The Hawaii Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion on Wednesday declaring that its state constitution grants individuals absolutely no right to keep and bear arms outside the context of military service. Its decision rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, refusing to interpolate SCOTUS’ shoddy historical analysis into Hawaii law. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the ruling on this week’s Slate Plus segment of Amicus; their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The bill of rights protects rights, it doesn’t create rights. That is a pretty fundamental concept.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
As written, the right to bear arms only applies to people who are in a well regulated militia.
To me it seems like that statement is broken down into two parts, divided by the second comma.
What it’s premise is is that a militia could be formed at any time when the need arises (the Minutemen, etc.), so all the citizenry can have guns so that they are armed when the militia is formed.
Now if back then militias always existed, and they were not formed/disbanded as needed, then ignore what I just said, as it’s incorrect.Edit: just realized if they’re always formed or not wasn’t the issue, its if they were given guns to fight or if they had to bring their own guns to the fight.Interesting, I’d never read it that way before. A lot of interpretation sure does seem to hinge on those little commas.
This is how I’ve always read it, especially given the historical context of the minute men being ready to go within a minute should the continental army/US call them to service.
The US wasn’t intended to have a standing army when we were founded, it was supposed to be militias.
The current constitution was created in part to allow a standing army to exist. It turns out not having a standing army and relying in 13+ militias to become an army doesn’t actually work.
The difference between an army and a milita being premeditation.
But if you follow this logic, how does it apply to the modern world? At the time, there was no standing army, but people could be called up to serve at anytime. There was no all-powerful military industrial complex, so people may need to supply their own gear. Hunting was common and war technology was primitive, so the gear you might keep anyway was directly applicable to war. The goals of this amendment really don’t apply anymore, so how can this topic best serve the people?
To protect against domestic tyranny?
But it doesn’t. Second amendment is not sufficient to protect against domestic tyranny, even from local police with radios and swat teams. Second amendment has a goal of supporting a people’s militia, but there isn’t any such thing nor could it possibly prevent domestic tyranny. At least if you define national guard as that people’s militia, it is equipped to make a difference and somewhat independent of the federal command structure …. But the second amendment in no way supports that
To protect against domestic tyranny, we mostly have the legal system and really need to reinforce its checks and balances, we have the federal system where states have some degree of independence, and we have national guard mostly per state. The very existence of the political stunts around immigration is a demonstration of that protection from domestic tyranny. It may be misguided and seriously flawed but it is “fighting back”, at least in the Don Quixote sense
This provision is completely irrelevant because we now have literal national guard in every state. The 2nd needs to be removed entirely. There is no need for militias anymore to defend the US against Britain or any other country.
Well, that’s a whole other different conversation to be had. I just replied with an interpretation of the actual amendment.
Our forefathers expected us to modify and enhance the Constitution over the centuries, and not that it would be static forever, mired in the time frame of when it was written.
Modify through amendments, not malicious interpretation
I wasn’t suggesting anything malicious. /shrug
Having said that, the amendments themselves are interpreted, which gets us to where we are today, since they were written so long ago. Time has a way of distorting both language and meaning.
I wasn’t saying you are, just what I hear argued from most people in support of a living constitution. Basically that the text of the law doesn’t matter, if it’s considered outdated. But IMO thats the place of the elected legislature to change, not judges, who’s job is to best apply what was written.
That’s definitely true, but there are more genuine honest interpretations, and more dishonest ones. IMO, looking at what the intent was at the time of writing is best, but I can understand the argument of only wanting to follow what is explicitly written.
Not disagreeing with anything that you wrote, but as far as what I quoted above, I just wanted to say that ‘dishonesty’ tends to be in the eye of the beholder, and people tend to distort their reality based on their own personal worldview/bias’, so it’s hard to get a ‘pure’ interpretation.
But I do agree that we should all strive for honest interpretations, the best we can.
Repealing the second is the logical conclusion to the insane path the right has taken us down.
That’s always been my take as well, but then I’m not from the US, and I don’t think that it’s possible anyway with the country’s political mechanisms.
