Thread: Obama to Seek New Assault Weapons Ban

Obama to Seek New Assault Weapons Ban

Previous Ban Expired in 2004 During the Bush Administration

By JASON RYAN
WASHINGTON, Feb. 25, 2009
1388 comments


The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.

PHOTO Wednesday Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Obama administration will seek to reinstitute the assault weapons ban which expired in 2004 during the Bush administration.


Wednesday Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Obama administration will seek to reinstitute the assault weapons ban which expired in 2004 during the Bush administration.
(AP Photos/ABC News Graphic )

"As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons," Holder told reporters.

Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

"I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum." Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S.

Mexican government officials have complained that the availability of sophisticated guns from the United States have emboldened drug traffickers to fight over access routes into the U.S.

A State Department travel warning issued Feb. 20, 2009, reflected government concerns about the violence.

"Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades," the warning said. "Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico, but most recently in northern Mexico, including Tijuana, Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez."

At the news conference today, Holder described his discussions with his Mexican counterpart about the recent spike in violence.

"I met yesterday with Attorney General Medina Mora of Mexico, and we discussed the unprecedented levels of violence his country is facing because of their enforcement efforts," he said.

Holder declined to offer any time frame for the reimplementation of the assault weapons ban, however.

"It's something, as I said, that the president talked about during the campaign," he said. "There are obviously a number of things that are -- that have been taking up a substantial amount of his time, and so, I'm not sure exactly what the sequencing will be."

In a brief interview with ABC News, Wayne LaPierre, president of the National Rifle Association, said, "I think there are a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill cringing at Eric Holder's comments right now."

During his confirmation hearing, Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee about other gun control measures the Obama administration

"I think closing the gun show loophole, the banning of cop-killer bullets and I also think that making the assault weapons ban permanent, would be something that would be permitted under Heller," Holder said, referring to the Supreme Court ruling in Washington, D.C. v. Heller, which asserted the Second Amendment as an individual's right to own a weapon.

The Assault Weapons Ban signed into law by President Clinton in 1994 banned 19 types of semi-automatic military-style guns and ammunition clips with more than 10 rounds.

"A semi-automatic is a quintessential self-defense firearm owned by American citizens in this country," LaPierre said. "I think it is clearly covered under Heller and it's clearly, I think, protected by the Constitution."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=6960824&page=1

this is one of the few things if any that's still keeping the Tyrant in check ... they mean business and the New World Order cannot succeed while America is armed to the teeth

well, unless your crazy enough to hand them over and at this point... I think you are

Your Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms

By Howard J. Fezell, Esq.

This essay originally appeared in the January, 1997 issue of American Survival Guide

Go to www.SecondAmendment.net for other essays on your right to keep and bear arms.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed

United States Constitution, Amendment II

Introduction

Gun-prohibitionists constantly argue that the Second Amendment guarantees only a right of States to maintain militias. In doing so, they ignore not only the plain text of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but numerous opinions in which the United States Supreme Court has spoken of the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right. Proponents of the "states' rights" theory are also silent as to why, despite abundant opportunity, the Supreme Court has never summarily disposed of a Second Amendment claim on the grounds that an individual lacked standing to assert it.

The right guaranteed by the Second Amendment is the right of the people, not the States. The very text of the Constitution distinguishes between "the people", "persons" and "States". See, art. I., Sec. 2; art. I, Sec. 3; art. II, Sec. 1. The Tenth Amendment distinguishes between "the people" and "the States" by providing that, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

In The Bill of Rights as a Constitution, 100 YALE LAW JOURNAL 1131, 1166 (1991) Prof. Akil Reed Amar of Yale Law School writes:

The states' rights reading [of the Second Amendment] puts great weight on the word "militia," but this word appears only in the Amendment's subordinate clause. The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to "the people," not the "states." As the language of the Tenth Amendment shows, these two are of course not identical and when the Constitution means "states," it says so. Thus, as noted above, "the people" at the core of the Second Amendment are the same "people" at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment, namely Citizens.

United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259 (1990) involved the search of a residence in Mexico by agents of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency. The occupant of the residence was a Mexican citizen who later sought to suppress evidence that had been obtained during the search. The Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to a search by American police of the Mexican residence of a Mexican citizen and resident who had no voluntary attachments to the United States. Although this case involved a claim under the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, the opinion by Chief Justice Rhenquist makes it clear that the phrase "the people", as used in the Bill of Rights, means individuals:

"The people" seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. . . . The Second Amendment protects "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to "the people." See also U.S. const., Amdt. 1, ("Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble") . . . . While this textual exegesis is by no means conclusive, it suggests that "the people" protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.

