JUSTICE BUILDING BLOG

WELCOME TO THE OFFICIAL RICHARD E GERSTEIN JUSTICE BUILDING BLOG. THIS BLOG IS DEDICATED TO JUSTICE BUILDING RUMOR, HUMOR, AND A DISCUSSION ABOUT AND BETWEEN THE JUDGES, LAWYERS AND THE DEDICATED SUPPORT STAFF, CLERKS, COURT REPORTERS, AND CORRECTIONAL OFFICERS WHO LABOR IN THE WORLD OF MIAMI'S CRIMINAL JUSTICE. POST YOUR COMMENTS, OR SEND RUMPOLE A PRIVATE EMAIL AT HOWARDROARK21@GMAIL.COM. Winner of the prestigious Cushing Left Anterior Descending Artery Award.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

THE POLITICS OF OIL AND WATER AND IDIOTS

HALEY BARBOUR IS AN IDIOT.

For seventy days Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi and former head of the Republican National Committee has loudly complained that fears of oil reaching Mississippi's coastline was created by the liberal media. Barbour, a former lobbyist for Oil Companies, and whose run for Governor was financed in part by large oil companies, has also been an outspoken critic of the government's ban on new offshore drilling, and has spoken against the use of Obama's "big government" against "private oil companies."

On Monday June 28, 2010, oil reached the beaches of several Mississippi beaches.

Governor Barbour immediately asked for more federal help and pledged to make sure BP paid for the clean-up.

For 70 days everyone but the Governor of Mississippi knew that the prevailing Gulf currents would take oil to the beaches of Mississippi. In response, Governor called up 58- let us repeat that- fifty eight members of the National Guard- to prepare for the oil that everyone knew was coming. This from the same Governor who practiced the "duality of Republicanism" - simultaneously criticizing the Obama administration for doing too little, and for creating too big a government.

It would serve the Governor of Mississippi and the people who voted for him right if the Obama administration told him that because of rising budget deficits and because of the concept of limited government, that the Federal Government could do nothing for the shores and beaches of Mississippi....except lead a prayer on the floor of Congress.

WE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH:
RE: The contretemps of the Listserv, we received this wonderfully imaginative comment:

Rump, we type on a listserve that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with keyboards. Who's gonna do it? You? You Rick Freedman? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Leacock, and you curse the FACDL. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. that Leacock's lambasting, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that listserve, you need me on that listserve.

Fake Jude "The Hammer" Faccidomo
.

PRESIDENTIAL SUCCESSION: For those of you who pay attention to these matters, and we do, with the death of Senator Byrd, 85 year old Senator Daniel Inouye becomes President pro tempore of the Senate. As such, the Senator is 3rd in line to the presidency behind the VP and speaker Peolsi. Inouye, the Senator from Hawaii, is an Asian American who lost his right arm fighting in the Pacific for his country in WWII.

Guns, guns, more guns.

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd Amendment mandates that all citizens over the age of 18 carry a firearm. Or something like that. It was Justice Stevens final dissent. And guess which favourite federal blogger's BFF was in the Majority?

The majority's blatant disregard of the first clause of the second amendment is a startling example of judicial activism. The first clause of the amendment states s that a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free state. This clause clearly limits the right to bear arms for the purposes of a Militia that was necessary in the 1770's. We don't know about Justices Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Roberts, but we haven't seen our local Militia marching down the street lately. But because they're conservative, and because they were put on the bench by those who worships guns like they worship the lord, their ox was gored, and they resorted to the sort of judicial determinism that Republican Senators are currently bemoaning that Ms. Kagan may resort to if confirmed.


SARAH PALIN IS AN IDIOT

In a speech to a California State University fundraiser, the former candidate for the vice president of the United States said this:

"...this is Reagan country and (applause), YEAH! And perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California's Eureka College would become so woven within and inter-linked to the Golden State..."

Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, went to Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, you idiot. Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois on February 6, 1911. He was raised in Illinois and went to Iowa to broadcast baseball games before he ever made his way to California.

