Gun rights in criminal law, securing rights after conviction

Gun use is traditionally seen as an individual right in the United States, as well as generally in the philosophy of natural rights (a major philosophy on which the US was founded). That is, gun use is a human right, along with and up there with the right to life, property, liberty, the right to vote.

However, over the years, increasing laws have been passed curtailing this right. Not on just a state level but on a national level.

In the US right now an individual can have their gun rights taken away from them permanently because of an object being found among their property, and no other cause than that. This object could be something deemed itself illegal, or it could constitute evidence of something else illegal. Or it might not actually be a physical object itself, it could simply be a bit of information somewhere in an electronic device, which is so common in normal life these days. The point is, there might be no evidence of the alleged crime other than the object itself and nothing else. This is not that uncommon.

Now, if we are talking about taking away an individual's rights temporarily, that is one thing. The individual might be put in prison for one year, as the most obvious example.
But what we are talking about in this discussion is the individual's right being taken away permanently, for the rest of their life.

Now, it is always possible for an individual who has been convicted and sentenced, and served their time in prison, to later apply for restoration of their rights. But that is not a given and is far from guaranteed. That is, it is not secured in law as a right that that will happen.

We should also not forget that plea bargaining is, not only an extremely common part of, but an integral part of the court / justice system. An individual might be held in jail based on not the strongest evidence, and then released a very short time later after they agree to plead guilty to a felony. Very often, agreeing to plead guilty results in them spending less time in jail. In this situation, the individual may be basically trading their physical freedom for their gun rights.

I would propose a modification to the current law:
No individual would automatically have their gun rights permanently taken away when the only evidence are objects found, and there are no victims and no witnesses to the alleged crime, and except in the case of alleged crimes of rape, robbery, murder.

This would seem like a very reasonable and limited modification. Can you think of a crime that does not fall into one of these categories where the individual should not have their rights completely restored after prison?

In addition to that, if anyone was still concerned this might somehow open some sort of unforeseen loophole, there could be some sort of automatic time limit based into the law. Where, for example, the individual would lose their gun rights following release for a period constituting half the time they spent in prison, but being at least one year but not exceeding 7 years. Or something like that.

This would be something clearly written into law expressing automatic restoration of full rights.

Special trials for special situations

Just to further address any possible additional loopholes, there could be an additional part of the law addressing severe child abuse, inflicting severe injury, "serious and severe" criminal threats of using a gun when a gun is actually brandished, kidnapping involving a gun, and burglary while carrying a gun, where automatic future restoration of gun rights would not automatically be guaranteed, but the jury would have to come to a separate and specific decision about whether gun rights should be taken away in such a situation. And in addition to that, there would be a clear law that any plea bargains would not be subject or dependent on the defendant waving their right to one of these special "trials". (Because that's the type of coercion that cause many to lose their rights in the first place)

This might impose an additional burden on the court / criminal justice system. However, the jury in this case, where there is not an ordinary jury already convening for a criminal trial, could be smaller (maybe 5 or 6 people), and they could use the same jury to go through and listen to several cases that day, and the "trial" could be shorter and more informal because less would be at stake. There would also likely be no rush with these sort of trials anyway, so they could be easier scheduled at the court's convenience. (If for example a person has plead guilty to a crime and is going to be sentenced to two years, then this "trial" concerning restoration of additional civil rights after release doesn't have to take place immediately, or can take place after they they have been released) In many cases the prosecutor might decide it is not even worth pressing the matter, since it is not worth the court's time of having to hold such a hearing. So in that case, the full restoration of civil rights would kick in automatically by itself, perhaps based on the timeline written into the law.

The number of cases where there would actually have to be one of these special "trials" would probably be only a very small percentage of the total cases. Remember, we are only talking about a certain limited number of special categories of crimes here, and even for many of these situations, the prosecutor will likely decide that permanently taking away gun rights is not needed. These rights might be automatically taken away for a temporary period of time anyway, and the individual will still have the normal avenue of restoration of rights open to them, so these "trials" will only be necessary in a smaller number of cases. Many of these defendants won't even bother contesting full restoration of their rights at a trial, knowing they will not be granted.