494 U.S. at 265 (emp. added).

In his dissenting opinion in Verdugo-Urquidez, Justice Brennan noted that, "the term `the people' is better understood as a rhetorical counterpoint to `the government,' such that rights that were reserved to `the people' were to protect all those subject to `the government.'" 494 U.S. at 287 (emp. added).

In The Second Amendment and The Personal Right to Arms, Vol. 43 DUKE LAW JOURNAL 1236, 1243-44 (1994) Prof. William Van Alstyne writes:

[The Second Amendment] looks to an ultimate reliance on the common citizen who has a right to keep and bear arms rather than only to some standing army, or only to some other politically separated, defined, and detached armed cadre, as an essential source of security of a free state. In relating these propositions within one amendment, moreover, it does not disparage, much less does it subordinate "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." To the contrary, it expressly embraces that right and indeed it erects the very scaffolding of a free state upon that guarantee. It derives its definition of a well-regulated Militia in just this way for a "free State:" The Militia to be well regulated is a Militia to be drawn from just such people (i.e. people with a right to keep and bear arms) rather than from some other source (i.e. from people without rights to keep and bear arms). (emp. in original)

During the Constitutional Convention, language qualifying the right to keep and bear arms by inserting the phrase "for the common defense" next to the words "bear arms" was rejected. This underscores the drafters' refusal to limit the right to military purposes. Dowlut, Federal And State Constitutional Guarantees To Arms, Vol. 15 U. DAYTON LAW REVIEW 59, 66 (1989).

The Requirement For "Standing"

In order to assert a constitutional claim, a person must have "standing", that is, the legal right to assert a claim. A plaintiff asserting the violation of a constitutional right must show a direct and immediate personal injury. Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 204 (1962). If a party lacks standing, the court can dismiss his claim without ever considering its merits. On four separate occasions the Supreme Court considered cases of individuals who sought relief for what they claimed was an infringement of the right to keep and bear arms. In the first two cases the Court held that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States (a concept long since discarded). In the third, the Court held that since the defendant did not raise his claim at trial he could not do so on appeal. In the last case, the Court decided that the evidence before it was incomplete and sent the case back to the trial court. Not once did the Court rule that an individual lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment claim.

In United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876) the Supreme Court gutted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by holding that the Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, only operated as a restraint upon the federal government. In discussing the right to "bear arms for a lawful purpose" the Court stated that "the people" should look to localities (not the National Government) for protection against "their fellow citizens" of rights recognized by the Second Amendment. 92 U.S. at 553. Cruikshank affirmed an order arresting judgments of conviction for conspiracy to deprive freed blacks in Louisiana of their civil rights. The fact that the black citizens who were victimized were not affiliated with an organized state militia had no bearing on the case. The Court in Cruikshank also used the phrase "the people" in the same context as "their fellow citizens". 92 U.S. at 553. It obviously viewed "the people" referred to in the Second Amendment as meaning individuals. States, unlike individuals, do not have "fellow citizens".

In Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886) the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man charged with parading a body of armed men through Chicago without a license. Illinois law prohibited bodies of men to associate together as military organizations or to drill or parade in cities and towns unless authorized by law. Presser challenged this law as violating the Second Amendment. The Court held that these provisions did not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Citing Cruikshank, Presser also held that the Second Amendment is a limitation only upon Congress and the federal government. Presser did, however, hold that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserve military force or reserve militia of the United States and of the States; and that even without the Second Amendment states may not prohibit people from keeping and bearing arms "so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining public security." 116 U.S. at 265. Presser thus drew a clear distinction between "the people" and "States". If the Second Amendment guaranteed only a collective right, the Court could easily have disposed of Presser's Second Amendment claim by holding that he lacked standing to assert it. Instead, it addressed Presser's Second Amendment claim on its merits.

In Miller v. Texas, 153 U.S. 535 (1894) the Supreme Court declined to rule on the appellant's Second Amendment claim due to his failure to raise it in a timely fashion, stating, "[i]f the Fourteenth Amendment limited the power of the States as to such rights, as pertaining to citizens of the United States, we think it was fatal to this claim that it was not set up in the trial court." 153 U.S. at 538. Miller had been convicted of murder and on appeal argued that Texas law forbidding the carrying of weapons violated the Second Amendment. Once again, if the Second Amendment guaranteed only a collective right, such a claim could have been easily disposed of due to Miller's lack of standing. However, Miller's claim was not ruled upon because he, as an individual, lacked standing to assert it. The Court held that he had failed to assert it in a timely fashion.

