Zackey Rahimi, the Texas criminal defendant challenging a federal gun law before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, said this summer that he no longer wanted to own firearms and expressed remorse for his actions that got him in trouble with the law.

“I will make sure for sure this time that when I finish my time being incarcerated to stay the faithful, righteous person I am this day, to stay away from all drugs at all times, do probation & parole rightfully, to go to school & have a great career, have a great manufacturing engineering job, to never break any law again, to stay away from the wrong circle, to stay away from all firearms & weapons, & to never be away from my family again,” Rahimi, who is being held at a Fort Worth jail, said in a handwritten letter dated July 25.

He continued: “I had firearms for the right reason in our place to be able to protect my family at all times especially for what we’ve went through in the past but I’ll make sure to do whatever it takes to be able to do everything the right pathway & to be able to come home fast as I can to take care of my family at all times.”

  • Tb0n3
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    1 year ago

    The revolutionary war was won with the help of private warships. That would have been well known to the founding fathers who wrote the bill of rights. Do you think that they would suddenly not want the citizens to be able to defend the homeland because guns are scary?

    The part of the amendment that could be its own stand-alone sentence—the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed—is known as the “operative clause.” The well regulated Militia part—the prefatory clause—is understood by enthusiastic gun regulators as defining the only reason for preserving the right to keep and bear arms (as opposed to one of the reasons). Anyone who is not a member of a well-regulated militia would have no such right.

    The late Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in Heller, thought it made no sense to read the prefatory clause that way, because that would essentially nullify the direct and clear meaning of the operative clause. While the prefatory clause could give insight into some of the specifics of how to apply the operative clause, he argued, it could not make the right to arms contingent on militia service.

    Scalia pointed out that the amendment refers to “the right of the people.” When that language is used elsewhere in the Bill of Rights—in the First and Fourth Amendments, for example—it plainly means a right that belongs to every individual, as opposed to a collective with special properties, such as a militia. A prefatory clause mentioning a purpose, Scalia argued, is not sufficient to overwhelm the commonsense and contextual meaning of a right guaranteed to everyone. Furthermore, he said, contemporaneous usage makes it clear that the phrase bear arms cannot be restricted to a military context, as Justice John Paul Stevens suggested it should be in his dissent.

    https://reason.com/2019/11/03/what-is-a-well-regulated-militia-anyway/