 

if a person is too dangerous for society to trust them with the ownership/possession of a firearm, said person is too dangerous for society to trust him to be released from prison.

 

Well, I overall agree with the general gist of what you are saying, but that is kind of an extreme position.

What I am suggesting here is a much more moderate compromise, that will respect individual liberties and civil rights more so than current law.

 

Not so much.
A person is a threat to society, or he isn't.
If he isn't, there's no reason he cannot have a gun.
If he is, then his simple presence in society puts people at significant risk of harm - gun or not.

 

How about you support this idea, and if it can get passed into law (which would still be a longshot in reality to be honest), then we can work from there.

Just to clarify, nothing in the above idea would take away individual rights anymore than already exists in current law.

 

People aren't released from prison at the end of their sentence because society believes that they aren't dangerous; they're released because they've served their sentence.

 

If they are too dangerous to be trusted with a gun, their sentence should have no end.

 

Are we going to discuss my proposal in the OP or not?

I assume you would give it your support? (albeit it might not go quite as far as you want)

 

The Right to keep and bear Arms is an unalienable Right. In a strict reading of the Constitution, once a person has done their time, paid the fine, been punished, rehabilitated, gotten off probation / parole and made restitution to those he / she wronged, there is no legitimate reason to attempt and withhold their Rights. The word unalienable has a meaning (and I promise you that, in law, it is NOT inalienable).

There are a couple of ways to significantly reduce firearm violence without gun control. It starts with prevention when children are in school. Instead of solving every headache or emotional problem with pills, we should focus on helping children, not drugging them. That's a whole thread on its own.

Next, society does NOT do anything to criminals to help society. We do not rehabilitate prisoners and we do not require restitution for the victims. We give them time off for good behavior. No, that's not how you do it. If someone is sentenced to prison, they get a GED and earn some early release time; they get some transferable job skills and earn a little more time off. Make them take seminars in interviewing and getting a job, balancing a checkbook, getting their first apartment or house, family problem resolution / coping skills, developing a budget, cleaning a house, etc. and earn little segments of time off each time they are tested and show competency in those areas. An in house drug rehab program would net some early release time as would an anger management class. Fact is, some of this stuff could be part of the sentence. If someone does not want to comply, then they can stay in prison. You can't put a danger to society back on the streets no matter what the crime was. Most people would avail themselves to most of the available time earned as a ten year sentence could be reduced to two and a half years IF the prisoner did all of the above. Once they've proven themselves, they go free and retain their Freeman status.

 

Not according to current federal law in the US.

That's why I came up with this proposal, to help extend and protect rights that are not currently recognized as inalienable.

 

The courts have ruled that the Second Amendment IS "inalienable." THAT is what is wrong and why the pro-gun lobby loses in court. I did not say that gun Rights are inalienable; I said they are unalienable.

Now, here is the point where grammarists start grabbing their dictionaries to disprove me. The terms are synonymous they will claim. There is no difference; you're a conspiracy theorist, blah, blah, blah. I went to school and studied law. I graduated - AND I was tied with another student and shared honors with her for being in the top of our graduating class. I have even worked on legal teams where two different cases went to the United States Supreme Court and were won. Moral: What I know is not conspiracy theory, but legal reality. You have to read my words carefully.