The monkey paw curls. Gun control laws that do not exempt people who are in a well regulated militia are unconstitutional.
This would…be good actually? The scary thing about guns isn’t revolutions, it’s random sad men poisoned with conservatism doing a mass shooting.
It would invalidate every firearm regulation at the federal level. None of them include carve outs for militia.
Do you need to explicitly include carve-outs or are those implicit? Don’t laws just get interpreted with the constitution in mind, without having to be completely thrown out? Genuinely asking!
I try to be nice to people asking questions.
edit: I mean, if you don’t understand, and I didn’t answer your question, please feel comfortable to ask more questions.
If you have a law that says “a person cannot carry a gun in a courthouse”, that would mean everyone, including police, cannot carry a gun in a courthouse. You can say, “felons cannot possess firearms.” I guess that “exempts” people who are not felons implicitly.
I’m not sure if I understand your question correctly. A portion of a law can be struck down without the whole law being struck down as unconstitutional.
Thanks, I think you answered with your last sentence. They could conceivably just make the part of the law that affects militia members invalid, and keep the rest. Or do they have to literally strike out clauses in the language of the law? If it’s worded too generally it would be impossible to do so without gutting it.
I think that depends on how the law is written and in what way the law is unconstitutional.
Monkey’s toe curls: well regulated means heavy government oversight and oh, so many sensitivity and diversity equity trainings
I would support an affirmative action firearm ownership program.
In this context “well regulated” meant “in proper working order” not heavily overseen.
I’d argue our militias don’t seem to be in proper working order.
Every single gun control law out there exempts police officers and service members in the course of their duties.
I don’t think that is how rights work.
Go look at the gun laws. It’s there in black and white. If a soldier has written orders then civilian police can’t do anything. (Of course, the military can and that officer better have a very good reason related to the military’s needs)
And police officers are largely exempted from any sort of gun control.
Would requiring written orders to vote violate a soldier’s right to vote?
That’s not what’s meant in there. Soldiers can carry on their own off base with a privately owned weapon, according to local laws. But when the military is doing something like transporting serious goods, (nuclear waste, etc) they need to be able to protect it. So they get written orders allowing them to mount belt fed machine guns on the convoy vehicles. Or in lesser cases, just carry a service pistol. Obviously that machine gun breaks literally gun control law we’ve ever made, so there needs to be an exception in that laws for it.
*- I have no clue if the military actually transports nuclear waste, it’s just a hypothetical example.
*- Due to federal laws there is no right to carry a private weapon on base or keep a private weapon stored outside the armory.
The rest of the world considers it INSANITY, that Americans think guns and RIGHTS belong in the same sentence
The “rest of the world” is entitled to their opinion.
Other countries have rights to gun ownership you know
Gun PRIVILEGES? Sure, its the RIGHTS part that is insane and uniquely American
I said rights
Now whether the law is followed depends on the country. But the country I live in does.
Are US police officers well regulated though?
Lmao, I see what you’re doing there and I agree with it.
The modern use of “regulated” isn’t the same as it was then.
Regulation had to do with training and equipment. The idea was that militias, as opposed to a standing (“Regular”) army, weren’t always trained and armed when they were called to arms. The idea of a “well-regulated militia” was for civilians to already have weapons and understand their use if they were needed.
So a requirement for a well-regulated militia is for civilians to have the right to own and use weapons.
Is it antiquated? Maybe. But saying that “well-regulated” militia was meant to limit access to firearms is an argument based on either ignorance or dishonesty.
Well not quite. Well regulated did also include training and they did not consider the average person to be well trained enough to qualify for the phrase.
It’s both. Without weapons with which to train, a well-regulated militia made up of ordinary civilians isn’t possible.
It’s saying, with a weird comma out of place, that civilians can be armed so that a militia is possible.
Fun fact, you don’t need guns on you 24/7 for training. You don’t even need to store them at home.