We all know Palin is a simpleton. We now know that she is so stupid that she cannot even hire competent speech writers. We are in favour of a law prohibiting this idiot from every mentioning the name of the 40th President of the United States. She does not have the intellectual capacity to have brewed coffee in the Reagan White House, much less make the startling claim to be the heir to his political movement and ideology. She makes us ill.

See you in court, having recovered sufficiently from the ill effects of too much lager commiserating the loss of our lads in the World Cup to the Germans.

48 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rump
Sorry YOU are wrong on guns. Read the FLA Constitution , all Citizens are part of the Militia.
DS

Rumpole said...

In the 1770's, this country was nothing more than bands of citizens coming together for the purposes of breaking away from England. We had no institutions per se- no dept of treasury, no pentagon, no white house. At the state level, there was a similar lack of traditional government. Therefore, to form a government and to form a well ordered society, people needed to band together and form Militias for protection. Therefore they needed firearms.

To read the second amendment without this historical context is absurd. If the Supreme Court is going to read the amendment without its historical context, they might as well go back and declare certain humans 3/5th of a person as well.

Can you imagine anyone from the 1700's or 1800' s being anything but startled and upset over the level of gun violence in our country today?

Can you tell me what need the second amendment serves other than to fulfill the need to arm a militia at that time?

Anonymous said...

Rump,

Read the opinion. Gun contol laws were passed (mostly in the South) to keep freed black people from protecting themselves. In the 1870's, nobody ever thought gun control applied to white people because it was so obviously unconstitutional.

Kudos to the liberal academics like Lawrence Tribe and Sandy Levinson for demonstrating that the 2nd Amendnent is an individual right.

Anonymous said...

what is this obsession of yours with the world cup? we americans prefer FOOTBALL over lame SOCCER!

Anonymous said...

A note on "militias":

The Declaration of Independence was principally authored by Thomas Jefferson. He wrote that "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

Thomas Jefferson’s main apprentice (or even philosophical partner), James Madison was the principle author of the Bill of Rights (including the 2nd Amendment). The 2nd amendment reads "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."

When James Madison was talking about a militia, yes, he was talking about military as we imagine it today. BUT he was ALSO talking about the whack jobs in the Michigan militia and Alpha 66, and every other organized group of citizens who takes up arms believing that "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

These men believed that it was the right and obligation of the citizenry to take up arms against its government if that government should deprive them of their inalienable rights. Any argument to the contrary ignores the American War for Independence wherein the founding fathers put this philosophy to practice.

The right to bear arms must be an individual right in order to fulfill the vision of Jefferson and Madison.

Anonymous said...

Rumpole,

I wasn't aware that constitutional rights required a specified "need." One might say that you don't "need" the right to remain silent if you haven't committed a crime. Does that logic really fly for you?

But, I wonder what the three civil rights workers murdered by the KKK (James Chaney, et al.) would have thought of their "need" for the right to bear arms. Maybe if their second amendment rights had been enforced in the Jim Crow south, the government agents who arranged their deaths would have been thwarted.

And I'm glad that interpreting the breadth of the second amendment is so easy for you. Given that constitutional law scholars (like Randy Barnett and Akhil Amar) divided sharply prior to Heller on the historical and contemporary impact of the "Militia" Clause on the notion of a private right to bear arms, it's astounding that you alone find that issue so simple.

But for me, a simple country lawyer, it's tricky. The problem is that if the founding generation wanted the right to bear arms constrained just to militia activities, why did they say "the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed"? Wouldn't they have said "the right of those MILITIA to keep and bear arms...." Seems to me that they would have kept using that same idiom had they wanted the right to be so constrained.

I'm no fan of guns, and I think they should be regulated to the greatest degree the Constitution permits. But what you're suggesting is the notion of curtailing the rights and freedoms of the people for the sake of the communal or governmental good. Seems like a strange position for such a vocal adherent to Ayn Rand's objectivism.

Rumpole said...

9:17 - you can no longer square the Jeffersonian dicta about the right to take up arms against an oppressive government with the current laws against associating with terrorist groups. Laws which every member of the republican party and every conservative justice on the supreme court agree with. Face it- the days of armed insurrection to overthrow the government of the US are over.

9:25-I hardly believe that individuals marching against discrimination wished that they had their second amendment right to carry a firearm. And I doubt that even armed, they would have lived.