The earliest courts ruled that unalienable Rights are inherent, natural, absolute, God given, irrevocable and above the reach of government. "Inalienable" rights were defined as "rights" (sic) that can be forfeited by the consent of the person having such rights AND then you have to throw the 14th Amendment into the mix. If you read legal literature carefully, AFTER the adoption of the 14th Amendment, the courts used the word inalienable and ascribing to it a different interpretation than unalienable. Ultimately, the courts would interpret the Second Amendment in light of the 14th Amendment. Here is the most recent example:

"MacDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), is a landmark[1] decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that found that the right of an individual to "keep and bear arms," as protected under the Second Amendment, is incorporated by either the Due Process Clause or Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and is thereby enforceable against the states."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._City_of_Chicago

WHY should the 14th Amendment play any part of a Second Amendment ruling? The reason is that it comes down to who the grantor of the Right is. In the Declaration of Independence, our Creator bestowed upon us unalienable Rights. In MacDonald, the high Court is relying on a privilege bestowed by government. So, yeah, the government can regulate an inalienable right, but the government has NO jurisdiction over unalienable Rights. Honestly, I think the left understands this principle, but kosher conservatives on the right know it, but don't want to get into the fight to prove what one of their own declared... or, in the words of King George the Bush: "the Constitution is just a G.D. piece of paper" (Bush didn't it abbreviate it, however).

 

The Declaration of Independence, of which there are 7 copies uses both inalienable and unalienable. Even the Jefferson Memorial uses the word "inalienable". The simple fact you found a court case that uses the word unalienable makes no difference, and if you truly "went to school and studied law" you would know this (minimum of 4 years required), you are not a lawyer, at best you are paralegal holding a certificate which may have only taken 8 - 12 weeks to obtain.






As to gun rights, the right to own a firearm goes back to the 1689 English Bill of Rights, the only "God given right" is that of self defense.

Do I think criminals should be granted the ability to own firearms???? No, they have shown their inability to be upstanding members of society, this does not deny them the ability to own other weapons, such as a knife, an air rifle, a bow and arrows, etc, nor does it deny them their "God given right" to self defense.

 

You are funny. I have way more education than you can imagine. I don't even know a paralegal with 12 weeks worth of education as it takes two years to get an Associates required to test for certification (my level of legal education is more like 6 years worth). As you don't know, the English Bill of Rights was not mandatory authority on the newly formed United States government. So, the early Americans interpreted the meaning of the Second Amendment in accordance with their own intent. The greatest authority to refer to with respect to the meaning of the Second Amendment would be the man who wrote it. So, in reading what Justice Joseph Story wrote (who was nominated to the United States Supreme Court by the author of the Second Amendment) I quote his words:

"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 1833

The Right to keep and bear Arms is an extension to your Right to Life as presupposed in the Declaration of Independence and codified into law by the Bill of Rights. The official word used in the Declaration of Independence is unalienable. That word was interpreted differently from the word inalienable, both having different meanings in legal interpretations. Inalienable rights are not God given Rights bestowed upon you by a Creator. They are privileges that were given to you to by the power of government in the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment and the resulting decisions thereof, nullified the Bill of Rights, making them mere privileges to be doled out by the federal government. Those are facts, not opinions.

You will not be able to cite any case that refutes that. I can give you many cites to support the reality of my short synopsis of the law.

 

Is there a separation between state and federal instances? Some states allow for state voting already, it is the feds that deny federal voting the most.

 

This is you, right? The Resister: Banned
http://politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/an-unalienable-right.506079/page-5#post-1067561205

 

Not me, but nice try. We're getting like Qanon. Have offered to prove same to the mods. What are you going to do then?

 

Maybe they may "Want Some REAL Excitement?" to look at to put 2 and 2 together.

 

I’m going to disagree with the implication that the BoR grants us a “privilege.” The BoR certainly speaks of rights rather than privileges with good reason. A privilege is an activity which the government has total power to deny but choses to allow you to engage in under the conditions it sets (for example, the license to drive). A privilege exists only at the discretion of the government minister and can be revoked unilaterally. A right is owned by the citizen. The government must recognize it and respect it. Equally important with this wordplay is the understanding that the BoR did not create or grant anything. Instead, it recognized certain pre-existing rights. This is one of the clearest understandings known to our constitutional law:

“The law is perfectly well settled that the first ten Amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were not intended to lay down any novel principles of government, but simply to embody certain guarantees and immunities which we had inherited from our English ancestors. . .” Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275, 281-82 (1897).

