But it's absurd to believe that the text magically contains the answers to complex modern issues: the definition of what it means to be alive, or how the commerce clause or the right to bear arms amendment should be interpreted; or whether a corporation is a person.
Several amendments bear the fingerprints of Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill.
In fact, I think the only thing amiss here is Mr Scalia's weirdly literalist approach to the word "bear"; the first amendment's reference to "freedom of speech and of the press", for example, is generally held to apply to non-verbal communications as well.
Right to bear arms (Second Amendment) comes with an obligation to bear them responsibly and not use them against each other.
It seems Knob Creek takes this proclamation pretty literally: The Second Amendment is the right to bear arms, while the First Amendment is the amendment that guarantees freedom of speech--and religion.
They want limitations -- but not on the Second Amendment right to bear arms but rather the First Amendment right of free speech.
The equivalent may have been unforeseeable at the time of the application; the rationale underlying the amendment may bear no more than a tangential relation to the equivalent in question; or there may be some other reason suggesting that the patentee could not reasonably be expected to have described the insubstantial substitute in question.
Although the Bill of Rights is a broad expression of individual civil liberties, the ambiguous wording of many of its provisions such as the Second Amendment's right "to keep and bear arms" and the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments"—has been a source of constitutional controversy and intense political debate.
But Judge Navarro prevented lawyers for the four men from raising First Amendment rights to free speech and Second Amendment rights to bear arms, saying that these were not applicable in the case.
Even Robert A. Levy of the libertarian Cato Institute, who served as co-counsel in the Supreme Court case that established a second amendment right to bear arms, stated that "I don't see any constitutional bar to regulating high-capacity magazines...The Second Amendment is not absolute".
Nobody questions the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
