Gun Control & RKBA
In reply to the discussion: Replacing white people to kill gun rights [View all]jimmy the one
(2,717 posts)big mike: I read an article on it in the NY Times years ago: Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right. My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,
Please, read the whole article and let's discuss Professor Tribe's and other scholar's work
You are reading too much into a few sentences taken out of context, vintage 2ndA mythology; Laurence Tribe is simply militia centric, like alan dershowitz, believing 2ndA based upon militia participation but not disallowing for auxiliary individual ownership:
Tribe posits that it includes an individual right, "admittedly of uncertain scope," to "possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes."
18 December 12 - constitutional interpreters .. ought to conclude that the only "individualistic right to keep and bear arms" (that is, the only right to keep and bear arms independent of the organized militia) is a limited right of self-defense that people may exercise vis-à-vis state and local "efforts at disarming people," a right derived from the 14th Amendment rather than the Second, but that "federal gun control legislation [is] essentially invulnerable under the 2nd Amendment provided the state militia [is] not undermined." http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/265-34/15098-a-response-from-laurence-tribe-in-the-wake-of-newtown
I certainly believe that restricting the kinds of high-powered weapons and ammunition that made possible the horrific slaughters of innocent children and others in recent days and months is well within the power of government even as the Supreme Court has misguidedly interpreted the Second Amendment in Heller and McDonald, purporting to be guided by the original meaning of the text but in fact being driven by an incoherent mishmash of non-originalist considerations.
It badly distorts the meaning of everything I have written on the subject to treat me as remotely hostile to the comprehensive national regulation of firearms and ammunition possession, transfer, and use; and it even distorts my meaning to regard my views as similar to those that the Roberts Court has expressed on the subject, although I hasten to add that even this Court's unfortunate views leave very substantial room for close regulation and even prohibition of entire categories of dangerous firearms and the ammunition that makes them lethal.
The fact that many of my fellow gun control proponents were disappointed by the nuanced character of what I wrote in 2000 shouldn't be allowed to distract from my continuing conclusion that the Constitution permits, and that sane public policy demands, vastly stricter firearms regulation than exists in the United States today."
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/265-34/15098-a-response-from-laurence-tribe-in-the-wake-of-newtown