The individual (and not limited to militia participation) RKBA was just such a pre-existing right claimed by our founders:

Instances of the licentious and outrageous behavior of the military conservators of the peace still multiply upon us, some of which are of such a nature, and have been carried to so great lengths, as must serve fully to evince that a late vote of this town, calling upon the inhabitants to provide themselves with arms for their defense, was a measure as prudent as it was legal. . . .It is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their defense; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression. O. Dickerson ed., Boston Under Military Rule, p79 (1936) (quoting from what was at the time the most widely circulated periodical in the colonies, A Journal of the Times)(The writer is also citing Blackstone’s description of the effect of the RKBA found in the English Bill of Rights).

We may argue that this is one example from the town of Boston, yet the latter depravation of this right once open conflict began at Lexington and Concord became a national outcry. To justify armed resistance the Continental Congress published the DECLARATION OF THE CAUSES AND NECESSITY OF TAKING UP ARMS (July 6, 1775). Here the Continental Congress (through Jefferson’s pen) listed this complaint about General Gage’s solution to the citizens of Boston having armed themselves contrary to his wishes:

The inhabitants of Boston being confined within that town by the general their governor, and having, in order to procure their dismission, entered into a treaty with him, it was stipulated that the said inhabitants having deposited their arms with their own magistrates, should have liberty to depart, taking with them their own effects. They accordingly delivered up their arms, but in open violation of honor, in defiance of the obligation of treaties, which even savage nations esteemed sacred, the governor ordered the arms deposited as aforesaid, that they might be preserved for their owners, to be seized by a body of soldiers; detained the greatest part of the inhabitants in the town, and compelled the few who were permitted to retire, to leave their most valuable effects behind…

(And thus we see the outcome of the first “we must trust the government to securely store our firearms for us” experiment)

Simply put, the BoR contains is a list of rights which our founders 1: believed were rights which pre-existed the founding of the nation, and 2: were felt important enough to specifically recognize as a check on the power of the government as it dealt with its citizens.

The importance of recognizing a pre-existing right is this: No right is self-enforcing, and God is not a worldly policeman who strikes down dictators for refusing to acknowledge any freedom we claim as a universal right of mankind. It is the task of man to recognize and enforce these rights. This our founders did with the BoR.

A singular importance of understanding the RKBA is a pre-existing right which is not granted to us by the federal government is this: The right does not depend on the whim of the government for its existence. Because government did not create it, government has no authority to abolish it. Government can—if we let it—refuse to acknowledge the right. The right is a “right of the people” and only the people have the power to abandon it (absent an overthrow of the government by a dictator). And even if we were to repeal the 2nd Amendment, this would by itself not free the government from the shackles on its power imposed by this right. It would merely transfer the enforcement of that right to the 9th Amendment. Absent a coup (or the people allowing our courts to deny the right through the demonstrably fraudulent “militia only right” interpretation of the amendment), the only lawful way to get rid of the RKBA in America would be to both repeal the amendment and include language expressly disavowing the RKBA.

I further disagree that the 14th Amendment has anything to do with who “granted” the right. The 14th Amendment was a reaction to how the reconstructed southern states (mine included) were treating African Americans after their emancipation. A majority in Congress (and ultimately of the people as a whole) believed it was wrong for southern states to set about the virtual re-enslavement of African American citizens. They realized—exactly as our original founders did—that these important pre-existing rights are not self-enforcing—and they knew the BoR only operated as a check on the power of the federal government. The 14th was created to be that enforcer against state power. It was originally intended to bind the states to recognize and protect the rights found in the first 8 Amendments. SCOTUS instead decided on a path of selective incorporation, taking each right in turn as a challenge came before it—and the RKBA is merely one of those rights which have been incorporated.

