Did Democrats Give Up in Gun Control Debate?
There are some exceptions to the rule — for instance, according to the General Social Survey, conducted intermittently since 1972, the percentage of Americans who think permits should be required before a gun can be obtained has gradually risen (to 79 percent in 2008 from 72 percent in 1972). Background checks for gun owners are overwhelmingly popular, attracting the support of as many as 90 percent of Americans. And while most Americans say they do not want gun control regulations to become stricter, even fewer — about 10 percent — think they should be made more lax.
Still, the overall pattern is reasonably clear. According to Gallup surveys, for instance, the number of Americans favoring a ban on handguns has been on a long-term decline and is now about 30 percent, down almost 10 percentage points from a decade earlier:
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It is perhaps not surprising, then, that support for gun control measures has declined in recent years, with one of the parties essentially having surrendered on the issue. Somewhere along the line — perhaps between 2000 and 2004, when the rhetoric in their platform changed significantly — Democrats concluded that the issue was a political loser for them and they stopped fighting back.
It may also be that gun control has became less a priority for the Democratic Party’s key stakeholders. On one hand, major cities — where Democratic voters and donors have long been concentrated — became much safer during the decade of the 2000s, and so gun violence would have seemed a less immediate threat to an Upper East Side liberal in 2008 than it would have in 1988.
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http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/did-democrats-give-up-in-gun-control-debate/
Pretty interesting analysis by Nate Silver there at the New York Times.
Lower crime rates have lead to less households owning guns, yet people are becoming more tolerant of guns in general.
Long before the McDonald or Heller decisions, the Democratic Party acknowledged individual right to keep and bear arms, which makes it harder to push for gun control now.
= new reply since forum marked as read
So, not really the most sensitive analogy you could have made.
away. I will not take your rifle away. I won't take your handgun away."
If he backs away from that pledge it could mean he doesn't get reelected and most certainly will hurt Democratic candidates for the Senate and House.
...can't do much with all the anti-gun control reform Repukes in Congress. 
Democratic House, Democratic Senate, Democratic President.
Zero gun control action whatsoever (except for liberalized carry in national parks.)
I don't see the math changing any if Democrats take back control of Congress and Obama keeps his job come November.
The only way Democrats regain majority is via winning rural states. And rural states, it would seem, have lost their appetite for stricter gun control.
Blue dogs are afraid of the gun lobby
Clearly, there is ineffectiveness in our current gun control system.
...to do the best possible job they can to protect and the defend the Constitution of the United States, not to surrender to whims of "the will of the people." Oh well, I guess different strokes for different folks, my anti-Federalist friend. 
But not the misconstruction thereof, per the 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
I do live right now in what some would term a "dangerous neighborhood." The city I live in is serviced by the LA County Sheriffs Department. We're about 5 miles from the Inglewood city limit. When was the last time you were in a dangerous neighborhood? I think there's a real urban - suburban/rural divide. Responsible citizens should be for a responsible gun control policy. People in most urban areas know this, it's the rest of the country that doesn't understand that we're all the same boat.
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The preamble of the Constitution states that the document is intended "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The idea that there exists a right to safely walk the streets, to be safe in one's home, and to generally have government take an interest in public safety in such a way that does not create a less safe society is pretty basic. The libertarian dream of course is that government should have no social contract beyond some vague conceptualization of individual liberty. The Ninth Amendment provides for "silent rights" one of which I would argue is to not have firearms ownership constructed in such a way as to undermine public safety.
I have a right to not have government hand out guns for free to anyone that wants one without any screening at all. The enumeration of "a well-regulated Militia" cannot be "construed to deny or disparage" responsible firearms controls. Like I've said all along, the idea that there is some sort of "individual right" to firearm ownership is political mythology and not based in any broad constitutional sense. For that reason, the Court did not strike down gun control in general:
Clearly, the Court in Heller is skirting the idea that there is a right to firearms policies that establish public safety. I'm sure I'll now be told that there is no such right, just like there is no "right to privacy," and that I'm advocating a police state.
That's the crux of it. Would you care to expand on what commonly proposed gun control measures would infringe on the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" within the context of "a well-regulated Militia," it's only fair since I answered your question.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments are like the decoder rings to the rest of the Bill of Rights, without acknowledging their centrality to placing the preceding Amendments within the actual context of cases we are so narrowly binding the "rights of the people" in relation to the practice of good government that we would be like a small-child lost in the woods. Justice Douglas wrote in Griswold v. Connecticut "that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance," before citing the Ninth Amendment as the basis for this notion. I think a very strong case can be made that time and again the court has made a penumbra of "the right to public safety."
