ACLU Blog on Heller

The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller. While the decision is a significant and historic reinterpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, the decision leaves many important questions unanswered that will have to be resolved in future litigation, including what regulations are permissible, and which weapons are embraced by the Second Amendment right that the Court has now recognized.

They continue to disagree and say the SCOTUS was wrong. Of course they’ve disagreed with the SCOTUS before so this shouldn’t be too surprising.

They chose well funded. It had the advantage of not encouraging people who they disliked on a cultural level to join.

The consequence, of course, of becoming explicitly anti-2nd amendment, is that people who care about the 2nd amendment self-select away from the ACLU, and they became even more anti-gun.

I really don’t think there’s any going back, they’re too financially dependent on anti-gunners, AND there aren’t enough people still in the organization who want to go back.

I’ll consider supporting them again when they start taking on restrictive gun laws and when the Feds overstep their authority.

I don’t except this to ever happen. The ACLU has never met a gun law they didn’t like and absolutely love it when the Federal government interferes with state and local authority. In fact, their court cases almost always result in more Federal interference and less local autonomy.

http://www.guncite.com/journals/heath.html

So, when it comes to the Second Amendment, the Collective Right Crowd’s position seems to be a kind of: “Heads, the Federal Government wins; Tails, the States and Individual Citizens lose.”

Rather than being disappointed, I imagine they lick their lips and get excited over the cash they’ll be able to generate.

(scroll down to message # 10)-

http://blog.aclu.org/2008/06/26/mandatory-ultrasound-laws-are-about-political-interference-not-medical-information/

“The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller. While the decision is a significant and historic reinterpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, the decision leaves many important questions unanswered that will have to be resolved in future litigation, including what regulations are permissible, and which weapons are embraced by the Second Amendment right that the Court has now recognized.”

http://www.aclu.org/scotus/2007term/35797prs20080626.html

“The Second Amendment has not been the subject of much Supreme Court discussion through the years. To the extent it has been discussed, the Court has described the Second Amendment as designed to protect the ability of the states to preserve their own sovereignty against a new and potentially overreaching national government. Based on that understanding, the Court has historically construed the Second Amendment as a collective right connected to the concept of a “well-regulated militia” rather than an individual right to possess guns for private purposes.”

“In Heller, the Court reinterpreted the Second Amendment as a source of individual rights. Washington D.C.’s gun control law, which bans the private possession of handguns and was widely considered the most restrictive such law in the country, became a victim of that reinterpretation. ”

“The Court was careful to note that the right to bear arms is not absolute and can be subject to reasonable regulation. Yet, by concluding that D.C.’s gun control law was unreasonable and thus invalid, the Court placed a constitutional limit on gun control legislation that had not existed prior to its decision in Heller. It is too early to know how much of a constitutional straitjacket the new rule will create.”

“So, we’ve been getting a lot of comments about the ACLU’s stance on the Second Amendment. For those of you who didn’t catch our response in the blog comments, here it is again:

The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller. While the decision is a significant and historic reinterpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, the decision leaves many important questions unanswered that will have to be resolved in future litigation, including what regulations are permissible, and which weapons are embraced by the Second Amendment right that the Court has now recognized.

As always, we welcome your comments.”

Link to ACLU’s Blog

(I’m sure I’m not the first person to point that out).

I always thought it stood for Atheist Criminal Lovers Union. But then, I was just going on their actions over the years.

Even if the Second Amendment is interpreted in purely collective terms, Blackstone makes it clear that the common-law right to arms was an individual right for purposes of individual defense. The Ninth, at the very least, incorporates all then-existing rights not otherwise enumerated in the Constitution. Therefore, there is an individual right to own firearms for self-defense in the Constitution.

on my go-around with the ACLU regarding the Second, a decade or more ago, a la Jonathan’s comment above.

That’s how I met Paul Gallant, a research fellow with David Kopel. ACLU ended correspondence with me by giving me contact information for other ACLU members who were contesting their Second Amendment policy. Paul was one of them.

on my go-around with the ACLU regarding the Second, a decade or more ago, a la Jonathan’s comment above.

FWIW, that’s how I met Paul Gallant, a research fellow with David Kopel. ACLU ended correspondence with me by giving me contact information for other ACLU members who were contesting their Second Amendment policy. Paul was one of them.

> Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty.

I ask you, what right could possibly be more fundamental than the God-given right to rebel and throw off tyranny as necessary? If we did not have this right, we would not have rebelled against England.

And given the fundamental nature of that right, in particular in America, what good would that right be without the ability to arm ourselves? A right to rebel without the right to keep and bear arms is not very much use.

But I’ll let Kozinski explain it to you:

> All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

> My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

There is no more fundamental right written in our constitution.