I believe the RKBA is a subset of the broader natural right of self-defense—a right which itself is referred to as the “first law of nature.” Both the right of self-defense and the RKBA have been recognized as an essential right of man in western thought for more than 2000 years. I for one am glad our founders had the wisdom to included its recognition in my nation’s charter.

 

Sorry to have come in off-topic, Kazenatsu. I can tell you how it works in Virginia.

Convicted felons lose many rights as a consequence of their actions. By whatever term we call the rights Jefferson listed in the Declaration, each of these rights can be taken away as a result of a conviction. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness are lost daily by citizens through their incarceration as a result of their conduct. Virginia allows the right to life itself to be taken away when the crime warrants that punishment.

Other rights are also lost as a consequence of conviction. Examples are the right to vote and the RKBA. In Virginia, the Governor is empowered to restore civil rights, but interestingly enough, not the RKBA. That must be done by a court once the Governor has restored other rights. The practice is once you are free of incarceration you may apply to the Governor for restoration. If he grants it, then you are eligible to petition the court to restore your right to keep and bear firearms.

The practice for non-violent offenders for both the Governor’s restoration and the Court’s restoration of the RKBA has become virtually automatic in Virginia.

The consequences for having a firearm without having these rights restored are severe. If your felony conviction is more than 10 years old and is non-violent, the possession is a new felony with a punishment up to 5 years. If the felony is non-violent but less than 10 years old, then the 5-year potential sentence is enhanced by requiring a mandatory minimum of 2 years which cannot be suspended by the judge. If your prior is a violent felony, then the punishment is an automatic 5 years which cannot be suspended regardless of how old the conviction.

Whether we like it or not, SCOTUS has specifically mentioned the loss of the RKBA by convicted felons as not being an infringement on the RKBA. I'm agnostic about automatic restoration. To me, its more a matter of the prior offense. I have zero problem with automatic restoration for someone who wrote a felony bad check. I have more of a problem with automatic restoration for a murderer who used a firearm in his killing. In any event, SCOTUS says--whether we like it or not--that this is not an infringement and is thus left to the sound discretion of the people of each state.

 

A Paralegal course is only 8 - 12 weeks for a certificate, there is no Associates required for a paralegal certificate, your 6 years of education wasn't in school, it was under an Attorney as his clerk/secretary.

The 1689 English Bill of Rights was in full force in colonial times, to which the early Americans interpreted into the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution, the 2A was written by Madison, Henry, and Mason, not John Story. Individual rights of owning firearms falls back to the 1689 EBoR. Nothing in your quote from Story refutes anything I have stated. Madison never states that the right to own a firearm is an unalienable/inalienable right, he didn't initially include the 2nd Amendment in the BoR proposal.

Their is no official "unalienable" word in the DoI. Of the 7 copies, 4 use inalienable while 3 use unalienable. The Jefferson Memorial uses the word inalienable just like the 4 copies of the DoI use. The words inalienable and unalienable have not been interpreted differently nor do they have different legal interpretations. Even Blacks Law Dictionary says: unalienable; see inalienable. Unalienable was used by English while Inalienable was used by French, both meaning the same thing, Jefferson spent a lot of time in France which is why he used the word inalienable.

The 14th has no bearing on anything other than requiring the states to provide equal protection of the laws as per the 1866 CRA . It didn't nullify the BoR, your ramblings are not facts, they are mere inept opinions of interpretations of law as used by "Sovereign Citizens".

Did God create firearms? or are they a man made construct? The only God given right you have is the right to self defense, i.e. Life. As for the word Liberty in the DoI, it meant merely to be free from tyranny.

