James Brady and the Brady Bill
On August 8, 2014, thirty years after James Brady was shot with a dime store handgun, a Medical Examiner in Virginia ruled that the death of Ronald Reagan's former Press Secretary was an act of homicide. After the shooting, Brady spent the rest of his life with partial paralysis and slurred speech. Brady and his devoted wife Sarah lobbied nonstop for improved handgun controls and assault weapon restrictions for twelve years until the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, known as the Brady Bill was passed finally in 1993. In the decade long process of enactment the Brady Bill overcame wave after wave of legal maneuvers and media ridicule, all darkly bankrolled by the NRA and other gun people.
Since it was passed, the Brady Bill has been further corrupted by those same NRA and gun people. In one crude sidestep of the law, gun people can attend a gun show for buying weapons and many of the Brady Bill rules do not quite apply to those ostensibly private sales. To help their guns and gun sales promotions, the NRA and gun people originated the slogan, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." That catchphrase has now gone beyond overused, and sensible people know it is meaningless. Another trivial motto is the NRA and gun people's constant and rigid refrain of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment as if it were a biblical commandment. Here is an exact transcription from the original document of 1787.
On August 8, 2014, thirty years after James Brady was shot with a dime store handgun, a Medical Examiner in Virginia ruled that the death of Ronald Reagan's former Press Secretary was an act of homicide. After the shooting, Brady spent the rest of his life with partial paralysis and slurred speech. Brady and his devoted wife Sarah lobbied nonstop for improved handgun controls and assault weapon restrictions for twelve years until the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, known as the Brady Bill was passed finally in 1993. In the decade long process of enactment the Brady Bill overcame wave after wave of legal maneuvers and media ridicule, all darkly bankrolled by the NRA and other gun people.
Since it was passed, the Brady Bill has been further corrupted by those same NRA and gun people. In one crude sidestep of the law, gun people can attend a gun show for buying weapons and many of the Brady Bill rules do not quite apply to those ostensibly private sales. To help their guns and gun sales promotions, the NRA and gun people originated the slogan, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." That catchphrase has now gone beyond overused, and sensible people know it is meaningless. Another trivial motto is the NRA and gun people's constant and rigid refrain of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment as if it were a biblical commandment. Here is an exact transcription from the original document of 1787.
The Second Amendment
"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."
The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution
Exactly like the founding Fathers of our nation, let's apply good American common sense to reveal and flesh out the contorted legal twists that have been used to justify personal ownership of deadly weapons in our nation. The Preamble is the beginning and the biblical guide to everything that follows in the U.S. Constitution.
The Preamble
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form
a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic
Tranquility, provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and secure
the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and
our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America."
The Preamble is the basic structure of our U.S. Constitution including our first commandments, our ironclad rules for all the rules that follow. The Preamble trumps any of the later "Amendments." That means the Second Amendment is secondary to the Pre-Amble. So the Preamble demands that "Justice" and "Tranquillity" and "common defence" and "Welfare" and "the Blessings" for our children not be further destroyed by the NRA and gun people across our nation with their grossly flawed interpretation of our U.S. Constitution.
Now let's dig even deeper into a few concepts of Constitutional Law that are used by our U.S. Supreme Court in their decisions. Sometime after the days of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the tremendously important decisions of the civil rights era, the Court majority changed from progressive to regressive. The Court majority came to rely on a new theory of microscopic and extreme interpretation of the U.S. Constitution named by Justice Antonin Scalia as "originalist."
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Served on SCOTUS 1969 - 1986 |
Chief Justice Burger was first a trial lawyer in St. Paul, Minnesota and then Assistant Attorney General under President Eisenhower. He was a professor of law and a deep thinking jurist who certainly knew what he was talking about. Chief Justice Burger was an early iconic "originalist" who used that theory of constitutional law to exactly determine the meaning of any provision. Conservative republican President Richard M. Nixon nominated him to the Court.
Chief Justice Burger was a most severe conservative. He voted for the death penalty. He voted for life imprisonment for the convicted perpetrator in a $100 check fraud. He saw nothing wrong with the Watergate burglaries of the Nixon scandal. However, in a 1991 PBS interview, Chief Justice Burger twice called using the Second Amendment to justify anything-goes gun policy a fraud. The right to bear arms cannot be separated from militia service. The right to own guns is not individual. The U.S. Constitution exactly allows only a group, a militia, to own a gun. That important "originalist" interpretation was later ignored by the Court in the infamous mistaken decision for District of Columbia v. Heller in which the individual right to keep and bear arms, or in our era own a gun, was allowed counter to the wishes of the people of the District of Columbia.
Compromise And Parsing Death
We must disarm America now before it gets any worse. Our children, our teenagers, the best of the best die because we do nothing to regulate guns. Many gun people say we need to find a compromise. There is no compromise. There is no middle ground between life and death. We must save lives now by confiscating all deadly weapons.
The Brady Shooting
At this moment alongside President Reagan six agents and police officers were armed with various handguns and one agent with an Uzi submachine gun. Shootings are over in seconds. No officer or agent was able to stop the shooting. There was not enough time.
Over the past two hundred years and more, the U.S. Supreme Court has relied on many, many different interpretations and moral codes to sanction it's rulings. But each Justice certainly agrees that all of the law in our United States of America is based on the Judeo-Christian bible. The biblical and the legal of the U.S. Constitution must be reconciled with respect to the Second Amendment. The Preamble takes first position.
We Americans must do our duty set in our Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. We must "...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence..." and protect all the citizens and all their children from deadly weapons all over our America. We need rigorous laws to control each and every deadly weapon in our America and we need to do it now.
To research and write this essay, let's say any regular person would spend about one hour. That hour is sixty minutes. During this sixty minute period more than three people will die from gunshot in our America according to F.B.I.'s data. Every hour on the hour, every day after day, during every hour of our entire lives in our America three of our people die. That is three friends, girls, boys, fathers, mothers, police officers, first responders, regular people. That's three regular people that you may know and you may love. All of these people are dead. Dead because we do not have effective realistic legal controls on deadly weapons in our America.
We Americans must do our duty set in our Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. We must "...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence..." and protect all the citizens and all their children from deadly weapons all over our America. We need rigorous laws to control each and every deadly weapon in our America and we need to do it now.
To research and write this essay, let's say any regular person would spend about one hour. That hour is sixty minutes. During this sixty minute period more than three people will die from gunshot in our America according to F.B.I.'s data. Every hour on the hour, every day after day, during every hour of our entire lives in our America three of our people die. That is three friends, girls, boys, fathers, mothers, police officers, first responders, regular people. That's three regular people that you may know and you may love. All of these people are dead. Dead because we do not have effective realistic legal controls on deadly weapons in our America.
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