I think a very well written article on the SC ruling

[nodog]

The blue part at the bottom was a comment made that I also thought was right on.

I've mentioned before how gun laws started by gun advocates like you and I to restrict others freedoms. This article high lights that and it is something we need to be vigilant against.




Coweta's gun rights advocates pleased by court ruling
BY SARAH FAY CAMPBELL
THE TIMES-HERALD
Last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McDonald v. Chicago left Coweta's most prominent gun rights advocates pleased, but not very surprised.
In the 5 to 4 ruling, the court found that the Second Amendment applies to states and local governments, not just the federal government.
"It kind of paves the way for people, both in Georgia and across the nation, to challenge state and local gun laws that infringe on their Second Amendment rights," said Cowetan John Monroe. Monroe is the vice president of gun rights organization Georgia Carry, and its legal counsel.

"It is a big deal, but it was so widely expected that it wasn't real exciting when it happened," Monroe said. The ruling probably won't have a big effect on Georgia, which already has fairly liberal gun laws.
However, "it will change a lot of things in the way a lot of states and local governments regulate guns, no doubt about it," Monroe said.
The court had already ruled, in the 2008 case Heller vs. D.C., that the Second Amendment conveys an individual right to keep and bear arms, and that the D.C. law that prohibited handguns, even in the home for self defense, was unconstitutional. However, because Washington, D.C., is an enclave of the federal government, the Heller case didn't answer the question of whether or not the amendment was binding on the states.
Residents of Chicago and the suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, brought the suit to strike down Chicago and Oak Park's total bans on handguns.. The residents lost at both the federal court level and the appeals court -- even though those rulings came down after Heller.
In the McDonald ruling, the Supreme Court found that the right to keep and bear arms is "fundamental to the concept of ordered liberty," said Ed Stone, also a Cowetan, and the president of Georgia Carry.
In both the Heller and McDonald cases, amicus briefs pointed out that the handgun bans didn't reduce crime in D.C. and Chicago.
"That was the laughable thing -- D.C. is like the murder capital of the year, and Chicago has vied for that title several times," Stone said. Chicago banned private ownership of handguns in 1982, Stone said. In the next 19 years, there were only three years in which the murder rate was as low as it was when the ban took effect, he said.
In the McDonald ruling, as in Heller, the justices clearly stated that they weren't striking down reasonable restrictions on the Second Amendment, such as forbidding felons to have guns and regulating carry in sensitive areas.
However, the justices didn't indicate what sort of "test" such reasonable restrictions would have to pass to be constitutional.
Usually, laws infringing on a "fundamental right" have to meet the test of "strict scrutiny."
Strict scrutiny has three prongs, Stone said. First, the restrictions must be justified by a "compelling government interest." Secondly, the restriction must be narrowly tailored to meet that compelling government interest.
And thirdly, the restriction must be the least-restrictive means to achieve that government interest.
Most laws can't pass that test. "Usually, strict scrutiny means the law is going to be struck down, just like the lowest level usually means the law will be upheld," Stone said.
The lowest level is the "rational basis test," Stone said. "Generally speaking, rational basis is a default level of review, but that never applies to a fundamental right. And the Supreme Court made it clear in Heller that that would not be appropriate for any gun control law."
"I'm guess they will probably decide it is intermediate scrutiny. That puts it on par with privacy rights."
Intermediate scrutiny requires an "important government interest," and the law has to "substantially advance that important government interest," Monroe said.
Georgia's gun laws have been loosened substantially in the past several years.
This year sweeping changes in Georgia's laws were made by Senate Bill 308. They included getting rid of the confusing "public gathering statute," which banned the carry of firearms at public gatherings, but didn't expressly define them.
The public gathering statute was enacted during the Jim Crowe era and designed to help disarm blacks, Stone said.
SB 308 was sponsored by Sen. Mitch Seabaugh, R-Sharpsburg.
The bill went through many incarnations to make it to final passage, and some of the things Seabaugh, and other gun rights advocates wanted, got taken out.
One of the changes that didn't make it was allowing churches to decide whether or not handguns can be carried by parishioners. Current state law makes it a crime for anyone other than law enforcement or professional security to have a handgun at church, regardless of whether the church wants guns or not.
And challenges to that law will likely be the most obvious result of the McDonald decision in Georgia.
"It is difficult to imagine how that can pass either First Amendment or Second Amendment muster," said Monroe. "It was bad enough that it was a First Amendment violation. But it's now pretty clearly a Second Amendment violation, as well," Monroe said.
Georgia's requirement for a license to carry a loaded handgun, even openly, could also be "called into question," Monroe said.
He said that Georgia is one of only 13 states that doesn't allow openly carrying guns without a license.
"If you have to have a license to carry at all, it means you are required to have a license to exercise a fundamental constitutional right," Monroe said.
This week Seabaugh said he was going through the 214-page opinion to "really understand what the real impact will be on the state of Georgia."
So far, he said, it seems that, in most ways, "the direction we were going with 308 originally would have fit right in with what they are saying is constitutional and what is not," Seabaugh said.
"Private property owners should have the right to determine for themselves where the individual can carry or not carry," he said. "The real question is wading through to get some kind of feel for what they deem to be the 'sensitive areas' that can still be regulated for license holders."
As for the most important part of the ruling, "I would think that most people would've thought that the Second Amendment applied to the states anyway," Seabaugh said.
In reading order, Seabaugh said Chicago and Oak Park's arguments on what "they thought gave them the right to be able to make such an ordinance" seemed to make no sense at all.
"It was very hard to see, to me, how they could come to that conclusion. That's why a lot of people felt like the ruling was going to go this way," Seabaugh.
Though it might seem obvious that the Constitution applies to states and local governments, the court's ruling that Second Amendment rights are applied to the states through the 14th Amendment contradicts multiple earlier rulings.
It was those earlier rulings that the federal district court and court of appeals had relied on when ruling against McDonald, et al.
In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito talks about the major earlier ruling, the Slaughter-House case of 1873.
That case gave a very narrow reading of the 14th amendment's "privileges and immunities" clause.
The clause states that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."
In Slaughter-House, the court ruled that the provision applied only to a very narrow set of rights.
Alito says that, though "many legal scholars dispute the correctness" of Slaughter-House, "we see no need to reconsider that interpretation here. For many decades, the question of the rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against state infringement has been analyzed under the Due Process Clause... and not under the Privileges or Immunities Clause. We therefore decline to disturb the Slaughter-House holding."
Justice Clarence Thomas partially dissented from the ruling, saying he felt that the privileges and immunities clause did apply to Second Amendment rights.
Almost
7/5/2010
Link To This Comment
"It was very hard to see, to me, how they could come to that conclusion. That's why a lot of people felt like the ruling was going to go this way," Seabaugh.
Yet the vote was 5-4. It obviously could have gone the other way, other than, the political happenstance of the current makeup of the court.
The totalitarian infection, the theocrativc takeover of the nation by the religion Social Scientology, is nearly complete, after a hundred year plus bout of fighting the disease. We are more than ripe for a complete abdication to an American Totalitarianism, subjugation under the One True Religion: "S"ociety is God, and the state is its proper church.
Secular, free, constitutionally limited democratic republic?
Not with so many religious nuts running unfettered with their True Believerism, scrambling for their elitist seat at the circus of paternalistic megalomania.
Posted by Frediano at 8:03 AM