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The Gun Ban is alive and well
TooBig
Member Posts: 28,559 ✭✭✭
defendgr.png
Harry Reid Shut the Front Door on the Feinstein Bill,
But Left the Back Door WIDE OPEN
harry-reid1.pngSenator Dianne Feinstein has introduced a bill (S. 150, The Assault Weapons Ban of 2013) that overturns the U.S. Constitution's sweeping Second-Amendment guarantee protecting an individual's right to own and bear arms.
The artifice used in her bill to ify the Second Amendment is the exclusion of a certain arbitrarily defined class of weapons (so-called "assault weapons") from coverage by the Second Amendment protections. In other words, she gratuitously and unconstitutionally exempts a certain class of weapons from protection by the Second Amendment. Her bill also fabricates from whole cloth a new government power to grant individuals the privilege of owning and bearing certain other weapons specifically listed in the bill, which turns the Second Amendment on its head.
Senator Feinstein's bill, if enacted into law, would constitute a palace coup-what the French call a r?volution de palais-overthrowing the Constitution with ramifications reaching far beyond the Second Amendment to every other protection afforded the people against the government by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
If the Second Amendment can be selectively ignored as Feinstein claims, then so can the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment and every other amendment in the Bill of Rights and every other protection and guarantee of liberty and due process within the Constitution.
If the Second Amendment can be selectively ignored, then the Bill of Rights becomes merely a Bill of Permissions granted at the indulgence of the government.
If the Second Amendment can be selectively ignored, the Congress will have set itself above the Almighty, abrogating to itself the power to assign and withhold rights that the Declaration of Independence proclaims to be individuals' "inalienable rights endowed by their Creator," not by the government.
If Senator Feinstein's bill is enacted into law, the U.S. Constitution will have been dealt a deathblow and the stage set for tyranny across the entire spectrum of inalienable rights.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
To appreciate just how close we are to allowing a power-crazed, know-nothing Congress to overturn the Constitution, listen to the exchange in the video below between Senators Ted Cruz and Dianne Feinstein about her bill to ify the Second Amendment and ban certain guns. She takes umbrage at Senator Cruz's sterling explanation of the Bill of Rights and why her bill violates it egregiously. "I'm not a sixth grader," Feinstein huffs. Obviously not; she isn't as smart as a sixth grader or she wouldn't spew the tripe she does.
Feinstein also admits she isn't a lawyer but that fact, she contends, doesn't limit her understanding of the Constitution because she has been "up close and personal with the Constitution" for 20 years by virtue of her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, a position that clearly has blinded her to a true understanding of the founding document. Her emotional rant waiving the bloody school uniforms of Sandy Hook victims at Sen. Cruz not only is repulsive, it also reveals that she reads the Constitution with her heart, not her brain.
play.png
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
Notice in the video how Senator Feinstein takes issue with Senator Cruz when he refers to her "ban" of certain weapons. Even though she titles her bill the "Assault Weapons Ban of 2013," she insists it doesn't really "ban" weapons; it exempts specified weapons from Second Amendment protections. In other words, her bill strips away Second Amendment protections from applying to weapons not granted a specific exemption in her bill. Here's the bottom line: Senator Feinstein and her crony co-sponsor Senator Dick Durbin believe Congress has the power to limit Bill-of-Rights guarantees by exempting certain people, places, acts and things from constitutional provisions, such as the inalienable right to own and bear arms. Make no mistake; this legislation is nothing short of a constitutional coup de grace.
Senator Feinstein wails that her bill would permit, mind you PERMIT, 2,271 guns to remain protected by the Second Amendment, so it isn't a "ban" at all-it is congressional PERMISSION to own certain guns, an indulgence granted by the almighty Congress. This turns the Constitution on its head and makes a mockery of the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights doesn't PERMIT people anything; it PROHIBITS governments from doing certain things that limit people's freedom to behave anyway they see fit. It is the Bill of RIGHTS, not the Bill of PRIVILEGES, not a Bill of PERMISSIONS.
