a sincere, non-trollish question, if I may.....

[TPaine7]

46. Scalia? Scalia?!! I showed you, very clearly, that this has nothing to do with Scalia

As I showed you clearly here ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/11721025#post74 ) the meaning of the Constitution was quite clear before Scalia was born.

Have you even read and considered the history I've repeatedly cited since you've been posting, like one of my favorite posts to link ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=300206&mesg_id=300331 )? Have you considered the original sources I cite from long before Scalia's birth?

At this point, pretending that this has anything to do with Scalia is simply lying. So no, the way I know that you don't care about what the Constitution says has nothing to do with Scalia; It's based solidly on what you have said:

But the underlying philosophical issues don't depend on who happens to be sitting on the supreme court, or even what it says in the constitution. And this always trips up the pro-gunners. Because part of pro-gunner indoctrination involves memorizing long lists of talking points about the second amendment. But when asked to actually give a philosophical justification for why gun ownership should be considered a fundamental civil right, alongside things like free speech and fair trials, beyond "becuz its in da constatooshun", you just get blank stares.

At the time of the BOR, standing armies vs militias was a significant issue (along with peacetime quartering of troops in private homes), so it is not difficult to see why RKBA was elevated to the level of a constitutionally protected right. But, today, things are different, of course, and militias and quartering of troops are non-issues. The third amendment is basically obsolete, as would the second be if not for right-wing gun extremists who have managed to twist 2A into a requirement that the US must endure levels of gun violence and homicide that the rest of the civilized world would find completely intolerable.

But, regardless of what the framers thought, or how Scalia decides to interpret it, the most important point to me is that, gun ownership, in today's world, has nothing to do with maintaining and participating in a functioning democracy or a free civil society. A gun is an object, which can be both useful and dangerous, and it should be regulated as such, without all the hyperbolic talk of "freedom" and "tyranny". As I pointed, there are plenty of free, prosperous, democracies in the world with rational gun laws (almost all of them, in fact), and the people in places like the UK and Canada would simply laugh if you suggest that thousands of them should die every year for the sake of "gun rights".

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11721025#post75

Your own words show clearly that you have no interest in what the Constitution says; you only care about your own personal philosophy and what you think the law should be. You don't take a principled position for changing the Constitution, no you think the parts that you imagine to be "obsolete" should just be ignored.

To see the fallacy of your "logic" one only has to look at your view of the Third Amendment, which you imagine to be obsolete because it is not currently being violated. If the Third Amendment is obsolete, and therefore can be ignored, then government may freely quarter soldiers in our homes during time of peace.

So all the government has to do to invalidate any Amendment in the Bill of Rights is to strictly obey it. Then, once the amendment is obsolete, government may freely violate it! That is the depth of your constitutional thinking.

You don't care about what the Constitution says--when it varies from your personal policy preferences--because you say so in so many words. You don't care about what the Constitution says because when you are shown, in detail, that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments mean that your interpretation is historically impossible and that it is clearly refuted by the text of the Constitution itself, you do not bother to investigate the facts and learn, or even to make the most feeble attempt to argue, but continue making your inane arguments as if they are still valid.