False, George Mason quote “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.” George Mason wrote a draft of what became the second amendment
Well yeah, a militia is a bunch of armed people with a goal.
A well regulated one knows how to use those weapons effectively, and as a group. In my opinion the law as it stands falls short of the mandate: The US should provide public weapons training and make sure its citizens know what the hell they’re doing. That might actually save a few lives that are currently lost to accidents.
The USA should just do what many other countries do: universal compulsary military service for a time during early adulthood. That’d meet the mandate.
We have the man who wrote those words expanding upon them to say what he meant, and you’re still saying “actually he meant something else.”
I’m saying the words that made it into the bill of rights he championed explicitly say more than that, probably because it was written by James Madison and then cut down by Congress.
Yeah that’s one of the pitfalls of the historical argument. There was more than one writer, and founding father. They absolutely did not agree on how widespread guns should be. However the term “Well Regulated Militia” was in common use to describe militias with extensive training to fight in the line and not just skirmish or be an extra force on the side. Alexander Hamilton states you cannot be a “Well Regulated Militia” training once or twice a year.
So it seems a bit disingenuous to now say it’s everyone and there’s no training or anything they would consider Regulation involved.
Aren’t there already limits on what firearms people can have? Also, if understanding their use is a requirement then why isn’t training necessary to purchase one?
Aside from the fact that “training” takes many forms, what the law is saying is that, at a bare minimum, people need the right to keep weapons so that it’s possible to form a militia. If you take a random person who has never owned a weapon and throw one in their hands they won’t even know how to hold the damn thing.
If you spend any time at a gun range, the absolute scariest people are adults who have never handled a gun before. Without the right to own private weapons, if a civil defense situation were to arise and weapons were handed out, that would be everyone. As a national defense strategy, it’s pretty awful.
So they made a law guaranteeing the rights for civilians to own and train on weapons.
As I said, we’re not in any real threat If the British invading these days, but if we’re talking about the original language there it is.
Training would not take many forms if they federally mandated a set of training guidelines.
We do have a national training organization dating back to the 1800s established by the federal government.
It’s called the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice and Firearms Safety, but is better known as the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Millions of gun owners participate in it in one form or another - including training and competition.
It is NOT required for owning a firearm, though participation is mandatory to buy a surplus military weapon (civilian-legal weapons only) from the government.
“the people” usually means the state, like in court.
False, George Mason quote “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.” George Mason wrote a draft of what became the second amendment
The federalist papers, and the entire body of US law prior to 2003 disagree with you.
Doesn’t matter who disagrees with me, I’m stating what a individual who helped draft the amendment said.
Except Mason didn’t help draft the Bill of Rights. Madison looked at the Virginia Bill of Rights along with a mountain of other documents to draft the Federal version. Madison’s proposal was then stripped down and reworded and argued over before being partially adopted.
Saying Mason drafted the 2nd amendment is like saying Lucas drafted the current Star Wars shows.
As written, the right belongs to ‘the people’. That’s everyone. It can’t be infringed because that would interfere with their ability to form a well regulated militia, which is necessary to secure freedom.
English is hard sometimes, but not that hard if you try.
If it were so simple, there would be no reason to preface the statement with the clause about a well-regulated militia. No other amendment includes functionless explanatory language. Every amendment was looked over and debated with considerable care, and the language used was deliberately chosen with purpose. The clause was included for a reason, and was not removed for a reason.
No good-faith reading of the language can conclude that the drafters would have phrased it that way if they did not intend for “a well-regulated militia” to be functionally relevant to the interpretation. If they had intended the amendment to mean, simply, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” then that would have comprised the entirety of the text. Legal language is hard sometimes, but not that hard if you try.
Yes. It’s relevant in that it’s an explanation.
Noah Webster
Explanation is not function. No other amendment includes an explanation or justification for its functional text. They all simply state, in purely functional language, the right being affirmed.
I reiterate, if it was the intention of the drafters to affirm broadly that “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” then they would have written that. The opinion of any individual is their own, the legislation as drafted is the legal consensus. As drafted, the consensus necessitated the insertion of the clause, or it would not have been so inserted.