 

I think punishment for crimes should come during sentencing, once that sentence is served, all rights restored, voting, gun, religious rights, ect....

longer sentences are easy, just give longer sentences if one feels it's needed

 

I can appreciate that you "disagree." We're agreed that unalienable Rights pre-existed. I belong to a legal team that has vowed to bold the word every time we mention it because it is no longer in use in the legal community. Black's Law Dictionary omits the word as of the 7th edition (IIRC). Yet unalienable is the word that is used in the official language. The Declaration of Independence is at the head of the United States Code which happens to be the official laws of the United States. And no matter your opinion, the courts ruled that inalienable rights have a different meaning. Let us prove it for your edification:

“By the "absolute rights" of individuals is meant those which are so in their primary and strictest sense, such as would belong to their persons merely in a state of nature, and which every man is entitled to enjoy, whether out of society or in it. The rights of personal security, of personal liberty, and private property do not depend upon the Constitution for their existence. They existed before the Constitution was made, or the government was organized. These are what are termed the "absolute rights" of individuals, which belong to them independently of all government, and which all governments which derive their power from the consent of the governed were instituted to protect.” People v. Berberrich (N. Y.) 20 Barb. 224, 229; McCartee v. Orphan Asylum Soc. (N. Y.) 9 Cow. 437, 511, 513, 18 Am. Dec. 516; People v. Toynbee (N. Y.) 2 Parker, Cr. R. 329, 369, 370 (quoting 1 Bl. Comm. 123) - {1855}

“The absolute rights of individuals may be resolved into the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right to acquire and enjoy property. These rights are declared to be natural, inherent, and unalienable.” Atchison & N. R. Co. v. Baty, 6 Neb. 37, 40, 29 Am. Rep. 356 (1877)

“Men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,-'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;'and to 'secure,'not grant or create, these rights, governments are instituted.
BUDD v. PEOPLE OF STATE OF NEW YORK, 143 U.S. 517 (1892)

According to Wikipedia:

"The first state court decision resulting from the "right to bear arms" issue was Bliss v. Commonwealth. The court held that "the right of citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State must be preserved entire, ..." "This holding was unique because it stated that the right to bear arms is absolute and unqualified."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms_in_the_United_States

In 1846 the Georgia Supreme Court ruled:

“The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed." The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is, that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right, originally belonging to our forefathers, trampled under foot by Charles I. and his two wicked sons and successors, reestablished by the revolution of 1688, conveyed to this land of liberty by the colonists, and finally incorporated conspicuously in our own Magna Charta!” Nunn v State 1 Ga. (1 Kel.) 243 (1846)

In Texas, their Supreme Court made the point unequivocally clear:

"The right of a citizen to bear arms in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the high powers delegated directly to the citizen, and is excepted out of the general powers of government. A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power."

-Cockrum v. State, 24 Tex. 394 (1859)

Then, the United States Supreme Court weighed in:

“The Government of the United States, although it is, within the scope of its powers, supreme and beyond the States, can neither grant nor secure to its citizens rights or privileges which are not expressly or by implication placed under its jurisdiction. All that cannot be so granted or secured are left to the exclusive protection of the States.

..The right there specified is that of "bearing arms for a lawful purpose." This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. United States v. Cruikshank 92 US 542 (1875) I'm having to break my response into multiple postings Sorry

 

So, once again, The Right to keep and bear Arms is a Right, but it was not granted by the Constitution, neither is it dependent upon the Constitution for its existence. It is above the law and the lawmaking power and it is absolute. By any and all definitions, the Right to keep and bear Arms is a personal Liberty and it is an extension of your Right to Life. That is another way of saying that the Right is an unalienable Right.

So, your basic unalienable Rights are the Rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. These are Rights you gained upon birth and do not owe anyone a duty in order to exercise them. We know, however, that the reality is a bit different, but this Manual will go in depth to explain WHY and WHAT you can do about it. For now, we will focus on these unalienable Rights.

