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Opinion
New York – -(AmmoLand.com)-
“I reiterate: All that we decide in this case is that the Second Amendment protects the right of law-abiding people to carry a gun outside the home for self-defense and that the Sullivan Law, which makes that virtually impossible for most New Yorkers, is unconstitutional.” ~ Closing paragraph of Part One of Justice Alito’s Concurring Opinion in Bruen
There are two key components of Bruen.
- One involves the test that Federal and State Courts must employ when they are called upon to review Governmental actions that impact the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
- The second involves the matter of “proper cause”/ “may issue”, aka “justifiable need”, which is at the heart of the gun licensing regime of New York, and that was the central topic of concern at oral argument in Bruen. And Bruen impacts other jurisdictions around the country that have similar handgun licensing structures.
As we all know, the High Court in Bruen struck down the foundation of New York’s concealed handgun carry license regime—the salient constituent of which is the unrestricted concealed handgun carry license component.
Few people in New York “are privileged” to hold such valued and rare licenses, as those that have them can rely on handguns for self-defense in the public sphere, i.e., outside the home—a right denied to almost all New York residents.
First things first. We deal with the test that reviewing Courts must use when reviewing Governmental actions impacting 2A.
The U.S. Supreme Court did articulate in Heller the test to be utilized by the Federal and State Courts when reviewing Governmental actions impacting the Second Amendment, but all too many Courts demonstrated a barely disguised antipathy toward it or otherwise exhibited a tired apathy apropos of it. In either case, such jurisdictions resorted to their own case precedent.
The appropriate test to be employed—the Heller test—involves a two-step process.
The first step is easy or should be easy if a reviewing Court doesn’t make what is a simple matter difficult.
A reviewing Court first ascertains whether the Governmental action conflicts with the plain meaning of the Second Amendment. This means that the Court looks to see if the Governmental action affects the Second Amendment. If the Governmental action impacts on the individual right to keep and bear arms, then the first part of the test is met. The Government action is presumed unconstitutional, and the burden to prove that the action is constitutional rests on the Government, not on the individual asserting the right to be exercised—the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Thus, in the second part of the test, the Government must prove that the action is consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation.
If the Government fails to establish historical precedent, then the regulation must be struck down.
Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, said this:
“We reiterate that the standard for applying the Second Amendment is as follows: When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command.’”
Pay close attention to the phrase “we reiterate” as utilized by Justice Thomas in the main Majority Opinion and as also utilized by Justice Alito in his Concurring Opinion.
In colloquial parlance, the word ‘reiterate’ means ‘to say something again or several times, typically for emphasis or clarity, and often alluding to a feeling of weariness for having to do so.’ Such is the reason for the term’s appearance in Bruen, and such is the profound frustration apparent in the Majority Opinion.
By using the word ‘reiterate,’ in Bruen, the High Court expressed its disdain for the lower Courts for continually failing to heed Heller. This may be due to antipathy, even spite, toward the Heller decision. Or it may be due to ignorance, apathy or sloppiness, philosophical leanings, or stubborn adherence to lower Court precedence. That it happens at all is a dreadful thing—thus the need for Bruen—and, still, we see the Federal Government and State Governments and State and Federal Courts contending with Heller and with McDonald and intending now to contend with Bruen, as well.
How many cases must the U.S. Supreme Court hear before Government gets the message: that the right codified in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution is a natural law right: fundamental, unalienable, immutable, illimitable, eternal, and absolute?
Heller laid out the test, and the Majority Opinion stated that fact explicitly.
—The point being that the High Court wasn’t positing a new standard of review of Second Amendment cases in Bruen, but it was merely confirming the test as promulgated in Heller that all too many lower Courts had heretofore failed to apply. And in that failure, the lower Courts were jeopardizing the sanctity of the fundamental right of the people to keep and bear arms, as an individual right unconnected with one’s service in a militia.
Justice Thomas, writing for the Court Majority, was telling those lower Federal and State Courts that had heretofore applied a ‘means-test analysis’ in Second Amendment cases—a test also referred to as an ‘interest-balancing approach’ or ‘interest-balancing inquiry,’ or, in Court vernacular, an ‘intermediate scrutiny test’ in testing the Constitutionality of a Governmental action—that those Courts had gotten it all wrong!
Those lower Courts were giving their imprimatur to Governmental actions that all was well and good when nothing was well and good with those actions as they infringed the clear intent of the Second Amendment. The Courts should have struck those actions down. They didn’t. And in affirming the constitutional correctness of unconstitutional acts, those Courts compounded their sin against the people and against the Divine Creator. For the Divine Creator had bestowed on man and in man the right of self-defense.
