101–110 of 215 posts
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Guns are not, fundamentally, a tool for ensuring one's privacy.
The original intent of the right to bear arms was to enable protection against an intrusive government. It's very similar to crypto in that sense.
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Because it wouldn't work. You're purposefully trying to work around the intent of things. Judges tend to take ill view of cute things like that. Besides, ok you ban the sale of ammunition. Now are you going to ban reloaders and selling of ammunition components too? How far are you willing to go down that rabbit hole? Noting that it isn't that hard to make ammunition are you going to ban the knowledge of that as well?…
I thought a lot of laws were cute intents to work around the constitution. Any such law would work its way up the legal chain until it got to the supreme court (assuming they chose to take it up the case). As the federal law on armor piercing bullets shows [1] there does not seem to be anything stopping congress passing a law regulating or banning ammunition. Instead of just limiting the ban to armour piercing it cou…
And this is why judges exist: to go "hey, that law is trying to work around the Constitution and therefore is unconstitutional." And I say this as someone very much in favor of gun control. But it must be approached legally, not with the mindset that the law is some kind of computer program executed by idiot minds.
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Your perception is wrong. The gun lobby is crazyily grassroots. The NRA is demonized, but their spending in lobbying is low (their income is relatively low and they have a lot of other elements such as training and certification) and less than the gun control lobby since Bloomberg (and some silicon Valley VCs) began to lobby. There is only one reason the NRA has influence: members and sympathizers will vote on thier…
The problem is that guns are tangible. I can have a gun, and then have the gun taken away or banned by the government. This is easy for anyone to understand. Encryption isn't so tangible. If certain forms of encryption were banned, we'd still have our computers and phones, and to the average end user, they'd be no different in their perception.
I'm a gun rights supporter, not so much because I give two hoots about guns, but because I see the fourth and second amendments as an overall proxy for the health of the bill of rights.
If the government wants to ban guns, or privacy, the remedy there is through amending the constitution, not simply pretending it doesn't exist, but we've allowed the government so much discretion and deference on matters like these, especially on guns, because we (as a people) don't particularly love them, and because the argument has historically been presented as "you don't want these bad people to have these loopholes", where bad people is interchangeably terrorists, gun owners, communists, or whatever the evil of the day tends to be.
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At the level of simple firearms, arms are arms. You're going to have to argue 2A regardless.
I don't understand this response. Why wouldn't banning the sale of ammunition and ammunition components not work to stop most of the bad problems of guns? A gun is still arms even if it does not have ammunition so this avoids the constitutional problems, but it makes them much safer. I should add that I am not arguing for the banning of ammunition, just why has this not been used as an attack vector on the gun lobby?
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I'll try to make it simpler. How do you propose a ban on ammunition? Walk me through the legislative and judicial processes. On the flip side, my first argument 2A, so now the burden is back on you.
Well if I was asked to draw up the law (unlikely since I am not a lawyer) I would just follow the current law on armor-piecing bullets [1], but add a clause that limited the powder load to ensure that the bullet’s muzzle velocity could not exceed 10 feet per second. Probably equally effective would be to limit the weight and/or density of the bullet such that bullets could only be made out of aerogel [2]. Once you at…
In brief, strict scrutiny is the most stringent level of scrutiny, and rational basis the least stringent. Operating a vehicle on public roads is decidedly a right, but not a constitutionally enumerated one, so it is only held to rational basis. Rational basis scrutiny allows a right to be curtailed it, on a rational level, the curtilage is related to a legitimate government interest.
When strict scrutiny is applied, it means that a much more stringent justification must be met. Not only must it further a legitimate government interest, but it must also be the least restrictive possible means of doing so, and not fundamentally burden the right.
Banning teflon coated bullets does not fundamentally infringe the right, and is narrowly tailored enough that it survives the least restrictive means test. Banning all ammunition cripples the right, fundamentally, and is nowhere near tailored enough to survive heightened levels of scrutiny.
If the government wins any of these court battles, it's only a matter of time until one-way encryption is outlawed. It follows logically that if criminals/terrorists can't use iPhones to securely communicate, then they'll just move on to the next convenient encryption app. The government will continue to order companies to break their one-way encryption until the government realizes they're playing musical chairs and…
I want to point out the reasons for which that's impossible -- that the executive can't issue an EO that applies to the citizenry at large, and that there aren't any agencies that specifically regulate software companies, but as I can't find a loophole that hasn't been leveraged to render my arguments moot, I can't even convince myself that it couldn't be done.
That said, on paper, executive orders are only applicable within the executive branch. E.g., the president can issue an order that commands his agency chiefs to interpret a law a certain way, or compel them to issue internal commands to change an action that they are otherwise charged with doing, but laws to which the citizenry must comply need be done via Congress.
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This is a very good point. As someone who has been anti-gun and pro-encryption, I'm now wondering how I reconcile these two stances that are at conflict with each other.
The one major difference that I see is that it's really hard to kill someone with encrypted data.
To be clear, I am both pro-encryption and "pro-gun". However, spinning the argument to present encryption as a more immediate threat can be done, and quite easily considering the fact that not many people understand it. The argument could even work on pro-gun people!
If the government wins any of these court battles, it's only a matter of time until one-way encryption is outlawed. It follows logically that if criminals/terrorists can't use iPhones to securely communicate, then they'll just move on to the next convenient encryption app. The government will continue to order companies to break their one-way encryption until the government realizes they're playing musical chairs and…
Would there be a first amendment (freedom of speech) argument against such an outlawing? If you are not allowed to say things which the government doesn't understand, then your speech isn't free.
And at that point it's just speech. I don't mean "like speech", or "something sophisticated people should recognize as speech", or "code is speech" ... I mean, it's just plain old speech. Just very boring, long-winded (and extremely precise) descriptions of computer source code.
So perhaps there will be some pain and perhaps there will be some years before it finally gets to the supreme court, but in the end, it's just speech.
Will they change the 1A ? Would they ?