If every amendment had been prefaced with an explanation, you’d have a point. But they weren’t. The entirety of the language used was specific and functional, so the only good faith reading of the second is that the entirety of the language is specific and functional. Explanation is not function.
Before 2003 the law agreed with me. It was Anthony Scalia who made the baseless assertion that they were two separate concepts.
That’s 230 years of history and legal basis on my side, countless judges and lawmakers, and one corrupt, greedy bastard 21 years ago on yours.
And those pesky federalist papers that explicitly clarified the intent significantly closer to the context of the period.
People forget that the founders were not of the same ideology. Plenty of founders disagreed with each other on the danger of military force, but generally agreed on popular gun ownership to protect against it.
In regards to rights not being created…
Rights are a created and codified concept. Whether or not something is a right or not is decided by someone somewhere down the line. There is always a foundational document that expresses the right because in it’s absence you don’t really have a right you have either a privilege that can be taken away by a valid or at least powerful authority or you have a grey area where simply no law or social norm applies until further regulation is created. This is subject to change over time and location.
Rights as we understand them today are not naturally occuring. The idea isn’t even particularly old in the grand scheme of things. Before that point laws definitely existed but they were pretty simplistic operating codes there was no higher echelon of law that superceed other law particularly just layers of powerful people who interacted with the law. If you were basically in charge of the law you could rewrite it as you saw fit and your potential consequences were pissing off someone who could band together and rebel against your authority. If you felt secure enough you could re-write anything through decree. Rights are a feature that was conceptualized or created from scratch in 18th century philosophy with the rise and design of modern concepts of democratic government.
The 2nd Amendment itself is a wonderful example of a non-universal right. Out of all the governments in rhe world today only four have a version of a right to firearms. The USA, Guatemala, Mexico and the Czech Republic. Of those only the US and Guatemala have no restrictions on both firearm type and a required licencing program. Outside of that guns are most often regulated but legal. Exceptions being situations like Japan where there is an almost total prohibition but where guns are legally purchasable ownership is covered under variation of regular property rights against government seizure sort of like how your car is.
You technically do not have a right specifically to a car. They are just legal to own without a licence and illegal to use without one. But use and possession are two independent principles. The right to property is subject to laws banning or regulations of specific things but also Constitutional rights against illegal seizure. There are a lot of things one can only legally possess only with an appropriate licence and that isn’t a violation of property rights.
Do you believe the second amendment creates a (individual or otherwise) right to bear arms?
Historically, deciding who ascends to the throne when a king dies or how to distribute a man’s property after his death was based on birthright, at least in some cultures. Birthright is an old concept. I believe our modern conception of natural rights or human rights has evolved from that. The development that accompanied democracy was the idea of equal rights, and we’re still working on that.
The text of the amendment is “arms,” not “firearms.” Those terms are not interchangeable.
In what sense does the United States have no restrictions on firearm type?
Firearms in the United States are regulated. Businesses that buy and sell firearms must have a license.
You only need a license to operate a car on a public road. No license is required for driving a vehicle on private property.
I am unsure how your individual takes are relevant to the passages you quoted or are at best fairly surface level abstractions or dodges of main topic at hand… and on a personal note I must say that I am quite tired of this style of engagement where an entire post is chopped up, regurgitated and replied to in short, low effort dismissals. If you can’t write your own damn paragraph, don’t bother.
