founding principles being all but ignored.

      Don’t get me wrong though. I’m not saying that these are two separate processes that happen to coincide nicely, by some coincidence. I’m saying they are one in the same conflict, the war against liberty and against Biblical principles being waged by the very same people.

      • Interesting analogy. It adds a new angle to the similarities between the Dutch war for independence (1568-1648) and that of the USA. Also, the Dutch declaration of independence and the US one — semantically similar though the US one is stylistically vastly superior.
        I’ll have to ponder this more.

  4. Unfortunately, citizens can’t initiate prosecution under federal criminal law, that is the fatal flaw in the statutes that outlaw the likes of Murphy.

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