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Sunday Open Thread: His Cold Dead Hands |
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Charlton Heston passed away last night. The actor, activist and former President of the NRA lived a full life, and always fought for the things he believed in. The BBC has a good 2 minute youtube clip with the highlights of Heston’s life.
Matt Yglesias puts Heston’s life and death in context. “His death, we hope, comes at a time when the great backlash of which he was a part is finally receding.” Under Heston’s leadership, the National Rifle Association helped elect George W. Bush and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to Republican Party committees. There is some evidence that Matt may be right. 8 in 10 Americans are rejecting the failed Republican economic and foreign policies of the past seven years. And in the House, Democrats enjoy an 8% advantage and will probably see considerable pickups from the unheard of 26 open (pdf) Republican seats.
The homicide rate in the United States is now higher than any country in Europe. It is about 3 times the rate in Canada, twice the rate in Iran and 6 times the rate in Saudi Arabia.
Is it too soon, or can we finally pry that gun from his cold dead hands?
You’re talking about Charlton F’ing Heston. Have some god damned respect. Whether you agree or disagree with his stance on the constitutionally protected right of all American citizens to bear arms, you cannot fill his shoes, nor hope to better embody the few virtues of the male gender than he. In fact, no man born this side of the 1970’s can.
So to answer your question: Yes. It is too soon. Let the body get cold - if you don’t mind - before you start with the off-color movie references and the raising of political flags from atop the corpse.
I find it a form of sensationalism worthy of the nightly news. Check yourself, sir!
(…you damned dirty ape…) -muahahaha
Meh. Heston has a mixed legacy. He stood up for civil rights, which I applaud him for, but he also stood up for a poor interpretation of the 2nd amendment, which I criticize him for. As a public figure, he deserves both our praise and criticism no matter how recently he passed away.
“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.”
I am sick of gun control advocates trying to reinvent the English language, as well as it’s Latin roots, to make the argument that what is written is not what is meant. Read the above: It reserves the right of the people to maintain militias. It reserves the right of the people to keep arms. It reserves the right of the people to bear those arms. Pretty straightforward. Especially considering that the colonies only freed themselves from British imperialism thanks to the right of the individual to keep and then bear his own instruments of war.
If you have a problem with the Constitution, then invoke Article V, or elect a legislative branch who will call for it’s amendment. But please, for the love of the very language that allows me to implore you so, give up these hubris-filled, Karl Rove’ish attempts to change the meaning of words instead of minds.
The truth is that the federalists and the anti-federalists disputed whether to create a regular army under the command of a Federal body. Anti-federalists feared placing such great, organized power into the hands of authorities existing outside the direct influence of the individual states. In the end they came upon this compromise: Federalists get their standing army, and anti-federalists get the right to maintain their own implements of self-defense. The language of the second amendment is the result of this compromise.
Now, I would love to see a debate on gun control; especially considering the times in which we live: where nothing seems politically certain and a state of martial law looms in the distance. But we cannot approach such issues so long as the issue advocates’ corrupt the forums with ‘newspeak’ word meanings and dispute for whom the three-hundred years dead might have agreed. I assure they would have none agreed evenly, just as we do not.
Therefore I beseech you: do no further harm to the language I so love. But make your case upon your notion’s virtues and not upon the further decimation of my native tongue.
Like any Constitutional argument, this one rests on a difference of interpretation. Just like we have reasonable limits on free speech (fires and crowded theaters) we also can limit access to firearms. Hence gun *control* not gun banning.
You agree, then, that the language of the amendment itself is plain and true? Therefore when you say “interpretation,” what you speak of is a legal / doctrinal interpretation of the applications and reaches of the law as written, yes?
I would take issue there as well. For, still, this mindset seeks to destroy the language and the law. In your example I would argue that the first amendment is written such that it prohibits “Congress” from abridging free speech, not the people and so not the states. Therefore, any state which wishes to limit speech may do so as its people so decree. But it is the Federal legislative branch which cannot pass a law in any way limiting the freedoms of speech. This is as intended.
The federal body was never meant to have authority over what might be said, written, or otherwise communicated within any of the several states. However, if the peoples of a state were to agree at a majority that a certain form of speech was too abrasive, physically dangerous, or disruptive to the social order, (fires and crowded theatres) then they would retain the power to enact their own measures upon the will of the local citizenry and their representatives.
The notion of placing “reasonable limits” on laws, without redressing the text of those laws as written, has very much created the wasteland of law-scape that we presently live in. It is why the nation can argue over whether or not the president has the authority to strip American citizens of their citizenry without trial; whether or not cruel and unusual punishment equates to torture; and what it is we mean by the very words we use to discuss these things. It is, in fact, that which has removed the states and the people of the greatest portion of their self-determination, and remitted the bulk of governance’s function to the District of Columbia.
If you want to change the law, change the law. If the law nolonger functions to the benefit of the populace then do away with it! I’m all for revising the Constitution in many of these instances. But don’t just decide unilaterally to treat the written law as though its words intended something that is not, and was not stated; or that it is no longer “reasonable” to apply the law as it is written. For it is this, coupled with the slow erosion of time, that eventually skins and debones the weight and authority of all law; making it illegible, inapplicable, and an utter confusion to the common men whom it was intended to serve. Follow not, therefore, in the footsteps of Justice Souter.
If you wish to limit the types of weapons a man can keep and bear, then you must amend the constitution. For there is no room, in this word, for interpretation. As it stands, you cannot “infringe” upon these rights.
-What do you think?-
Two points:
1. Prohibitions against free speech can and do appear at both the state and federal level, and have been upheld by the Supreme Court.