If the Founders had written that it was unconstitutional and against the laws of man and nature for the blood of a black man to be transfused into a white woman, would we uphold that restriction today? They certainly believed in anti miscegenation laws.
What makes those men so damn infallible? Why must we spend all of our time trying to discern the indiscernible?

Believe me when I say I understand the argument- that it is not that they were infallible but that we need some standard to measure the constitution by so that judges don't just legislate their personal opinions.

But it seems to me that on issues like firearms- that are tearing our country apart- we need a different standard then just trying to make things like they were in 1776. There are over 200 million firearms in the US, and they are wrecking horrific damage on our society. Enough is enough. The Founders were not right about everything, they weren't right about most social issues. It's time we stepped up and addressed these issues in a modern
format and stopped wondering what men who owned slaves thought about it.

Anonymous said...

Re: 9:44

In other words, Rump, we don't need no stinkin' constitution!

Rumpole said...

I maybe mistaken. I guess guns can be good:


A 6-year-old is recovering at St. Mary Medical Center on Friday morning after being shot in the back, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office reports.
Witnesses said someone fired bullets into a car full of people in Belle Glade on Monday night. The child was in the car.
Four people were inside the car when it was traveling on Southwest Seventh Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard about 11:30 p.m, authorities said.
The sheriff's office is investigating.



Yup- if those people in the car had been fully armed, then sure the six year old would still have taken a few bullets, but those people could have shot back- and maybe just maybe a stray bullet would strike a gun nut an kill him or her and make our society a little safer.

Yeah, after reading that article I sure want to make sure more people have access to firearms, and I bet the parents of that six year old feel the same way.

J

Fake Talitha Leacock said...

Would someone please send me all their research files, please. I have just been officially retained on a dumping without a license case and need a c4 motion with case law directly on point and on all fours and barking like a dog.

Thanks.

FTL

PS. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!!!

Rumpole said...

And I am certain the framers fully anticipated mechanical automobiles, roads, traffic lights and drive by shootings by gangs and I feel equally certain after considering all those future possibilities they, in their infinite wisdom decided to write the second amendment just the way they did so they could make sure there would be sufficient access to firearms on the streets of a country in states that did not even exist that time.

Yeah, this all makes great sense.

Rumpole said...

Of course we need a constitution. We also need an enlightened and reasonable way of interpreting the constitution beyond trying to divine what a bunch of slaveowners thought.

Anonymous said...

Rump:

9:17am here.

I am not a member of the right (I am a voted for Obama-Clinton loving-never voted for ANY Bush-single payer health care-get the f*** out of Iraq-liberal). I do not support the “laws against associating with terrorist groups” of which you speak and find them an affront to the first amendment.

Your interpretation that “guns are bad, therefore the second amendment should not be what it is,” is the classic example of advocating for legislation from the bench.

If you don’t like the second amendment, work on amending the constitution.

Anonymous said...

I'm actually in agreement with Rumpole on this one, which doesn't happen often.

I have long felt originalism is dishonest to the extent that attempting to discern what a bunch of dead people thought years ago is an expedition that can be craftily oriented towards the needs of the interpreter.

History is written by the winners, not the losers. It can glorify or villify. Relying on history as a source therefore, to me, still allows judicial interpretation to use framework that is not necessarily more consistent than the living document approach.

As a result, I definitely don't necessarily feel that we need worry about what the Framers thought on guns because at the end of the day, a Constitution is a social contract. Contracts are meant to be in stone, but must yield at times to changing needs. A Constitution is a social contract between the citizens of this nation.

Contracts are made to be tweaked and amended, as long as the manner in which we arrive at doing so, is a long, slow, well thought process that is not willy nilly.

Anonymous said...

Come on Rump. We agree on almost everything, except the Second Amendment. You torture logic and history to reach a legal conclusion consistent with your own political sensibilities. A "militia" was simply a way of describing an armed citizenry at the time the amendment was written.

The Second Amendment is a right of the people. Do you think for a minute that the framers, in laying out our most important individual liberties, got side-tracked on NUMBER 2!, spelled out a collective right, and then went back to laying out every other individual liberty that we cherish in this country (including those liberties that many of us on this forum spend each and every day fighting for).

