Do you think that a complete ban on handgun ownership would make it through Congress, given the actual result of Heller v. DC? If it did make it through Congress and Obama were president and he signed it, wouldn't it face almost immediate challenge based on that decision?
Even if shotguns are considered assault weapons, that still leaves long rifles, doesn't it? Are those insufficient for home defense? Countries like Switzerland have strict gun laws, but also by law, every home has a long rifle and someone trained in its use. Why would that not work here? If it's simply a problem of scale, in that there are so many firearms in the US, how did other countries manage to actually reduce their number of banned-weapon crimes so drastically, when at some point, they must have also allowed such weapons? If you say that it's because of the US's origins as a frontier land, settled by rugged individualists, then I would point you to the examples of Canada and Australia, both of which have much stricter gun control and much lower incidence of gun-related crime and violence.
If the problem with a "living document" interpretation is inconsistency, then how indeed does one balance the needs of a modern culture against a document written 221 years ago and maintain that consistency? And how do you imagine that the Supreme Court would have the authority to invalidate any part of the Constitution, when their mandate is to judge the laws, with the Constitution as the supreme law of the land? Didn't one of the most leftist decisions of the SCOTUS, the one limiting prayer in schools, actually use the Constitution as a method of limiting government's power to intimidate students into participating in teacher- or administrator-led prayers?
And how do you arrive at 17, when there are 27 Amendments? Are you considering the occasions when multiple amendments were ratified together as being only one 'time' each? Or is it just a typo because 1 is next to 2? |