Unalienable Rights are rooted in our foundational principles and first talked about in the Declaration of Independence. Of this document (the Declaration) Thomas Jefferson stated:

“The Declaration of Independence... [is the] declaratory charter of our rights, and of the rights of man.”
Grammarists and some historians will tell you that unalienable and inalienable are the same thing. In law, this is not true. I suspect that the confusion is what has led the United States Supreme Court to usurp the authority given to the other two branches of government and wage a war against the de jure (that is lawful) Constitution. Let’s define an inalienable right. A court ruling makes an important distinction:

“Inalienable Rights which are not capable of being surrendered or transferred without the consent of the one possessing such rights” Morrison v. State, Mo. App., 252 S.W.2d 97, 101 (1952)

Courts have the power to define terminology. If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it is specific. The word is unalienable. Today, most people (especially liberals) want to use the word inalienable… and they can point out the fact that the words were interchangeable in Jefferson’s time. They key controlling word there is were. The words were interchangeable, but whether by accident or design, the word inalienable is not used as a synonym for unalienable. Remember that an unalienable Right is absolute, inherent, natural, God given and cannot be aliened.

An inalienable right CAN be aliened. The court rules that you can consent to relinquishing the right. This very point may very well be the greatest takeaway you can get from this post. So, if these inalienable rights can be aliened, they are NOT, repeat NOT unalienable Rights and lights, alarms, bells, and whistles ought to be going off every time you hear that word inalienable.

The source of your unalienable Rights, according to the Declaration of Independence, is your Creator (your God, whomever you deem that to be.) They are above the law, so we know today that is not what is practiced at the federal level. For example, in 2008 the famous Heller decision came down from the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled:

“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.” District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 (200

What??? Wait a minute. What did the founders say?

“Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature” Benjamin Franklin

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” Patrick Henry

“...rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our own will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual"
— Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Isaac H. Tiffany - 1819)

"Nothing... is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man." --Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824

I would submit to you that the United States Supreme Court never had the authority to reinterpret their own decision in the Cruikshank holding relative to the limits on federal authority. The had the power, but certainly not the authority. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"... on every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was past" (sic). https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-3562

George Washington, in his Farewell Address of 1795 told us WHY:

"If in the opinion of the People, the distribution or modification of the Constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."

In the Heller decision the high Court reversed all of the standing precedents by holding that the Right to keep and bear Arms is not unlimited. The words unlimited and absolute are synonyms in layman language:

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/absolute

The courts have the advantage of being able to ascribe to words and phrases their own meanings. And, what happened, is that the high Court incorporated the Second Amendment into the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment. They simply avoided the previous holdings of what the word unalienable means and built a separate body of law around the concept of inalienable rights which are government created rights (actually privileges that the government doles out). Now, those are the Cliff's Notes. Would you like a hundred or more case citations in between Cruikshank and the MacDonald v Chicago holding (that unequivocally ties the Second Amendment to the Fourteenth Amendment)?

 

You are playing bold a word and associating the same words to mean the same thing in different cases/instances by removing all context from your bolded words.

Inalienable Rights are not government created rights or privileges doled out. The right to own a firearm is a pre-exisitng right, i.e. it pre-existed the DoI, the AoC, and the USC. It was granted to the British persons in the New World via the 1689 EBoR. Prior to that, firearms were owned by the Crown and kept in an armory with a person designated as an armor in the encampments or in the towns created.

Hellar was correct, since if you violate the law in a way that limits your right to own firearms, it still doesn't violate your inalienable/unalienable right to life (self defense). Yet your absolute right to life (what you claim can't be taken) can be taken for a heinous crime, just like your right to liberty and happiness, thus your rights aren't so absolute now, are they?. It's not the government taking your life, it is society (the people) and it's rules of which you live here by that does so.

A right, by its very nature, is limiting.

 

This woman was travelling in a vehicle with several other friends. One of the occupants in the vehicle had brought marijuana. Because none of the occupants in the vehicle stepped forward and claimed it was theirs, they were all charged.
This woman was pushed into a plea bargain. She pled guilty to a felony but did not end up serving any time in prison. She was put in a situation where she had to trade her civil rights for her physical freedom.
But that came back to bite her later. Years later, when she had to grab her husband's gun to defend herself from a home intruder.

Mom kills home invader, now going to prison for the gun she used