The great American experiment finally fizzled on December 1, 2003, when the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a 9th Federal Circuit decision which gutted the Second Amendment. It was a nice run - over two hundred years.
As of December 1, 2003, the US Supreme Court issued its ruling, refusing to hear an appeal in the case of Silveira vs. Lockyer. That made Silveira the law of the land, you see. You might think that the Silveria case was about the definition of an “assault weapon” but you’d be mistaken. In Silveira, the 9th Circuit Court made the following pronouncement: there is no individual right to bear arms contained within the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. That means that no American citizen, since December 1, 2003, has a fundamental right to possess a firearm. http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/columns/arms.htm http://www.keepandbeararms.com/Mancus/silveira.asp Gun enthusiasts (especially those who are members of the National Rifle Association http://www.nra.org and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership http://www.jpfo.org) may have now reached a crossroads. They have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying politicians and the public to support their view that in the US the right to own firearms is granted to individuals and not state militias (a view I completely support). But now, with the Supreme Court refusing to hear their appeal of the 9th Circuit decision in Silveira v. Lockyer, they are faced with the likelihood that Congress and state leglislatures will feel free to further restrict gun ownership, perhaps even eliminate it over time, as has happened in other countries. Further appeals to Congress and the states are no longer a sure bet. The soap box and the ballot box have been throughly tried, is it now time to get out the ammo box?