2. Gun control challenges in the Supreme Court are usually challenges to state level laws anyway.
So, anti-gun control advocates are battling state’s rights to limit gun control on a regular basis AND the Constitution does in fact allow the federal government to limit rights in reasonable cases, at least according to the Supreme Court.
Now, you may disagree with the Court’s rulings, which is fine, but there is a precedent here.
That is truly the crux of it all: The courts reinventing the written law and creating caveats where none were specified. Because in many instances, those caveats should be there… But instead of legislatures acting to insert what is found lacking, we rely on the courts to create wholly new interpretations of law; each based on the last, equally text-ignorant re-defining of verbiage, intent, and meaning.
Each incarnation of the court is allowed to change the written law without the legislature losing even one drop of ink from their pens. And each new administration that claims power in Washington gets to reinvent the Constitution and her authorities to match his desires.
It is an admirable goal to rid our streets of weapons, and the violence and death tolls to which they contribute. Still it is curious to see with what means men are willing to pursue their goals. Thanks to this ever-continuing process of judicial re-legislating, the law of the land has no home. There is no sense of stability or fundamental meaning in the law. There is no order; no precept to which the common man might grasp some fundamental understanding of justice’s whim. No one can say, from day to day, who with a jurisdiction lies, or what this beast of government was meant, at first, to do. And - to the detriment of all - the powers that come and go sit, when they do, with pleasure, for the ease that abides them to invert hard-won progress without need of consulting the people or their elect.
Herein, perhaps, is why we are meant to be humble. For the authorities we claim in the pursuit of what is good, loose we also upon those whose pursuits we find less righteous than our own.
Well…
I believe in the right of the judiciary to interpret the law, including the Constitution. The founders were not perfect and they knew their document would have to change with the times. They allowed two methods for it to do that, amendment and judicial review. And they protected judicial review from too much exposure to the harsh winds of politics with lifetime judicial appointments approved by Congress.
So, the courts have the right to their interpretations, no matter how twisting you may find them. If, later on as moods in the country shift, someone wants to challenge judicial precedent, they can do so, and interpretations can and will change.
I guess I see this all as part of the process of checks and balances. We need not turn to amendments for every change we want to make to the Constitution.
Curse you Rosenbaum! Someday I’ll get ya’. Someday I’ll pry you from that moderate/optimist platform and convince you once and for all that the whole ball’s gone to hell and the world’s at its end!
Eh, you know I’m playing a little bit of devil’s advocate, right? I mean, some judicial ruling really rankle me, and when they do, I get to thinking…
Here’s a perfect example of how our most sacred institutions of law have been completely reversed by the fluctuating leanings of the court, despite clear and unchallengeable language which has never itself altered:
law.cornell.edu/supct/html/06-984.ZD.html
This is Justice Breyer’s dissent to a recent decision of the court, which effectually repainted the constitution yet again, by ignoring and/or standing on its head the Supremacy Clause; which states in part:
“[...]Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the land; and the [!!!]Judges in every State shall be bound[!!!] thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
Despite this decisively unambiguous language, the courts concluded - as they have since the mid 1950’s - that judges of the several states are NOT bound by the treaties and international agreements concluded on their behalves. And therein the courts declared that we need not abide the decisions of the International Court of Justice; even though we signed, shook, and gave our word; and even though our Constitution says the states have no choice but to comply, nomatter their local laws or procedural regularities.
This is what I simply cannot condone. Even our Constitution now overflows with definitive statements and declarations of how the law will be applied and upheld, which upon review of their modern, real world applications, one finds that they have been completely and utterly reversed. My blood boils when I think that a man cannot be certain of anything he might investigate within our government and law, even unto our most sacred documents of unification. That nothing means what it says, and even those bold declarations of the rights of the people, which were not to be abridged, are now oe’rshadowed by a concrete web of the many bridges erected there and overthrown; whose structure was never legislated but simply re-interpolated by the courts.
What we are left with is the statement that ‘X’ shall not, and never, be allowed within these borders. And what that now means is that ‘X’ is perfectly allowable within a few minor restrictions…
The Constitution is a hypocrite!
See, as much as I disagree with the ruling, I think it is in fact fair. This is what the courts do. The Constitution’s words I don’t think are meant to be water-tight proclamations. They are meant to be redefined, changed, and reinterpreted as time goes on.
I donno, it just seems to me like that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
Hang on… Let me come down off the podium for a second…
Okay: Don’t it urk ya’, though? To think that the law should say one thing on paper and mean its exact opposite in application? Isn’t it only natural that we should strive for the simplest and/or most logical expression of our laws, so that a majority should be able to read and understand them - in place - without question of whether or not this law means what it means, anymore?
Don’t it make your scalp itch to think how much care and compromise and deliberation went into the wording of these laws… went into the integral structure of the code on whole - just for it to be wiped away without any of the elect so much as turning their heads to consider why and whatfor the law was drafted originally?
I would that a school child could look at the greater portion of our laws and understand their meaning. But so long as ‘yes’ means ‘no,’ and ‘black’ means ‘three fifths the equal of a free man,’ even the over-educated have little chance at deciphering what the law intends or demands of this modern America.
I mean: Don’t it… Don’t it urk ya’?
Well, sure, it irks, but what’s the better answer? I mean, I don’t believe laws should be completely unchangeable or uninterperatable, especially laws as hard to actually change the wording of as the Constitution. Plus, this is a checks and balances thing. If laws were immovable after they had been written by Congress, where is the check on that?
So yeah, it can irk, but I don’t see a better way…
The homicide rate has been largely stable since 2000 after a steady 8 year drop. So exactly what are you implying with your comment “Is it too soon, or can we finally pry that gun from his cold dead hands?”?