Your reading of the Second Amendment would invite a reading of the Fourth Amendment that would permit unrestrained searches of, for example, computer data, because it is not the "persons, houses, papers, and effects" that the framers wrote down. Such a tortured reading of the Fourth Amendmend would have us all up in arms -- as it should.

Picking and choosing which rights in the Bill of Rights you like flies in the face of everything we do as criminal defense lawyers. We almost never LIKE what our clients are accused of doing, but we very zealously (if we are doing our jobs) defend their constitutional rights; even if it means helping to set free a guilty or, even worse, dangerous individual.

I understand you don't like guns. Fine. But don't do to the Second Amendment what we rally against when done to the Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendment.

Anonymous said...

Rump,

9:25 here. Your anti-miscegenation and blood transfusion hypos hold no water. The Fourteenth amendment invalidated those laws. In other words, there was a positive enactment by society to prevent those laws. Thus, it wasn't a matter of just saying "hey, the Founders were wrong so let's ignore them" but instead seeing a subsequent generation changing the Constitution to reflect modern, and jointly held, fundamental beliefs.

The point is that you would unwrite the Second Amendment on your own, via judicial interpretation. Can we think of a more tyrannical, less democratic approach to government?

I fully agree with you that guns are a blight, and I would be first in line to vote for an amendment reversing the Second. But, until that day happens, it is a RIGHT which no judge can or should undo. If you support a de facto overhaul of the right to bear arms absent amending the constitution, you are inherently deciding that the social compact that serves as the fundamental basis of our government is invalid. I can sort of understand loose interpretive methods to PRESERVE rights, but you're talking about using those methods to deprive individuals of rights.

Do you not see the slippery slope there?

Anonymous said...

As has been pointed out before on this blog (and as J. Scalia himself detailed in the Heller opinion), the Second Amendment was derived from the 1689 Rights of Man that limited the power of the monarchy. In particular, the Rights of Man guaranteed the right to bear arms to all Protestants (who had been violently persecuted by the Stuart Kings and the Church of England). The writers of the Second Amendment were well aware of the Rights of Man, since most of them were descended from Protestants who had emigrated from England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland due to that very persecution. I do not own guns myself and am not a big fan of guns, but I don't see how you can say that the SCOTUS was wrong in Heller.

Anonymous said...

Rumpole is an idiot.

He doesn't want to understand the Second Amendment's historical background and why it has always been an individual and not a collective right or why it is still as relevant as it was in the late 18th century.

Even worse, Rumpole still believes in Barack Obama. I could understand it if he still had a reasonable belief in Mr. Santa Claus or Ms. Tooth Fairy, but in Obama???? I think I better run and buy some cases of Chateau Miami River before Rumpole hoards the entire production from the factory and drinks it all.

Anonymous said...

Rumpole, Sisselman is correct. It is precisely the lack of knowledge of the historical context of the Second Amendment what causes people to believe that it is an anachronism.

For a quick read on the history of the Second Amendment, I suggest that you read "The Embarrassing Second Amendment" in Yale Law Review. It was written some 20 years ago by a so-called progressive/liberal, but academically/intellectually honest, anti-gun law professor/scholar.

Anonymous said...

The wisdom and truth of the bumper sticker that reads "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" has been demonstrated in the localities with strict gun control, such as Chicago and New York, where violent crime against persons is rampant because criminals know that their victims are unarmed easy-pray courtesy of their government's shortsighted gun control laws.

Where is your anti-statism and Aynrandism? Gun control is the ultimate state control of the individual because it renders the individual powerless. Since when you became a statist, Rumpole?

Remember another very wise bumper sticker that reads "Fear the government that fears your gun". That sounds truly Rumpolean, like something from the anti-statism Rumpole that long time and careful readers of this blog know. Or are there several Rumpoles?

Anonymous said...

2nd Amendment aside....
Hey 10:09 "Fake Taletha Leacock" --- do I have permission to use the "barking like a dog" line?
THAT is good stuff for a board civil circuit judge.

PS. Taletha is a good lawyer. You Boys Behave & get in line.

Rumpole said...