Senator Feinstein, are you smarter than a sixth grader? Obviously not, or you wouldn't say such stupid things about the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
Senator Feinstein would take America through the looking glass right into Alice's Wonderland where the foul-tempered Queen of Hearts reigns in "a blind fury" and is quick to decree reversals of the normal process-"Sentence first; verdict afterwards"-and decree the ultimate sentence for the slightest offense-"Off with their heads!" In Queenie Feinstein's bleeding-heart rampage: "Away with their constitutional rights; grab their guns."
Queenie Feinstein thinks Americans don't need any more choices than the 2,271 guns she grudgingly permits under her gun ban-and it IS a gun ban, her regal mumbo gumbo notwithstanding. Feinstein implored Cruz: "Isn't that enough?"
The truth is, Feinstein's list of 2,271 "permissible" guns would shrink to zero if she had the votes, as she admitted after her temporary, limited weapons ban became law in 1993.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
What will be the practical consequences of enacting S. 51 and selectively ignoring the Second Amendment? PRECRIME-a complete reversal of the ancient rights of Englishmen and Americans where the people are guaranteed there will be no detention without charge of a crime; no charge of a crime without probable cause; no conviction of a crime without a trial; no trial without a jury; no conviction without proof beyond a reasonable doubt; no punishment without conviction; no cruel and unusual punishment and no excessive punishment disproportionate to the crime.
The smoking gun that the Feinstein weapons ban bill is the precursor to PRECRIME is that fact that she refused to expand the bill (S.150) to exempt military veterans because they might be "mentally incapacitated." She would turn "veteran" into a suspect class of likely criminals thus "exempt" from, which is to say make them ineligible for Second-Amendment guarantees. But the "exemptions" from constitutional rights in Queenie Feinstein's Wonderland don't stop there.
Consider how under the Patriot Act the government already decides whether any random person might be a terrorist and thus subject to dodgy anti-terrorist PRECRIME actions, which Senator Feinstein's weapons-ban bill would only exacerbate. The ACLU reports that the law treats a person as a domestic terrorist if they engage in any "act dangerous to human life" that "appears to be intended to (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping."
As Senator Rand Paul said when the National Defense Authorization Act was passed last year expanding PRECRIME powers for "suspected terrorists," the government now claims under the color of law the power to "arrest suspects without a warrant, hold them without trial, deny them access to counsel or admission of bail," and as a result, "We have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity."
The Feinstein gun-ban bill is another stab in the heart of the Constitution, a mortal blow to the Bill of Rights.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
Senator Feinstein thinks Congress may legislate exemptions to the Bill of Rights-may legislate where constitutional protections apply and where they do not.
Senator Durbin says "none of these rights are absolute, none of them." He and Feinstein think it is up the Congress to limit rights, not protect them. This is the mentality and police-state environment created when the government eviscerates Bill-of-Rights guarantees in the name of "crime prevention" and "gun safety." This inversion of the Constitution results from the misguided and unconstitutional expansion of government power to prevent crime rather than restricting government to its traditional role of issuing a warrant and arresting only people for whom there is probable cause to believe they committed a specific crime and then trying them in a court of law.
This constitutional inversion leads to the militarization, not only of our police forces, prosecutors and courts but also the militarization of every facet of domestic life. It allows the selective legislative abridgement of the Bill of Rights, gives rise to a police state at home patterned after the military regime required to support empire abroad. It brings the battlefield home to American soil.
It infuses daily life and all our domestic institutions with a militarist mentality, and it induces martial behavior by the government at every turn. It demands replacing due process, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights with the law of war-martial law. It's the world of preemptive and preventative war brought home; preventive detention; preemptive confiscation of guns; pre-screening eligibility determinations to select out those individuals not entitled to constitutional protections and due process; pre-trial probation; pre-conviction seizure of assets and frozen bank accounts-PRECRIME in all its abhorrent applications. BUT FIRST, THE AMERICAN PUBLIC MUST BE DISARMED. "TURN THEM ALL IN, MR. & MRS. AMERICA," QUEENIE FEINSTEIN SAID.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
If you read the Bill of Rights in its entirety and construct it in terms of what it means taken all together, it is clear that the Founders did not intend either the Congress or the courts or the president to have the power to limit any of the bill of rights before the fact and did not give any branch of government the power to make exemptions or exceptions or to any constitutional protections, including the Bill of Rights.