That certainly would be an interesting test case...maybe some right-wing county will oblige us and do so therefore prompt such a case.
...resulting in a crime therefore giving the victim standing.
And, if you're going to cast shadows so broadly, you can't avoid realizing that the individual right to own firearms is far more strongly implied in the shadow of the 2nd than the right you're suggesting is implied by anything else (even if we accept that individual ownership isn't directly protected by the 2nd). In other words, if you want to take an expansive view of unenumerated rights, private ownership could not reasonably be overlooked.
The 9th is nothing like a decoder ring - it's a safeguard, an extension, a recognition that we have many more rights than those explicitly protected in the document. These unspecified rights emanate from those that are listed - they are things implied by or necessary to the listed rights. (You should reexamine Griswold; you've got the point exactly backward.) So, you can't logically turn it around and use an unenumerated right (especially one as unsupported as the one you posit) as a foundation for an argument against an enumerated right.
I'm not sure what you mean by "we are so narrowly binding the "rights of the people" in relation to the practice of good government", but I'm almost getting the sense that you think the rights being protected are those of the government, that the BoR is providing power to the state and that "the people" means "the state." You do understand that the BoR is intended to protect the people from the government, right? That it limits what government (which is not "the people"
is allowed to do?
As for what proposed measures would be unconstitutional, that's not really relevant to this discussion. But I will say that anything which makes it unduly difficult for an eligible private citizen to obtain a firearm - things like SF's Prop H (2005), or the onerous restrictions in cities like DC - should run into 2A problems if not shut down by something else...
I'm arguing for reading the entire Second Amendment as it was written, rather than ignoring the so-called prefatory clause to the favor of a supposed operative clause. I'm arguing that the Constitution clearly states that the "right to keep and bear arms" only exists within the restriction of "a well-regulated Militia." That we've gone so far away from this reading to as suppose that such a right is "infringed" by "well-regulated" is non-sense. The Amendment does not contradict itself, it simply states a principle. The Bill of Rights is not intended to "protect the people from the government," the Bill of Rights is intended to form a basis for an ordering of relationships between "the people" and the organ of governments, which are elected by and for the people, hence:
The Founders didn't believe the government to be inherently misconstrued, they presumed that good government was the paramount interest in contrast to the bad government of King George III. The Founders were concerned with good government and accepted the Bill of Rights in order not to "protect" but to advance the rights of man.
The entire argument that is being made about the "operative" clause of Second Amendment being a stand-alone statement is inconsistent with the rest of the Constitution. This is the type of jurisprudence you get from Scalia and Co., readings that don't make any sense on the whole even if they do try and read it as Talmud! The Constitution is not Talmud, it is a living document.
The question presented by this case is not whether the Second Amendment protects a “collective right” or an “individual right.” Surely it protects a right that can be enforced by individuals. But a conclusion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right does not tell us anything about the scope of that right.
(Intro)
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZD.html
Justice Breyer:
The majority spends the first 54 pages of its opinion attempting to rebut Justice Stevens’ evidence that the Amendment was enacted with a purely militia-related purpose. In the majority’s view, the Amendment also protects an interest in armed personal self-defense, at least to some degree. But the majority does not tell us precisely what that interest is. “Putting all of [the Second Amendment ’s] textual elements together,” the majority says, “we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” Ante, at 19. Then, three pages later, it says that “we do not read the Second Amendment to permit citizens to carry arms for any sort of confrontation.” Ante, at 22. Yet, with one critical exception, it does not explain which confrontations count. It simply leaves that question unanswered. (V)
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZD1.html
The proclamation of an individual right is so much political mythology that the only thing I can take away from Scalia and Co. is that there is penumbra "right to public safety." Like it or not, when 4 highly educated and experienced liberal Supreme Court justices can't figure out what the right-wingers are talking about in this context, they probably don't make all that much Constitutional sense. Sure it's a sexy argument to say that there's an "individual right," but just saying it doesn't actually say anything in regard to effect. It's pissing in the wind. So much anti-Federalist clap-trap.
Last edited Tue Feb 7, 2012, 01:12 AM - Edit history (2)
OK, so you read this ...
... to mean that for those outside of the "well regulated militia," the "right to keep and bear arms" doesn't exist.
Let's apply that logic to some parallel examples:
This right to umbrellas only exists when it's raining. There is no right to bear them on sunny days.
Clearly the illiterate have no right to possess books.
Woe be unto you if you are gardenless but are found in possession of shears; the right is only protected in the context of gardening.
Guess what. The prefatory clause establishes the rationale; it doesn't circumscribe the right.
...decaying plank held on with a few loose screws to be sure...