925/12:08- as Ms. Kagan pointed out today in her confirmation hearings, the 14th amendment was written by people who fully believed in and supported segregation. It was the court's use of the amendment starting in the 1950's that breathed the life into it that we see today. So when you say there was a positive enactment of the 14th amendment to prevent those laws like miscegenation- you are 100% WRONG.

Do you not agree that starting with Brown, the court USED the 14th amendment and the commerce clause for IT'S OWN PURPOSES TO RIGHT A SOCIAL WRONG THAT IT BELIEVED CONGRESS WAS NOT ADDRESSING?

Like those decisions or not- that is exactly what the court did. Now, as a person who believes property rights are the fundamental principle upon which all other rights are created, I cringe at court decisions that force desegregation in restaurants, etc. I fully believe that a person who owns a restaurant has the right to discriminate and not serve patriot fans.
That being said- I deplore racism, I would never patronize any establishment that discriminated (except against Patriot fans) and I believe the court and all federal courts found themselves in a situation where the country was being torn apart- where a clear wrong existed and not much was being done to rectify it.

Do I like the precedent the court established in intervening in social issues? Nope. Do I like the result? Yup.

However, getting back to the 2nd amendment- you and 12:07 are wrong. If the right of guns has nothing to do with a well regulated Militia, why is a well regulated Militia mentioned in the second amendment? Why not put "a well positioned cricket team"? or "a well stocked pantry?"

It is blatant judicial determinism by the conservative members of the court pandering to the gun lobby that elected the politicians that appointed them that caused the court to rule the way it is.

Scalia's ox was gored pure and simple and he reacted just like Thurgood Marshall would, albeit for a different cause.

Anonymous said...

I think that Rumpole took this absurd and un-academic position on the 2nd Amendment to spice-up and liven the blog.

Anonymous said...

The NRA is to the 2nd Amendment what the ACLU is to the 1st and the FACDL is to the 4th, 5th and 6th. So, why call them pejoratively the "gun lobby".

The purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to make sure that private citizens had the right to keep and bear arms so that they could participate in a militia to keep their state free and secure if the need arose. The armed citizens came first, and the militia came from their aggregation and participation into it. It's not that the militia came first and that the citizens got the right to keep and bear arms from their participation in the militia.

Anonymous said...

It is interesting to note that the two states in the continental U.S. that do not require permits to carry guns are the most liberal (socialist Vermont) and the most conservative (Republican Arizona).

M. Stephen Stanfield said...

You know, I read back through your postings for the past several days. I searched high and low to see if in any way you might, possibly have commented on perhaps the single most important issue facing the criminal justice system in the United States. Since I cannot find it discussed I must conclude you either don't know about it or are ignoring it. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though and assume you didn't know.

Our Federal government now has an assassination list that by its own admission might have "dozens" of US Citizens on it. Our government is planning on killing our fellow citizens without the benefit of any amount of due process of law.

You've written about local politics, World Cup Football, DCA appellate opinions, SCOTUS appellate opinions, but you've not written about our President advocating state sanctioned murder all in the name of chasing that elusive mistress named Safety.

Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent article on this issue June 25 at Salon.com

Don't you think it's time you tackled this issue? For surely, your recognize what Mr. Greenwald and I do. A President that can order your death without due process of law is a President that can order anything short of your death without due process of law.

Anonymous said...

Then I guess Lawrence Tribe and all those liberal law professors who found an individual right to bear arms in the 2nd amendment are stupid, eh?

Anonymous said...

Rump: 12:07 here. I'll answer your question "why is a well regulated Militia mentioned in the second amendment?" with this question: why is it the right of the "people" to keep and bear arms and not the right of the "militia" to keep and bear arms? The militia clause was a declaration of purpose, and preserving the people's right to keep and bear arms was the method the framers chose, in-part, to ensure the continuation of a well-regulated militia. "Militia" referring to the armed citizenry. "Well-regulated" meaning disciplined.