United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) involved the indictment of Jack Miller and a cohort for unlawfully transporting a short-barrelled shotgun in violation of the National Firearms Act of 1934. The trial court granted Miller's motion to dismiss the charges, holding that the section of the act under which he had been indicted violated the Second Amendment. The United States appealed. Jack Miller fled to parts unknown. Only the Solicitor General for the United States filed a brief or appeared to argue the case before the Supreme Court. The Court was not at all concerned that Jack Miller, an individual, was asserting a Second Amendment claim. What the Supreme Court cared about was whether the shotgun possessed by Miller had "some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, . . ." 307 U.S. at 178. The Court refused to take for granted that a short-barrelled shotgun "is any part of ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense". 307 U.S. at 178. The case was sent back to the trial court for further proceedings on this question. Unfortunately, Jack Miller was no longer around and the case went no further. If the Second Amendment guaranteed only a collective right, the Supreme Court could have simply held that Mr. Miller, as an individual, lacked standing to assert a right to keep and bear arms. However, the fact that Miller was not affiliated with an organized state militia had no bearing on the case. The opinion in United States v. Miller never even suggested that the possessor of a firearm must be a member of a militia, and the individual nature of the right to keep and bear arms went unquestioned.

Since before the Civil War (and to this day)
the Supreme Court has spoken of the right to keep and bear arms
in the context of other "individual" rights.

In Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)(also known as "The Dred Scott Case") the Supreme Court addressed the question of whether persons of African descent could be citizens. It held that they could not in an opinion written by Chief Justice Taney, a Southerner from Maryland (where slavery was both legal and widely practiced). In 1857, Southerners were not keen on the idea of freeing the slaves, much less bestowing upon them the rights of citizens. The concerns of his fellow Southerners were not lost upon Chief Justice Taney, who wrote that if blacks were recognized as citizens in any State of the Union, they would have the right to travel freely, engage in free speech, hold public meetings on political issues, and "keep and carry arms wherever they went." 60 U.S. at 416-17.

If the Second Amendment guaranteed only the collective right of states to maintain militias, there would have been no reason for Taney to fear that black citizens could "keep and carry arms" since citizenship does not automatically entail service in an organized state militia. What concerned Chief Justice Taney was the rights blacks would enjoy as citizens. The Court's opinion in Scott v. Sanford also listed the right to keep and bear arms with other rights which the Court has held to be of an individual nature, such as freedom of religion, free speech, freedom of the press, peaceable assembly, trial by jury, and the right against self-incrimination. 60 U.S. at 450.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, ____ U.S. ____, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (1992) the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of provisions in a Pennsylvania abortion statute requiring the informed consent of the patient, a 24-hour waiting period, parental consent, spousal notification, and reporting and recordkeeping. The plaintiffs claimed that such provisions constituted a deprivation liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Planned Parenthood held that the substantive liberties protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against interference by the States was not limited to those rights already guaranteed against federal interference by the first eight amendments to the Constitution. In doing so, the Court listed the right to keep and bear arms in the same context as other rights which it has held to be of an individual nature:

Neither the Bill of Rights nor the specific practices of the States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment marks the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects. See U.S. Const., Amend. 9. As the second Justice Harlan recognized:

"[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause `cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This `liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints, . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment." Poe v. Ullman, supra, 367 U.S. at 543, 81 S.Ct., at 1777 (Harlan, J., dissenting from dismissal on jurisdictional grounds.)

112 S.Ct. at 2805 (emp. added).

That the Court would even mention the right to keep and bear arms in a discussion of the rights protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment demonstrates that it considers the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right. The touchstone of due process is protection of the individual against arbitrary action of government. Dent v. West Virginia, 129 U.S. 114, 123 (1889); Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 558 (1974). The First and Fourth Amendments guarantee individual, as opposed to collective, rights. See Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925)(First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech applicable to States); Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961)(barred use of evidence seized in violation of Fourth Amendment). The Court's opinions in Verdugo-Urquidez and Planned Parenthood demonstrate that if "the people" whose rights are guaranteed by the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments are individuals, "the people" whose rights are guaranteed by the Second Amendment must also be individuals.

Conclusion

If the Second Amendment guaranteed only the right of States to maintain militias, the Supreme Court could easily have disposed of Second Amendment claims in Cruikshank, Presser, Miller v. Texas, and United States v. Miller by holding that individual citizens to not have standing to assert such a claim. Instead, the Court has consistently treated the right to keep and bear arms as a right of individuals, regardless of their affiliation with any organized militia.

http://www.secondamendment.net/2amd9.html

http://www.saf.org/

Second Amendment--Bearing Arms

[[Page 1193]]

BEARING ARMS

__________

SECOND AMENDMENT

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be
infringed.