It is clear that ALL constitutional guarantees are absolute unless and until exercising one of them infringes on the rights of another individual, in a specific act, at which point it is incumbent upon the courts to settle this conflict of rights. Your right to swing your fist stops at my chin. Anything else is PRECRIME.
The Constitution in its entirety, including the Bill of Rights, has a presumption of liberty. In other words, Americans are free to do anything they desire as long as it does not harm someone else. Laws are intended to specify when the exercise of that freedom runs afoul of someone else's rights and to provide for punishment if one is duly convicted of infringing those rights. So, the crime is not "breaking the law" but rather inflicting harm on another person. The law is designed to guide people in their day-to-day lives as to what actions infringe on the rights of others, and thus are not protected by the Constitution. The law is not meant to grant government permission to preemptively limit people's liberty in the name of "public safety" or "the collective good."
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
It is clearly unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law defining a crime and empowering police, prosecutors and the courts to go out and scoop people up because statistically, according to some bureaucratic profile, they MIGHT break the law at some future time. And it is just as clearly unconstitutional for Congress to preemptively exempt persons, acts or things from constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights just because it estimates a statistical probability that not doing so will lead to some future harm being inflicted on some unspecified innocent person by some unspecified perpetrator. Congress does NOT have the constitutional power to outlaw guns because they MIGHT be used in a crime; it only has the power to outlaw the unwarranted USE of a gun to harm another person and to bring to justice anyone who actually DOES use a gun unjustifiably to harm another person.
Congress does NOT have the constitutional power to outlaw cameras because they MIGHT be used to take pornographic photos of children; it only has the power to outlaw the USE of cameras to take pornographic photos of children (and even that proposition becomes iffy given the wide disagreement as to what constitutes "pornography" or even whether "pornography" harms a willing subject). As Jan LaRue points out so lucidly:
"Child pornography is a crime scene photograph. It's the best evidence of a heinous crime, the sexual assault of a child. It has nothing whatsoever to do with speech and books the First Amendment was intended to protect."
The wrongful harm inflicted is the crime; not the photograph of the crime.
American governments do NOT have the constitutional power to outlaw books or websites because they contain crime-scene photos or MIGHT be used as an instructional guide to commit murder or other crimes; it only has the power to outlaw acts that harm other people.
Government does NOT have the constitutional power to outlaw peaceful assembly on the public streets because the crowd MIGHT grow unruly; it only has the power to outlaw unruly BEHAVIOR (again iffy where general, sweeping legislation is concerned as opposed to judicial determination of specific instances after the fact).
Government does NOT have the constitutional power to intrude on privacy because particular forms of privacy MIGHT mean a future criminal will go undetected before he commits a crime; it only has the power to outlaw the crime.
Government does NOT have the power to outlaw jury trials because a jury MIGHT ify a law or refuse to convict on a "technicality" or a lone juror MIGHT insist on acquitting a person his eleven fellow jurors find guilty.
Congress does NOT have the power to suspend due process and other constitutional protections against unjust detention, conviction and punishment by creating exceptions to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments because permitting due process and Bill of Rights guarantees might allow some guilty people to go free.
And, governments do NOT have the power to usurp the Second Amendment and dole out gun rights as so much pork-barrel legislative largess.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
Defend Liberty,
Larry Hunter
P.S. It does not cost anything to FAX Congress on our system, but if we do welcome contributions as we are up against billionaires and gov't bullies. Please contribute if you can.
Harry Reid Shut the Front Door on the Feinstein Bill,
But Left the Back Door WIDE OPEN
harry-reid1.pngSenator Dianne Feinstein has introduced a bill (S. 150, The Assault Weapons Ban of 2013) that overturns the U.S. Constitution's sweeping Second-Amendment guarantee protecting an individual's right to own and bear arms.