I think you're parsing words unfairly. The spirit of the Second Amendment (again, the SECOND item in a list of INDIVIDUAL liberties)is to guarantee the "people's" right of gun ownership. Agreed, it's not perfectly written by today's standards. But neither are many of the other provisions in the Constitution. I return to my earlier point(only because it's familiar to us on the defense bar). The spirit of the Fourth Amendment prohibits the government -- without first obtaining a warrant -- from listening in on our phone calls even though communications, much less electronic ones, are not contemplated within the awkwardly written text, which only provdies that we shall be "secure" in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects." What the Fourth Amendment guarantees is unwarranted government intrusion into our private lives; what the Second Amendment guarantees is the "people's" right to bear arms.

Rumpole said...

12:07/3:08- you really need to answer my question first, however, since a Militia is not a person but an organization, the 2nd amendment guarantees the right to bear firearms to individuals who make up the Militia. Now that being clear, again explain to me what the Militia is doing in the amendment if the amendment's individual right is not modified by the use of the right to form the Militia to help the new country protect itself because at the time it did not have a standing army.

As to the question of when I became a Statist, I am not. But I am not in favor of no rules and no laws. I am not an anarchist. Objectivist believe that Government exists at the behest of the individual and to serve the individual and to do limited functions like PROTECT the individual from lawless thugs.

Anybody yet have anything to say to the parents of that six year with two bullets in his back, or do we just ignore the social costs of 200 million unregistered guns in this country. I'm waiting for someone, anyone, to tell me what they'd say to those parents.

Anonymous said...

11:37am here.

I have been saying that for the longest time, the Fourteenth Amendment had nothing to do with striking down segregation.

By the end of the 1800's the Fourteenth Amendment had appeared in hundreds of cases as an amendment protecting corporate personhood and to stop regulation and excessive taxation of corporations, as each corporation became a person with "equal protection" of the laws.

Of the 150 cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment heard by the Supreme Court up to the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 that established the legal standing of “separate but equal,” 15 involved blacks and 135 involved business entities. The scope of the Fourteenth Amendment to secure the political rights of former slaves was so restricted by the Supreme Court that blacks
won only one case.

Justice Field being a racist on the Court who not only felt the country was for whites only but lead the pack in giving greater protections to corporations than human beings.

Fake Talitha Leacock said...

To 2:17 pm:

You do not have permission to use the "on all fours and barking like a dog"® line.

I might think about letting you borrow it if you make them stop sending me mean e-mails and anti-World Cup messages. You also have to look over all of my cases and give me cases law directly on point. You also have to figure out what the point is, because I surely don't have a clue.

FTL

"on all fours and barking like a dog"® 2010 Officially Retained LLC


PS: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!!!

Anonymous said...

M. Stephen Stanfield, I saw the issue you talk about in one of the comments in the blog a few weeks ago. I read the article in the link and it is truly scary because of the fact that it is happening and because not much is being done about it. Basically, the president can order the assassination of American citizens based on secret intelligence and without a trial or sentence from a court.

Anonymous said...

Further Rumpole sayeth:

"Objectivist believe that Government exists at the behest of the individual and to serve the individual and to do limited functions like PROTECT the individual from lawless thugs."

The Second Amendment protects our right to keep and bear the tools to protect ourselves and our loved ones from the lawless thugs the government will not protect us from, and whom the SCOTUS has ruled that the government has no individualized duty to protect us from.

Gun control laws do not protect anyone from lawless thugs. Au contraire, they protect lawless thugs from lawful citizens and makes it extremely easy for the former to prey on the latter.

Lawless thugs, by definition, do not obey laws and will carry and use guns despite prohibitions, leaving lawful citizens defenseless.

Your argument is so specious and fallacious that it looks like its being made to stir up the discussion.

Anonymous said...

12:07/3:08 here: I thought I answered your question in my previous post, but I'll say it again: The militia clause was a declaration of purpose.

Your reading of "militia" is partially correct, but imposes too heavy a modern reading. Simply put, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home.

But the question I ask, which I think is more important to figuring out the Second Amendment's intent is why is it a right of the "people" and not the "militias." (if your reading is correct) A second question, why does it rank second in a litany of unquestionably individual rights?

As for the little girl who was shot. It's tragic. There is nothing anyone can say to that mother. Unless you can waive a magic wand and make all guns disappear I don't know what you are hinting at.

How is "gun violence" any different than any other sort of vicious violence?