I will leave this with an answer to your first question. Yes. Laws and legal theory are CREATIONS. Somebody wrote them, had intentions for their use which they tried to write in such a way to illustrate their intent because intent, letter, cultural continuity of precedent and effect to obtain peaceable justice are four independent vectors under which justices balance their individual rulings between. Rights are a body of law. Every single individual part of the operating system of the legal system is essentially optional and it CREATES the rubric for what is a legitimate use of force on behalf of the State. You are simply used to the one into which you were born and are choosing to believe it represents a universal truth. That whole legal possession of in(un)alienable rights was at one political considered a completely radical idea and it had critics. The “Divine Right of Kings” is tracable in an English sense to the Magna Carta which outlines the rules of legal succession which served as a constitutional document. You can trace the application of rights to the populace at large back to the English Bill of Rights from 1689 based largely on the ideas of John Locke and his contemporaries which mostly gained traction as a knee jerk response response to the perceived flippancy and overindulgences of James II but those rights are exceedingly foreign to our modern eyes for not the least reason they are very stratified by class. Your fun fact of the day is the UK didn’t legally have the very basics of human rights outlined as we know them in the American modern conception of them on their books until 1998 which was also when they officially repealed the death penalty since it was an ultimate violation of their conception of rights of the person.
Perhaps ask oneself if the original Constitutional right to “Life” is truly protected in the US when the State and the states under that Constitution are allowed to schedule the killing of people. That phrase “Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness” is a rip from John Locke’s “Life, Liberty and Property” in which his definition of “Life” meant “to live a style of life free from government interference.” This is what has been interpreted as the US Constitutional definition. UK Human Rights Act of 1998 protects a right to “life” as in a right to breathe, think have a pulmonary rhythm etc. Thus while both promise a right to “life” only one is explicitly understood as a protected right to be alive. You have no perfect Constitutional right to be alive in the US.
Every law requires interpretation at it’s point of judgement both ways because the question “what is law” in a broad philosophical sense is something every court grapples with every day. Your take is very much overly simplistic.
… And please don’t try and post “gotchas” because I didn’t list particular nitty-gritty aspects of individual laws I mention. My posts are long enough and I need to truncate them somehow.
I would like to apologize for that. It is a defense against people who act in bad faith.
I will sit down and give you a proper reply when I have time.
>I must say that I am quite tired of this style of engagement where an entire post is chopped up, regurgitated and replied to in short, low effort dismissals.
i don’t mind short, low effort comments. but the meticulously quoted, but page-long comments bother me a great deal. each thread can contain its own topic, and when it necessitates addinional threads, that can happen. writing multiple-page essays back-and-forth is a genuine academic venture, and this is a link aggregation comment section.
I also do not mind short low effort comments either though they often fall into “short, quippy and wrong” issues but the series of quotations in response to each individual part of a prior post is the engagement style I’ve learned to expect of the very self-centered and close minded.
They generally don’t want to have a discussion with an actual discussion of ideas, they want to take the least amount of effort to dismiss the post as wrong out of hand and be done with it.
Not really. Rights are a man-made construct. A social contract that a people agree on. There’s nothing inherent about them.
A society could, for example, decide that certain people had the right to eat human babies, beat their wives. That would be just as legitimate as anything else.
By the same token, a society can decide that certain things are explicitly NOT rights, or to decide which rights take precedence over other rights.
None of this is defined by some divine ordnance, or law of nature. It’s all people.
Rights are a fascinating concept. While I agree with you practically that we definitely create the social contract that “gives” people rights, that’s not really how rights are conceptualized in law. In the Western conception, rights are, by definition, not “given”, they are “inalienable”, meaning that you have rights even if someone has taken away your practical ability to exercise them. The rights themselves, separate from your ability to exercise them, are indeed considered “inherent”. In the olden days, this was often codified or framed in terms of religion, but it doesn’t have to be. Calling rights “natural” or “self-evident” are other ways of framing their “inherent-ness”.
Of course, in reality it isn’t so simple. We separate “natural” and “derived” rights. There aren’t many natural rights. Things like the right to life, to self-determination, and to freedom of conscience are considered natural rights (in the West, anyway), while something like the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution would be considered a derived right. Derived rights, of course, are rather more subject to interpretation since they rely on a chain of reasoning from a more natural right, and that chain of reasoning is subject to challenge.
Except, that many black folk in the US did not have a right to life or self determination at the beginning. So even these “inherent” rights aren’t so inherent until society agrees to grant/create them.
