{"id":18251,"date":"2012-12-19T13:54:43","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T18:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18251"},"modified":"2012-12-19T13:54:43","modified_gmt":"2012-12-19T18:54:43","slug":"clever-wording-cant-take-away-an-enumerated-constitutional-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/12\/19\/clever-wording-cant-take-away-an-enumerated-constitutional-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Clever wording can&#8217;t take away an enumerated constitutional right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2012\/12\/19\/you-can-t-save-gun-control-with-word-games.html\" target=\"_blank\">Megan McArdle<\/a> on the pious hopes of those who hope to bring in draconian gun control regulation by abstruse and intricate verbal gymnastics:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Others are suggesting a de-facto ban, accomplished either through a huge tax, or a ban on ammunition. Oh, I&#8217;ve also seen calls to limit the amount of ammunition people can buy, but I don&#8217;t think those people have thought this through. For starters, the number of bullets used by a typical rampage shooter is about what a target shooter or hunter might go through in an afternoon or two of range practice. And most gun homicides are not rampage shootings; they have one or two victims, and a correspondingly small number of cartridges expended. Moreover, even a very strict per-purchase limit would permit people to accumulate ammunition over time.  <\/p>\n<p>No, the people who want to tax guns at 17,000%, or ban ammunition, or make cartridges cost $2,000 apiece, are the only ones hinting at something that might make a real dent in America&#8217;s unusually high rate of gun homicide. Except for one thing: you can&#8217;t do an end-run around an enumerated right with some sort of semantic game. Chief Justice John Roberts is not Rumplestiltskin; he is not bound by the universe to disappear if you can only find the correct secret word.  <\/p>\n<p>You cannot accomplish back-door censorship by taxing at 100% all profits of any news corporation named after a &#8220;carnivorous mammal of the dog family with a pointed muzzle and bushy tail, proverbial for its cunning.&#8221; You cannot curtail the right to protest by requiring instant background checks and a 90-day waiting period on anyone who wants to assemble with 500 of their friends in a public area.  Nor can you restrict the supply of ink used to print Korans. If you pass a law like that, the Supreme Court will say &#8220;nice try, guys&#8221; and void all the painstakingly constructed verbal origami that was supposed to make civil liberties infringement look like an innocent exercise of the taxing power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Megan McArdle on the pious hopes of those who hope to bring in draconian gun control regulation by abstruse and intricate verbal gymnastics: Others are suggesting a de-facto ban, accomplished either through a huge tax, or a ban on ammunition. Oh, I&#8217;ve also seen calls to limit the amount of ammunition people can buy, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,53,13],"tags":[715,49,661,217,118],"class_list":["post-18251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-liberty","category-politics","category-usa","tag-constitution","tag-guns","tag-regulation","tag-rights","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4Kn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18252,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18251\/revisions\/18252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}