Thumper, where's the Hogwash?
WASHINGTON, June 10, 2002 (UPI) -- The Supreme Court passed up a chance Monday to rule on the Bush administration's assertion that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to bear firearms.
The justices refused to review two cases in which the Justice Department filed briefs asserting that right, in a departure from past administrations.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution says, "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."
For much of the 20th century, the amendment's language has sparked a political debate as to what the words mean. Advocates of gun safety laws say the amendment applies to state militias, not to individuals. Gun freedom proponents, such as the National Rifle Association, say the amendment's language clearly applies to individuals who would make up a state militia.
The courts have mostly adopted the view that the amendment is talking about militia, not individuals, though the Supreme Court, while upholding federal gun laws, has never ruled on the issue.
Until last month, the Justice Department had consistently interpreted the Second Amendment to apply to state militias, not to individuals. However, earlier this year, Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote to the NRA saying he believed the amendment gave individuals the right to bear firearms.
U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson echoed Ashcroft's stance in the two government briefs he submitted to the Supreme Court in May, though he urged the court not to intervene in the cases of two men who claimed their Second Amendment rights were being violated through the enforcement of guns laws.
One of the men, Timothy Joe Emerson, was indicted by a federal grand jury in San Angelo, Texas, for possessing a firearm -- a Beretta pistol -- while under a domestic violence restraining order, a violation of federal law.
A federal judge dismissed the indictment, ruling that the federal law was a violation of the Second Amendment, but a federal appeals court subsequently reversed the judge. When the appeals court sent the case back down for a new hearing, Emerson asked the Supreme Court in a pauper petition to intervene.
Olson told the Supreme Court that the appeals court was right when it ruled "that the individual right to bear arms protected by the Second Amendment is subject to 'limited, narrowly tailored specific exceptions or restrictions for particular cases that are reasonable and not inconsistent with the right of Americans generally to keep and bear their private arms as historically understood in this country."
Olson urged the Supreme Court not to review Emerson's case, even while the Justice Department took its new position on the Second Amendment.
In the second case, John Lee Haney showed up at a police station in western Oklahoma and told an officer that he owned semiautomatic and fully automatic firearms. Haney also told the officer that the weapons were not licensed and the federal government did not have the authority to make him get a license.
Officers later found two fully automatic weapons in Haney's car and house, along with literature describing how to turn a semiautomatic firearm into a fully automatic weapon.
A jury found Haney guilty of possessing two machineguns in violation of federal law and he was sentence to 33 months in prison.
An appeals court upheld the judge, ruling that there was no personal right contained in the Second Amendment. A federal law does not violate the amendment, the appeals court said, "unless it impairs the state's ability to maintain a well-regulated militia."
Haney then asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
In his brief to the high court in the Haney case, Olson said the Justice Department agrees with the appeals court in the Emerson case, but urged the justices not to intervene in Haney's case anyway.
(No. 01-8780, Timothy Joe Emerson vs. USA; 01-8272, John Lee Haney vs. USA)
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This post was actually about valid reasons for owning full automatic weapons, and you answered it by informing all of us that an automatic weapon would be the best way to kill people. Thanks.
