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The DC v. Heller decision meant that there always had been an individual right to bear arms in the US, and that laws against it were unconstitutional. It's an i

The DC v. Heller decision meant that there always had been an individual right to bear arms in the US, and that laws against it were unconstitutional. It's an important distinction.

redeux 4y ago
That’s a revisionist perspective, even if it’s one that’s held by the court to justify their decision and set a new precedent. Previous SCOTUS rulings found that there was a collective, not individual right to bear arms. That means despite the court insisting that it didn’t just create a right from thin air, history disagrees. By the logic you proposed, in any decision SCOTUS makes they can state that this is the way it’s always been and history is rewritten. Of course that can’t be the case. New precedent can be set but the historic record shows what the facts of the time were.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  And by your logic, once a SCOTUS decision is made it can never be revisited. Every 2A decision is interpreting the same, unchanged text. So any decision that goes against a previous one by definition means they believe the previous decision was incorrect. The fact that it was interpreted as a collective right before Heller doesn't mean that it was a collective right. It's just how the court (incorrectly) chose to interpret it in the past.
  - redeux 4y ago
    >And by your logic, once a SCOTUS decision is made it can never be revisited. I never implied any such thing. In fact, I'm arguing that the exact opposite, using DC v. Heller as an example of how SCOTUS can reinterpret a foundational right despite hundreds of years of precedent to the opposite. That speech with implicit violence should be ruled as unprotected speech in spite of hundreds of years of precedent to the opposite.
- prottog 4y ago
  Supreme Court decisions can be wrong; it doesn't make later decisions "revisionist". Nobody would say Brown v. Board of Education created a right from thin air that disagrees with the history of Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sanford and the historical fact behind those cases, or that Trump v. Hawaii revised the history of Korematsu v. United States and the historical fact behind it. The Supreme Court is just saying that the government has been doing things wrong this whole time. I'm not sure why you feel that the Second Amendment is so clearly a matter of a collective right? If you read a sentence that said "A well stocked library being necessary to the education of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Books, shall not be infringed", you would say this is about the right of state-owned librarians to have books, and not the everyman?
  - redeux 4y ago
    You've mistaken my argument. If you follow the thread from the beginning, I'm merely using DC v. Heller as an example of how the court can set precedent to reinterpret a fundamental right under the constitution despite a 200+ year history of the opposite. This was in response to being told > Hundreds of years of case law in the Anglosphere contradict your view While that is true currently, it doesn't mean SCOTUS can't come along and decide things differently. It also doesn't change history if they were to do so.

The DC v. Heller decision meant that there always had been an individual right to bear arms in the US, and that laws against it were unconstitutional. It's an important distinction.

redeux 4y ago

That’s a revisionist perspective, even if it’s one that’s held by the court to justify their decision and set a new precedent. Previous SCOTUS rulings found that there was a collective, not individual right to bear arms. That means despite the court insisting that it didn’t just create a right from thin air, history disagrees. By the logic you proposed, in any decision SCOTUS makes they can state that this is the way it’s always been and history is rewritten. Of course that can’t be the case. New precedent can be set but the historic record shows what the facts of the time were.

jaywalk 4y ago
And by your logic, once a SCOTUS decision is made it can never be revisited. Every 2A decision is interpreting the same, unchanged text. So any decision that goes against a previous one by definition means they believe the previous decision was incorrect. The fact that it was interpreted as a collective right before Heller doesn't mean that it was a collective right. It's just how the court (incorrectly) chose to interpret it in the past.
- redeux 4y ago
  >And by your logic, once a SCOTUS decision is made it can never be revisited. I never implied any such thing. In fact, I'm arguing that the exact opposite, using DC v. Heller as an example of how SCOTUS can reinterpret a foundational right despite hundreds of years of precedent to the opposite. That speech with implicit violence should be ruled as unprotected speech in spite of hundreds of years of precedent to the opposite.
prottog 4y ago
Supreme Court decisions can be wrong; it doesn't make later decisions "revisionist". Nobody would say Brown v. Board of Education created a right from thin air that disagrees with the history of Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sanford and the historical fact behind those cases, or that Trump v. Hawaii revised the history of Korematsu v. United States and the historical fact behind it. The Supreme Court is just saying that the government has been doing things wrong this whole time. I'm not sure why you feel that the Second Amendment is so clearly a matter of a collective right? If you read a sentence that said "A well stocked library being necessary to the education of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Books, shall not be infringed", you would say this is about the right of state-owned librarians to have books, and not the everyman?
- redeux 4y ago
  You've mistaken my argument. If you follow the thread from the beginning, I'm merely using DC v. Heller as an example of how the court can set precedent to reinterpret a fundamental right under the constitution despite a 200+ year history of the opposite. This was in response to being told > Hundreds of years of case law in the Anglosphere contradict your view While that is true currently, it doesn't mean SCOTUS can't come along and decide things differently. It also doesn't change history if they were to do so.