The artifice used in her bill to ify the Second Amendment is the exclusion of a certain arbitrarily defined class of weapons (so-called "assault weapons") from coverage by the Second Amendment protections. In other words, she gratuitously and unconstitutionally exempts a certain class of weapons from protection by the Second Amendment. Her bill also fabricates from whole cloth a new government power to grant individuals the privilege of owning and bearing certain other weapons specifically listed in the bill, which turns the Second Amendment on its head.
Senator Feinstein's bill, if enacted into law, would constitute a palace coup-what the French call a r?volution de palais-overthrowing the Constitution with ramifications reaching far beyond the Second Amendment to every other protection afforded the people against the government by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
If the Second Amendment can be selectively ignored as Feinstein claims, then so can the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment and every other amendment in the Bill of Rights and every other protection and guarantee of liberty and due process within the Constitution.
If the Second Amendment can be selectively ignored, then the Bill of Rights becomes merely a Bill of Permissions granted at the indulgence of the government.
If the Second Amendment can be selectively ignored, the Congress will have set itself above the Almighty, abrogating to itself the power to assign and withhold rights that the Declaration of Independence proclaims to be individuals' "inalienable rights endowed by their Creator," not by the government.
If Senator Feinstein's bill is enacted into law, the U.S. Constitution will have been dealt a deathblow and the stage set for tyranny across the entire spectrum of inalienable rights.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
To appreciate just how close we are to allowing a power-crazed, know-nothing Congress to overturn the Constitution, listen to the exchange in the video below between Senators Ted Cruz and Dianne Feinstein about her bill to ify the Second Amendment and ban certain guns. She takes umbrage at Senator Cruz's sterling explanation of the Bill of Rights and why her bill violates it egregiously. "I'm not a sixth grader," Feinstein huffs. Obviously not; she isn't as smart as a sixth grader or she wouldn't spew the tripe she does.
Feinstein also admits she isn't a lawyer but that fact, she contends, doesn't limit her understanding of the Constitution because she has been "up close and personal with the Constitution" for 20 years by virtue of her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, a position that clearly has blinded her to a true understanding of the founding document. Her emotional rant waiving the bloody school uniforms of Sandy Hook victims at Sen. Cruz not only is repulsive, it also reveals that she reads the Constitution with her heart, not her brain.
play.png
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
Notice in the video how Senator Feinstein takes issue with Senator Cruz when he refers to her "ban" of certain weapons. Even though she titles her bill the "Assault Weapons Ban of 2013," she insists it doesn't really "ban" weapons; it exempts specified weapons from Second Amendment protections. In other words, her bill strips away Second Amendment protections from applying to weapons not granted a specific exemption in her bill. Here's the bottom line: Senator Feinstein and her crony co-sponsor Senator Dick Durbin believe Congress has the power to limit Bill-of-Rights guarantees by exempting certain people, places, acts and things from constitutional provisions, such as the inalienable right to own and bear arms. Make no mistake; this legislation is nothing short of a constitutional coup de grace.
Senator Feinstein wails that her bill would permit, mind you PERMIT, 2,271 guns to remain protected by the Second Amendment, so it isn't a "ban" at all-it is congressional PERMISSION to own certain guns, an indulgence granted by the almighty Congress. This turns the Constitution on its head and makes a mockery of the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights doesn't PERMIT people anything; it PROHIBITS governments from doing certain things that limit people's freedom to behave anyway they see fit. It is the Bill of RIGHTS, not the Bill of PRIVILEGES, not a Bill of PERMISSIONS.
Senator Feinstein, are you smarter than a sixth grader? Obviously not, or you wouldn't say such stupid things about the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
Senator Feinstein would take America through the looking glass right into Alice's Wonderland where the foul-tempered Queen of Hearts reigns in "a blind fury" and is quick to decree reversals of the normal process-"Sentence first; verdict afterwards"-and decree the ultimate sentence for the slightest offense-"Off with their heads!" In Queenie Feinstein's bleeding-heart rampage: "Away with their constitutional rights; grab their guns."