In spite of extensive recent discussion and much legislative
action with respect to regulation of the purchase, possession, and
transportation of firearms, as well as proposals to substantially
curtail ownership of firearms, there is no definitive resolution by the
courts of just what right the Second Amendment protects. The opposing
theories, perhaps oversimplified, are an ``individual rights'' thesis
whereby individuals are protected in ownership, possession, and
transportation, and a ``states' rights'' thesis whereby it is said the
purpose of the clause is to protect the States in their authority to
maintain formal, organized militia units.\1\ Whatever the Amendment may
mean, it is a bar only to federal action, not extending to state\2\ or
private\3\ restraints. The Supreme Court has given effect to the
dependent clause of the Amendment in the only case in which it has
tested a congressional enactment against the constitutional prohibition,
seeming to affirm individual protection but only in the context of the
maintenance of a militia or other such public force.

\1\A sampling of the diverse literature in which the same
historical, linguistic, and case law background is the basis for
strikingly different conclusions is: Staff of Subcom. on the
Constitution, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 97th Congress, 2d
Sess., The Right to Keep and Bear Arms (Comm. Print 1982); Don B. Kates,
Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment
(1984); Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on
the Second Amendment (Robert J. Cottrol, ed. 1993); Stephen P. Halbrook,
That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (1984);
Symposium, Gun Control, 49 Law & Contemp. Probs. 1 (1986); Sanford
Levinson, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, 99 Yale L.J. 637 (1989).
\2\Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 265 (1886). See also
Miller v. Texas, 153 U.S. 535 (1894); Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S.
275, 281-282 (1897). The non-application of the Second Amendment to the
States is good law today. Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove, 695 F. 2d
261 (7th Cir. 1982), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 863 (1983).
\3\United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

In United States v. Miller,\4\ the Court sustained a statute
requiring registration under the National Firearms Act of sawed-off

[[Page 1194]]
shotguns. After reciting the original provisions of the Constitution
dealing with the militia, the Court observed that ``[w]ith obvious
purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness
of such forces the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment
were made. It must be interpreted with that end in view.''\5\ The
significance of the militia, the Court continued, was that it was
composed of ``civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion.'' It was upon
this force that the States could rely for defense and securing of the
laws, on a force that ``comprised all males physically capable of acting
in concert for the common defense,'' who, ``when called for service
. . . were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of
the kind in common use at the time.''\6\ Therefore, ``[i]n the absence
of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a `shotgun
having a barrel of less than 18 inches in length' at this time has some
reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-
regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees
the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not
within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary
military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common
defense.''\7\

\4\307 U.S. 174 (1939). The defendants had been released on the
basis of the trial court determination that prosecution would violate
the Second Amendment and no briefs or other appearances were filed on
their behalf; the Court acted on the basis of the Government's
representations.
\5\Id. at 178.
\6\Id. at 179.
\7\Id. at 178. In Cases v. United States, 131 F. 2d 916, 922
(1st Cir. 1942), cert. denied, 319 U.S. 770 (1943), the court, upholding
a similar provision of the Federal Firearms Act, said: ``Apparently,
then, under the Second Amendment, the federal government can limit the
keeping and bearing of arms by a single individual as well as by a group
of individuals, but it cannot prohibit the possession or use of any
weapon which has any reasonable relationship to the preservation or
efficiency of a well-regulated militia.'' See Lewis v. United States,
445 U.S. 55, 65 n.8 (1980) (dictum: Miller holds that the ``Second
Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not
have `some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of
a well regulated militia''').
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since this decision, Congress has placed greater limitations on
the receipt, possession, and transportation of firearms,\8\ and
proposals for national registration or prohibition of firearms
altogether have been made.\9\ At what point regulation or prohibition of
what classes of firearms would conflict with the Amendment, if at all,
the Miller case does little more than cast a faint degree of
illumination toward an answer.

\8\Enacted measures include the Gun Control Act of 1968. 82
Stat. 226, 18 U.S.C. Sec. Sec. 921-928. The Supreme Court's dealings
with these laws have all arisen in the context of prosecutions of
persons purchasing or obtaining firearms in violation of a provisions
against such conduct by convicted felons. Lewis v. United States, 445
U.S. 55 (1980); Barrett v. United States, 423 U.S. 212 (1976);
Scarborough v. United States, 431 U.S. 563 (1977); United States v.
Bass, 404 U.S. 336 (1971).
\9\E.g., National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws,
Working Papers 1031-1058 (1970), and Final Report 246-247 (1971).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This document is sponsored by the United States Senate on the United States Government Printing Office web site.

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/html/amdt2.html

2nd amendment

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/ ... 9457722626

START THE IMPEACHMENT AND SEND THIS GLOBALIST PACKING

I'll keep my guns, money, and liberty. They can keep the change. In fact they can stuff it.

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States Loosen Gun Laws Under Obama

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-189339.html

let him try. the hussain comedy show is more funny each day. lame duck is a complement to this failed presidency. we really needed a real upstanding american to take the bull by the horns, but this is what we ended up with. thank god non of his bs has gotten off the ground, he's still pushing healthcare "reform", even as the whole USA has told him NO.