PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Some people still seem to think that Second Amendment rights are unlimited :: 08/05/2015
I came across an online discussion this morning about whether federal authorities have violated the Second Amendment rights of three men in North Carolina who have been arrested on weapons charges.
These guys are paranoid conspiratorialists who feared a government takeover and martial law and had stockpiled weapons, ammunition and tactical gear while attempting to rig home-made explosives. They were arrested this past Saturday after a month-long federal investigation.
More than a few of the participants in the discussion I read argued that the government has no business interfering with the stockpiling of weapons, ammo and explosives. It was asserted that citizens have their Second Amendment rights to amass any kind of arsenal they might want.
Notions like this are not uncommon. But they're wrong.
Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most conservative member of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote this for the court majority seven years ago in a case in which a ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., was overturned:
'Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose
'The Court's opinion [in the Washington case] should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms'
http://www.desertdispatch.com/article/ZZ/20150804/BLOGS/308049980