They had the “right” but they weren’t able to exercise it. The moral wrongness of withholding their inherent right to life, etc. Is what created the moral impetus to free the slaves. It is a subtle but important difference. If rights are inherent, they can’t be removed without violating the moral fabric that those rights are based on. Thus, when a government removes the ability to exercise an inherent right, that is what makes that government’s action “wrong” and not just “different”.
I’m not buying that. Slavery has been a staple of civilizations all through history. There’s no universal law of nature that any being has any right to life, freedom or self-determination.
The “moral fabric” isn’t some universal constant either. It too is a function of society. In the U.S., for instance, in 1776 there was no moral problem with slavery. Time went by and morality in the country evolved such that slavery, for many, was no longer acceptable. But it wasn’t that the moral fabric of U.S. society was violated in 1776, it was just different in 1776.
Who knows, in another 100 years people might consider something that is normal today to be some huge violation of something that should be a human right.
Yup, fair enough. If I wasn’t clear, I’m not necessarily arguing that I believe in the concept of inherent rights. I’m an atheist, so I have a bit of trouble with it, too. Nonetheless, it has a very long tradition and underpins the modern concept of rights. At least conceptually, we lose something when we say that rights are contingent rather than inherent.
The concept of natural rights is great for people who believe in God and are arrogant enough to speak for him. Not so much for rational people.
The fact that our supposedly secular legal system is based around religious gobbledegook is something I try not to think about.
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Right. Because rights are created by God, right?
Rights are not created, bestowed, issued, manufactured, or handed out.
They aren’t a license or a badge or something physical.
Right. Just like God.
I think the important thing is to remember how important it always is to fight for them, at any rate.
I would argue all gods are created since there is zero evidence that they exist outside our imaginations.
That’s correct, the right for schoolchildren to live should always be fought for.
First and foremost. Though that argument in practice drifts annoyingly towards anti-abortion arguments, which are a different situation.
The rights of an existing citizen should always come before the rights of a theoretical future citizen. Requiring a potential mother to donate time and blood against her will is a very tiny step away from requiring US citizens to donate blood against their will to save a different life. Do you know what kind of shitstorm there would be if they started blood typing people in border states so that they could commander citizens to take their blood to help injured noncitizen immigrants?
If the government flipped to an ultra socialist majority, the precedent that is ok for the government to override your right to bodily autonomy when it seems it necessary to save a life, could take a pretty dark turn, mandatory blood donations, marrow, that extra kidney you aren’t using… All that could be fair game in the name of life.
Interesting argument. I prefer to draw a distinction between a fertilized embryo and a human. The idea that a fetus has the same rights as an awake, thinking, feeling person is absurd. If fetuses have rights, then liver cells should too.
The bodily autonomy arguments are a little less effective imo. The right does not genuinely believe in freedom or rights period, much less bodily autonomy. Thus, body autonomy arguments will not work. They simply don’t really believe in it. They believe people are a resource, to be used up, just like coal or oil. As soldiers or workers or breeders or whatever. They won’t admit it, but that’s kinda how they feel. Kinda that whole old-school “work to live” line of thinking.
Btw, I hope I’m not confusing you, but I’m not actually a conservative. I’m simply willing to sound like one whenever it helps me to communicate a point to someone. I’m no genuine christian though, Jesus, while real, was a human man, nothing divine about him.
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Internet atheists see any mention of God or religion as an opportunity to hijack a discussion.
internetreligionists see any criticism of religion as out-of-line and personally insulting.Can you explain why religion should have been a part of this discussion before someone else brought it up?
Yes.
What’s the difference between an “internet atheist” and an atheist?
It’s a little like this:
I am a vegan.
You should do crossfit.
I use Arch btw
When it’s literally a discussion of where rights come from and theists suggesting they come from God (while avoiding the word God and pretending they mean something else), it’s not hijacking. You’re the one trying to hijack to discussion to talk about how much you hate atheists.
No, they are created by Superman
Whoa. That’s a bit too philosophical, bud! We like to keep things simple and superficial around here.
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