Queenie Feinstein thinks Americans don't need any more choices than the 2,271 guns she grudgingly permits under her gun ban-and it IS a gun ban, her regal mumbo gumbo notwithstanding. Feinstein implored Cruz: "Isn't that enough?"
The truth is, Feinstein's list of 2,271 "permissible" guns would shrink to zero if she had the votes, as she admitted after her temporary, limited weapons ban became law in 1993.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
What will be the practical consequences of enacting S. 51 and selectively ignoring the Second Amendment? PRECRIME-a complete reversal of the ancient rights of Englishmen and Americans where the people are guaranteed there will be no detention without charge of a crime; no charge of a crime without probable cause; no conviction of a crime without a trial; no trial without a jury; no conviction without proof beyond a reasonable doubt; no punishment without conviction; no cruel and unusual punishment and no excessive punishment disproportionate to the crime.
The smoking gun that the Feinstein weapons ban bill is the precursor to PRECRIME is that fact that she refused to expand the bill (S.150) to exempt military veterans because they might be "mentally incapacitated." She would turn "veteran" into a suspect class of likely criminals thus "exempt" from, which is to say make them ineligible for Second-Amendment guarantees. But the "exemptions" from constitutional rights in Queenie Feinstein's Wonderland don't stop there.
Consider how under the Patriot Act the government already decides whether any random person might be a terrorist and thus subject to dodgy anti-terrorist PRECRIME actions, which Senator Feinstein's weapons-ban bill would only exacerbate. The ACLU reports that the law treats a person as a domestic terrorist if they engage in any "act dangerous to human life" that "appears to be intended to (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping."
As Senator Rand Paul said when the National Defense Authorization Act was passed last year expanding PRECRIME powers for "suspected terrorists," the government now claims under the color of law the power to "arrest suspects without a warrant, hold them without trial, deny them access to counsel or admission of bail," and as a result, "We have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity."
The Feinstein gun-ban bill is another stab in the heart of the Constitution, a mortal blow to the Bill of Rights.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
Senator Feinstein thinks Congress may legislate exemptions to the Bill of Rights-may legislate where constitutional protections apply and where they do not.
Senator Durbin says "none of these rights are absolute, none of them." He and Feinstein think it is up the Congress to limit rights, not protect them. This is the mentality and police-state environment created when the government eviscerates Bill-of-Rights guarantees in the name of "crime prevention" and "gun safety." This inversion of the Constitution results from the misguided and unconstitutional expansion of government power to prevent crime rather than restricting government to its traditional role of issuing a warrant and arresting only people for whom there is probable cause to believe they committed a specific crime and then trying them in a court of law.
This constitutional inversion leads to the militarization, not only of our police forces, prosecutors and courts but also the militarization of every facet of domestic life. It allows the selective legislative abridgement of the Bill of Rights, gives rise to a police state at home patterned after the military regime required to support empire abroad. It brings the battlefield home to American soil.
It infuses daily life and all our domestic institutions with a militarist mentality, and it induces martial behavior by the government at every turn. It demands replacing due process, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights with the law of war-martial law. It's the world of preemptive and preventative war brought home; preventive detention; preemptive confiscation of guns; pre-screening eligibility determinations to select out those individuals not entitled to constitutional protections and due process; pre-trial probation; pre-conviction seizure of assets and frozen bank accounts-PRECRIME in all its abhorrent applications. BUT FIRST, THE AMERICAN PUBLIC MUST BE DISARMED. "TURN THEM ALL IN, MR. & MRS. AMERICA," QUEENIE FEINSTEIN SAID.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
If you read the Bill of Rights in its entirety and construct it in terms of what it means taken all together, it is clear that the Founders did not intend either the Congress or the courts or the president to have the power to limit any of the bill of rights before the fact and did not give any branch of government the power to make exemptions or exceptions or to any constitutional protections, including the Bill of Rights.