Our failure to educate, care for, and nurture our kids, especially the historically disadvantaged and impoverished in this country, is the reason gang violence, drive-by shootings, and "gun violence" exist. Let's focus on getting them educated and off the street, so they have hope -- not on some steel implement that is incapable of doing anything on its own.

Anonymous said...

Who do I call to get someone put on that "list." And if I'm wearing my aluminum foil helmet, is it true the assassins can't see me???

Anonymous said...

Rump: It would really be a lot better if all Republicans and conservatives were delisted from the voter rolls, and the administration of the government could be left to the 20 percent of Americans, who like yourself, think of themselves as liberals.
With decisions being made by philosopher kings who know no wrong, good and justice would be served, and it would be so much more efficient.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Stanfield:

Obama is God. He's not that constitution-shredding Nazi George W. Bush. Why can't he go around and kill people if they need killin'?

Anonymous said...

Anyone interested in supporting Kuntz in his bid to send Gordo to a good spanking?

P. Nis said...

7:17, no thanks. Btw tell your buddy he might have a better shot by leaving his ugly mug off his campaign signs.

Anonymous said...

I love my guns. You can have them Rumpole. From my cold dead fingers.

To the parents:
I'm sorry. But we live in a society that worships money. And we love our guns. The second amendment ain't going to change by itself. Would you like to start a petition to repeal it? Because that's the only thing that's going to make a difference.

old guy said...

Have you met Kuntz? What qualities qualify him for the bench? I found none when we spoke.

Anonymous said...

Captain,

Word around REGJB was that Judge David Miller is going to civil. Any word on who might be called up to the big leagues to replace him?

Anonymous said...

Rump, agree Governor of Mississippi appears stupid, to say the least. But why punish the citizens of Louisiana, when many of them may have not even voted for him. Cooperation, rolled back sleeves and egos is what we need to get us through this oil gusher mess. Let's call it what it is. But remember, if you're reading this while you drive a petrol guzzling SUV to work from the outer fringes of the suburbs, you're a hypocrite. The time of oil is coming to an and, my friend, and then what will we do with the oil dependent infrastructure we've created? Time for truth.

Late breaking news said...

Sad, sad, so sad - late breaking news.

Kissimmiee Kid said...

"Can you imagine anyone from the 1700's or 1800' s being anything but startled and upset over the level of gun violence in our country today?"

Oh, come on. Is this how you litigate, just pulling stuff out your butt? Have you ever read any history? Do you have half an idea how quick to kill each other those folks were? Burr gunned Hamilton down on July 11, 1804 and was acquitted! Cold-blooded murder; not guilty. They loved to shoot each other and did so frequently.

Anonymous said...

This morning I entered through the rear of the courthouse. Much to my surprise there was no line in either the lawyer or the civilian entrances. Out of pure habit, I entered through the lawyer entrance. Once I cleared the metal detector, one of the 30 security guards who are doing absolutely nothing, approached me and asked me for my bar card. Nevermind the fact that I am wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Forget the fact that these people see me (and my bar card) every day. But do they really need to ask for a bar card WHEN THE CIVILIAN LINE IS EMPTY AS WELL??? Did these "security guards" somehow pass a more stringent background check than we did to get into the Florida Bar? Do we really need that many guards at each door? And finally, what the hell is the function of the security guard who guards the entrance to the traffic rooms on the first floor. He opens the rope like a bouncer for anyone who wishes to enter. Do we need him or his damned rope?

Anonymous said...

I am the President of the National Idiots Association and I resent having my intelligence assailed by being placed in the same breath as Sarah Palin. I demand a retraction.

Now if you want to call her a moron or an ignoramous, then that is okay with me. The officers and members of those associations don't know how to read and won't know the difference.

Anonymous said...

To the Parents of the Six-Year Old: Stop driving around! Cars are way more dangerous than guns and kill far more people year after year! Pencils don't make spelling errors, writers do. Cars don't kill people, poor drivers do. Guns don't kill people, evil violent people do. Banning guns for public safety is like outlawing tobacco, alcohol, trans fat, eggs (2 = 140% of RDA of cholesterol), and mandating personal exercise.