Key questions in the debate are: Can the government ban assault weapons without violating the Constitution? If so, why? To answer these questions, TheBlaze spoke to legal authorities on both sides of the ideological divide, including some truly famous names within the realm of constitutional law. What we found may surprise you.
Unfortunately, even though I like his argument, the above expert for some reason thinks that a rifle is less lethal than a handgun.......On these grounds, at least one expert would toss out assault weapons bans entirely. That expert, Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law Center, explained his reasoning to theBlaze via phone:
"When you get down to specifics, I think some of the easier cases for finding unconstitutionality is the assault weapons ban, which bans a weapon in common use, which is the phrase that Heller used to describe the weapons that are protected by the Second Amendment," Barnett told TheBlaze. "There's hardly a weapon that's in more common use than the AR-15 so-called assault weapon. I say so-called, because we all know this is a made-up category. They don't fire any faster than a constitutionally protected handgun fires, and it's typically less lethal than a handgun."
Someone else from Harvard law took an opposing view:
Heller recognized that dangerous or unusual weapons may be and have historically been heavily regulated or banned," Tribe's testimony runs. "It is not inconceivable - indeed, it seems quite likely - that the court's pause to distinguish unusually dangerous weapons from widely possessed handguns had precisely the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which included a prohibition on high-capacity magazines, in mind. At the very least, the Heller majority recognized that the government could keep machine guns --M-16 rifles and the like--out of the hands of civilians
And the Cato Institute chimes in:"Many of the lower courts are engaged in what you might call civil disobedience against Heller and McDonald," Barnett told TheBlaze. "I would not rely on courts to protect the Second Amendment. The courts did not protect the right to keep and bear arms until 2006, and yet nevertheless we had such a right, and that right we had as a result of political action."
Not that I agree with the above assertion on the creation of a "list" in any case, but the above also ignores the fact that anti-gunners aren't relying on experts to come up with the list.Now, [the Supreme Court] said that the Second Amendment would likely pose no barrier to outlawing weapons that are not in common use and are especially dangerous. And we have proof of that because fully automated weapons, like machine guns, have been essentially banned since 1934.
I don't consider myself an expert on the technical features of firearms, and so I'm not prepared to say exactly which weapons would go on the list and which shouldn't, but I think experts should be able to come up with a pretty good list -- obviously not needed for self-defense, obviously dangerous, not in common use. And that would be the new assault weapons ban.
http://news.yahoo.com/government-ban-as ... 19171.html
