‘Breyer: Founding Fathers Would Have Allowed Restrictions on Guns
If you look at the values and the historical record, you will see that the Founding Fathers never intended guns to go unregulated, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer contended Sunday.
aah yes….”values”. And assumed intentions. How convenient…when they coincide with the statists’ agenda.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Breyer said history stands with the dissenters in the court’s decision to overturn a Washington, D.C., handgun ban in the 2008 case “D.C. v. Heller.”
Breyer wrote the dissent and was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He said historians would side with him in the case because they have concluded that Founding Father James Madison was more worried that the Constitution may not be ratified than he was about granting individuals the right to bear arms.
Hell, why bother with a written Constitution at all? Why not have issues of liberty and freedom decided by a panel of historians, and bypass all this messy business of courts entirely? Historians, after all, are infinitely better qualified than the peasantry to adjudicate these things.
Madison “was worried about opponents who would think Congress would call up state militias and nationalize them. ‘That can’t happen,’ said Madison,” said Breyer, adding that historians characterize Madison’s priority as, “I’ve got to get this document ratified.”…..Therefore, Madison included the Second Amendment to appease the states, Breyer said.
“If you’re interested in history, and in this one history was important, then I think you do have to pay attention to the story,” Breyer said. “If that was his motive historically, the dissenters were right. And I think more of the historians were with us.”
Gott–and academia– Mitt Uns!
That being the case, and particularly since the Founding Fathers did not foresee how modern day would change individual behavior, government bodies can impose regulations on guns, Breyer concluded.
And there is the nub of his argument. The core of the “progressive” case for trashing the Constitution, that inconvenient roadblock on the way to Utopia. ‘Because the Founding Fathers could not possibly have foreseen the modern world’. In fact they foresaw the tendencies of governments to become tyrants very clearly, and that’s what sticks in Breyer’s craw.
….”Are you a sportsman? Do you like to shoot pistols at targets? Well, get on the subway and go to Maryland. There is no problem, I don’t think, for anyone who really wants to have a gun.” source
So there you have it….your Constitution, your rights are those which unelected judges and academics interpret for you. Because they know better than you what the Founding Fathers intended. Not only that, the test of whether or not to uphold those rights becomes also matter of who is inconvenienced, and by how much. How long before the First Amendment is also subjected to the “convenience test”?
