Putting the LIE to the DOJ's Position

[WAGCEVP]

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Boucher
To: FIREARMSREGPROF@listserv.ucla.edu
Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2000 12:48 PM
Subject: Re: DOJ Letter re: Emerson stating 2nd is not an individual right

I sent this request to the Firearmsregprof academic list in an effort to put the lie to the DOJs position.
I received the following citations that show the DOJ is wrong and is knowingly wrong:

--Original Message Text---
From: J. Horn
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 08:48:13 -0700

this Letter from the DOJ, they state that the Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd was not an
individual right.....I thought that aside from Miller they hadn't addressed it.
May I have clarification?

Kopel has written a piece which discusses The Supreme Courts Thirty-five Other Gun Cases: What the Supreme Court Has Said about the Second Amendment, 18 St Louis U L. Rev xxxx. A draft of the piece, complete with typos, is available at http://www.i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/35.htm


Another excellent article that rebuts the DOJ position is Denning, Brannon P., Can the Simple Cite be Trusted?: Lower Court Interpretations of United States v. Miller and the Second Amendment, 26 Cumb. L. Rev. 961-1004 (1996) http://www.2ndlawlib.org/journals/dencite.html

 

[dZ]

Immediately upon assuming chairmanship of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, I sponsored the report which follows as an effort to study, rather than
ignore, the history of the controversy over the right to keep and bear arms. Utilizing the research capabilities (p.VIII)of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, the
resources of the Library of Congress, and the assistance of constitutional scholars such as Mary Kaaren Jolly, Steven Halbrook, and David T. Hardy, the subcommittee
has managed to uncover information on the right to keep and bear arms which documents quite clearly its status as a major individual right of American citizens. We did
not guess at the purpose of the British 1689 Declaration of Rights; we located the Journals of the House of Commons and private notes of the Declaration's sponsors,
now dead for two centuries. We did not make suppositions as to colonial interpretations of that Declaration's right to keep arms; we examined colonial newspapers
which discussed it. We did not speculate as to the intent of the framers of the second amendment; we examined James Madison's drafts for it, his handwritten outlines of
speeches upon the Bill of Rights, and discussions of the second amendment by early scholars who were personal friends of Madison, Jefferson, and Washington and
wrote while these still lived. What the Subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear--and long-lost--proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was
intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms. The summary
of our research and findings forms the first portion of this report.
http://www.2ndlawlib.org/other/other/senrpt/senrpt.html#h1