Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (best e reader for epub TXT) 📗

all the others, is the most self-explanatory. Rather than “should not” or other statements that would portend that the Founding Fathers wanted to give the federal government some leeway within this right, the words used are “shall not.” “Shall not” does not mean “should not”; it means that the right cannot, for any reason, be infringed by any government without due process. The Court did not grant this phrase any analysis, noting only that “of course the right was not unlimited” (emphases added) and that the Second Amendment did not “protect the right of citizens to carry arms for any sort of confrontation.” The statements made by the Court focused on the idea that certain types of weapons were not protected.

As well, the Court determined only the right to carry guns in the home, noting that the case did not “cast doubt on longstanding . . . laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools or government buildings.” But it also protects only certain weapons, not overruling Miller but modifying it to mean that “the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law abiding citizens for lawful purposes.” Miller had held that the Second Amendment only protected the ownership and possession of weapons typically possessed by the military. But without an exhaustive analysis or an objective standard under which to judge whether or not a law infringes on the Second Amendment, the Court has left open the door for any government to continue its infringement. By not addressing the standard of review to be applied by courts to gun laws, the Court has left open the door for lower courts to decide each case as they feel, not as the Constitution requires.

At the moment, then, the state need only argue at most that the law passes strict scrutiny. The strict scrutiny standard essentially means that any law the government wants to pass that infringes on a constitutional right must affirmatively and effectively serve a compelling government interest by the least restrictive means. Anytime the court analyzes a law under strict scrutiny, there are three steps to ensuring that it passes constitutional muster: First, the law must be justified by a compelling government interest, which means that it is an interest that the government needs to maintain in order for it to deliver government services to people in its jurisdictions. For example, courts have held that maintaining a stable political system, protecting voters from confusion, undue influence and intimidation, and preventing vote-buying are all compelling state interests.

Second, the law must be narrowly tailored to achieve that interest, which means that it cannot be too broad, thereby affecting more people and rights than is required, or too narrow, meaning that it does not address all that the so-called compelling interest requires. The government has to prove to the court that the law actually advances the compelling interest, without being too broad or too narrow. It cannot restrict anything outside the purview of the interest or not restrict those areas that should be restricted in order to further the interest.

Third, the law must use the least restrictive means possible. It must be the least restrictive and least burdensome on those it affects. For example, the government cannot choose to pass a curfew law requiring all persons to be home by six o’clock because it wants to prevent the criminal activity of a few at night.

Given that public safety and therefore crime prevention are classified as a compelling state interest, and since the correlation between gun control and crime reduction has been incorrectly accepted as truth, then very few gun regulations will be overturned even when analyzed under the strict scrutiny standard; especially when the government can lie and argue that disarming the citizens will result in a lower violent crime rate. This is not the way that our most fundamental rights should be protected. The only way to ensure the protection of the fundamental right to self-defense is to require a higher standard, enunciated by the Supreme Court in some notable First Amendment cases, which prohibits the government from impairing such fundamental liberties absent “a need to further a state interest of the highest order.”25

Developed, though never precisely defined, in a series of opinions by Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Thurgood Marshall throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the use of this standard of review illustrated that the Court required that any impairment of the fundamental right to free speech by the government would have to be justified by only the highest of state interests and applied in the most narrowly possible fashion to the successful accomplishment of that interest. Generally, only the preservation of a free society was found by the Court to be of the highest state interest. Therefore, only those gun regulations that would be vital to uphold a free society would be upheld. Those would be the most highly rational laws, such as ensuring that violent felons do not possess weapons, which had factual bases, and for which regulations the government would not need to use deception to ensure their passage. But the idea of making it difficult for everyone to defend himself or requiring that the government know—via registration—who could defend himself, is the stuff of which tyrannies are made.

And, Don’t Worry,

the State Can Still Take Away Your Rights

The Heller decision has another loophole that the Court avoided; that is whether or not the Second Amendment protections apply against only the federal or also against the state governments. While some lower state courts state that the Second Amendment protects the people of that state from both federal and state infringement, the majority of the courts hold that the Second Amendment protects the individual only from federal action and the states can do whatever they want. The problem is that, if the Second Amendment does not protect the people from state action, then in effect, the Second Amendment means nothing at all. There is a reason why almost