It is clear that ALL constitutional guarantees are absolute unless and until exercising one of them infringes on the rights of another individual, in a specific act, at which point it is incumbent upon the courts to settle this conflict of rights. Your right to swing your fist stops at my chin. Anything else is PRECRIME.
The Constitution in its entirety, including the Bill of Rights, has a presumption of liberty. In other words, Americans are free to do anything they desire as long as it does not harm someone else. Laws are intended to specify when the exercise of that freedom runs afoul of someone else's rights and to provide for punishment if one is duly convicted of infringing those rights. So, the crime is not "breaking the law" but rather inflicting harm on another person. The law is designed to guide people in their day-to-day lives as to what actions infringe on the rights of others, and thus are not protected by the Constitution. The law is not meant to grant government permission to preemptively limit people's liberty in the name of "public safety" or "the collective good."
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
It is clearly unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law defining a crime and empowering police, prosecutors and the courts to go out and scoop people up because statistically, according to some bureaucratic profile, they MIGHT break the law at some future time. And it is just as clearly unconstitutional for Congress to preemptively exempt persons, acts or things from constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights just because it estimates a statistical probability that not doing so will lead to some future harm being inflicted on some unspecified innocent person by some unspecified perpetrator. Congress does NOT have the constitutional power to outlaw guns because they MIGHT be used in a crime; it only has the power to outlaw the unwarranted USE of a gun to harm another person and to bring to justice anyone who actually DOES use a gun unjustifiably to harm another person.
Congress does NOT have the constitutional power to outlaw cameras because they MIGHT be used to take pornographic photos of children; it only has the power to outlaw the USE of cameras to take pornographic photos of children (and even that proposition becomes iffy given the wide disagreement as to what constitutes "pornography" or even whether "pornography" harms a willing subject). As Jan LaRue points out so lucidly:
"Child pornography is a crime scene photograph. It's the best evidence of a heinous crime, the sexual assault of a child. It has nothing whatsoever to do with speech and books the First Amendment was intended to protect."
The wrongful harm inflicted is the crime; not the photograph of the crime.
American governments do NOT have the constitutional power to outlaw books or websites because they contain crime-scene photos or MIGHT be used as an instructional guide to commit murder or other crimes; it only has the power to outlaw acts that harm other people.
Government does NOT have the constitutional power to outlaw peaceful assembly on the public streets because the crowd MIGHT grow unruly; it only has the power to outlaw unruly BEHAVIOR (again iffy where general, sweeping legislation is concerned as opposed to judicial determination of specific instances after the fact).
Government does NOT have the constitutional power to intrude on privacy because particular forms of privacy MIGHT mean a future criminal will go undetected before he commits a crime; it only has the power to outlaw the crime.
Government does NOT have the power to outlaw jury trials because a jury MIGHT ify a law or refuse to convict on a "technicality" or a lone juror MIGHT insist on acquitting a person his eleven fellow jurors find guilty.
Congress does NOT have the power to suspend due process and other constitutional protections against unjust detention, conviction and punishment by creating exceptions to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments because permitting due process and Bill of Rights guarantees might allow some guilty people to go free.
And, governments do NOT have the power to usurp the Second Amendment and dole out gun rights as so much pork-barrel legislative largess.
Stop Reid & Feinstein's Palace Coup To Overthrow
The Constitution and Bill of Rights
DON'T BE FOOLED Feinstein's Gun Ban S. 150 is not DEAD.
It was stopped at the front door, but the back door is WIDE OPEN.
FAX Congress to BLOCK ALL Gun-Control and Gun-Registration Legislation
Defend Liberty,
Larry Hunter
P.S. It does not cost anything to FAX Congress on our system, but if we do welcome contributions as we are up against billionaires and gov't bullies. Please contribute if you can.
Comments
Then there's the House.No way in hell an A.W.B. will pass in the House.
The threat that remains is magazine capacity limits and more ineffective and burdensome background checks.
This could change in coming years. Especially if the conservative side continues to ignore the shifting demographics and drives away ever more voters. Like in the last election, and looking the same for the 2014 mid-terms.