More than 100 people shot in Chicago over long Fourth of July weekend
- Thread starter crimsonaudio
- Start date
Hank Johnson. Because he will have once again demonstrated how much smarter statists are than the rest of us.
Are you saying that they didn't have the foresight to see that the country would expand? Because to me, that they created a system designed to work at any size
I personally think Trump should nominate 6 more Supreme Court judges and expand the court to 15. Then, we probably would get more voices on the constitutionality of such things.
I think they would have tweaked some things had they foreseen the morass Congress has become.Are you saying that they didn't have the foresight to see that the country would expand? Because to me, that they created a system designed to work at any size
I personally think Trump should nominate 6 more Supreme Court judges and expand the court to 15. Then, we probably would get more voices on the constitutionality of such things.
They did. They specifically limited those things over which the federal government has power to act (i.e. defense, foreign policy, the US Postal Service).
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This is part of the confusion. "Natural right" can only mean things that follow from what people have by nature. That means, literally, things that make up the constitution of the human person: the body, the soul, freedom, reason, the power to reproduce (which is divided bisexually in humans, "God made them male and female" (Mark 6:10)), and other such things. That's it. Natural "rights" are the things that "follow" from one's natural "properties." Those are the grounds for all the things that are "natural rights." There never was, never is, never will be a natural right to own a gun, unless it grows from your butt. The "natural rights" related to and prior to gun ownership are the right to self-defense and the right to a living (in so far as gun is a means to these things). That's how it works. That's always been how it works. The founders understood this. The BR is not a list of rights, but a list of restrictions on the federal powers. The 2nd Amendment does not list a natural right to own a gun (which is nonsense) but a limit of federal powers to prevent you from owning one. Those are very very different.
In addition, the natural rights, while "inalienable", are also subject to limitation in civil society. The Constitution is the original of civil society on a federal level, and to make sure that everyone agreed, the federal powers were limited, and therefore did not involve making rules about guns, the founders made it explicit. This did not create a "natural right to a gun". You can't create a natural right to a gun with a constituion, for obvious reasons. It just made sure guns were not subject to that authority. What it did was leave the regulation of guns to the states. As I understand earlier posts by Tidewater, this is not a controversial point. The states retained the power to regulate such things. The federal level was told to stay out. But 1792, the federal government got involved anyway, but in the other direction. This is not controversial.
As for the notion of "delay", the exercising one's "natural right" is in the normal case always delayed. It is delayed by roughly 18 years, during which you are a minor. That "delay" is not necessarily 18 years. It could be 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, or whatever. It is conventional. But it is a fact.
Similarly, one does not complain that we do not sell guns to children even though that causes a "delay". Delay is part of human nature - we are temporal, we grow, mature, and die. We live with delay. You may as well complain about the weather.
Additional "delays" based on a test instead of an arbitrary age are no more or less unconstitutional. We use age for convenience, but we could just was well declare a person no longer an minor when they pass a series of tests during their teens and twenties. We actually already do that -- driver's license, etc. This is not controversial.
The fact is (and this is traditional, classical American liberal theory, not late 20th century liberal theory) we entered into civil society and we are supposed to accept the regulations imposed by that society. Correctly, people note that American tradition has a minimalist bent, meaning the founders opted for restrictions on government intervention. I support that minimalist bent within reason. I dislike big government that tries to fix every problem and really just creates dependency with no hope. We have real reasons to dislike big, bad government. However it is not as simple as just talking about "natural rights" and demanding autonomy. That is so much nonsense that even the generation of founding fathers would have considered it nonsense. George Washington didn't give a horseshoe for your natural rights once you entered into his military. It feels good to talk Natural Rights, but it's not even traditional American liberalism and it doesn't work.
The best I can say is, if you want to live in a state of nature, get off the grid. That's it. John Locke wrote in the 17th c., and Jefferson in the 18th. They figured if you wanted to be a rugged individualist, you had plenty of space to move. Today we live in a time when it is hard and bizarre to get off the grid. I'm sorry to all the totally rugged individualists who really want nothing to do with government. I don't know where you go. Montana; Oregon; Alaska. But the fact is, the problem of space does not change the rules. The founders did not opt for that. They opted for civil society. They opted to leave the state of nature and enter into local, state, and federal unions, with the pros and cons of each level meant to balance each other. In the civil society, natural rights are retained, but not as natural, but as integrated into a communal set of standards. That is not 20th century liberalism. That is 18th century liberalism. That's the founders. That's it.
I find it disturbing that Chicago has an icon for traffic delays due to gunshots.
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