And the general sacred right of self-defense subsumes armed self-defense, which is but a species of the Divine Right of personal survival of body, mind, and spirit against those people or Governments that would dare to destroy or subjugate body, mind, or spirit to another’s will or to the will of the State over the Self.
There are several examples of this failure to heed Heller, but the starkest example is Friedman vs. Highland Park, 784 F. 3d, 406 (7th Cir. 2015), cert denied, 577 U.S. 1039 (2015).
The Friedman case is particularly noteworthy, especially today, because the Court had the opportunity to deal head-on with the issue of whether so-called “assault weapons” fall within the core of Second Amendment protection. Had the Court taken that case up, it would have ruled that “assault weapons” do fall within Second Amendment protection, and that would have saved the American people a lot of aggravation and heartache that is at present heaped on them by a treacherous and obstructionist Biden Administration, a treacherous, obstinate Democrat Party-controlled Congress, an obstreperous, perfidious legacy Press, and a painfully passive, acquiescent, obsequious, worthless Republican Party.
Of course, the expression ‘assault weapon’ is fiction. That’s all it ever was. It isn’t a military term of art, and never was a military term of art, and it isn’t and wasn’t ever used in the arms industry as such either.
Propagandists devised the term for politicians and a seditious Press for its effect on gullible members of the American public who allow the Government and the Press to do their thinking for them—seducing them through emotive words and images to sacrifice their God-Given Rights for nothing but an illusion of or false hope of security if they would but place their faith in the State to protect them, but from what is never made clear.
What is clear is that the State wishes to protect itself from the armed citizenry, as it is the end goal of the State to oppress the citizenry, not provide for the citizenry’s succor, much less its salvation. For salvation can only come from the Divine Creator anyway, not from the State—a false god, a fake, cardboard god.
Propagandists originally meant to ascribe the expression ‘assault weapon,’ to some but not all semiautomatic handguns, rifles, and shotguns. But, of late, especially with the latest Texas public school shooting incident—with the Biden Administration riding a wave of public anxiety and anger over public school shootings—the Administration has chosen to exasperate public anxiety rather than allay it, seeking to ban all semiautomatic weapons or placing them under the purview of the NFA and that means under the heavy hand of the ATF. And this is as we at AQ had predicted long ago and have mentioned several times since.
But this would all be a non-issue if the U.S. Supreme Court had a chance to rule on “assault weapons” in the years following the Heller decision. The Court certainly had the chance to do so in the Friedman case. And, God knows, Justice Thomas, for one, wanted to deal with this matter but obviously could not get support from the liberal wing of the Court, or from the Chief Justice, John Roberts, and from Justice Kennedy, both of whom had no stomach for establishing clearly and categorically the salient reason for the Second Amendment: which is that Government was created to serve the American people, not the other way around.
An armed citizenry signals to the Government that the people are Sovereign over the Government and over their Nation and that firearms provide the means by which Government must bow to the will and sovereignty of the people, whether Government reluctantly agrees to do so or not.
It is curious that the supporters of tyranny constantly complain about the firepower of modern semiautomatic weaponry, emphasizing in a hysterical way that such weapons are designed for the military—the standing army of the Federal Government.
To be sure, that weaponry of the American citizen is supposed to be military weaponry, designed for just such a cataclysm: to prevent an unrestrained Government and its standing army, its militarized police, and its vast intelligence apparatus that seeks to bend the citizenry to its will.
The right of the people, the people’s duty, and the people’s ability to resist Government oppression and subjugation are only feasible where the citizenry is armed and armed to the hilt and armed with military weapons.
In fact, it is not just the semiautomatic weapons that Americans have a fundamental right to possess then; it is the selective fire weapons and fully automatic personnel weapons that Americans have a God-Given right to wield. Of course, a tyrannical Government would attempt to prevent the citizenry from having access to just that sort of weaponry by which the people might succeed in resisting tyranny.
The NFA should be repealed; no question about that. Instead, the Harris-Biden Administration wants to extend its purview over semiautomatic weaponry and, of course, eventually over all weapons.
A dire confrontation between the citizenry and the Government is inevitable if the Executive and Legislative Branches do not soon come to their senses and acknowledge that those that serve in those Branches of Government owe their allegiance to the U.S. Constitution as written, and to the American people they have a duty to serve. It is not the American people that must bow down or defer to these Government servants, much less deify them.
It is they, the smug, sanctimonious, self-righteous servants of Government that need to be put in their place, and that place may well be the chopping block.
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