The Constitution also says the courts interpret the law and the Supreme Court has interpreted it to mean there are limits.
You can amend the Constitution to forbid the Supreme Court from interpreting it to allow for unhindered access to weapons of mass destruction. Not super difficult if everyone agrees.
Moreover, Elon Musk can not launch anything with enough mass to come remotely close to the yield on even a small nuclear weapon. Kinetic bombardment of say, a 200 Mg tungsten rod from orbit, impacting Earth, would have a yield equivalent to only ~350 tons of TNT.
> The Constitution also says the courts interpret the law
Which clause?
If you read it, I think that you’ll be surprised to find that it doesn’t actually state anything about interpretation. It was in Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court invented the doctrine of judicial review.
I actually agree that the power of interpretation is implied by having a judicial power at all, but it’s not in the black and white text.
> Elon Musk can not launch anything with enough mass to come remotely close to the yield on even a small nuclear weapon.
To be fair to the Second Amdendment supremacist, he only compared the sattelite deorbit with the explosive arsenal of the wacko the FBI arrested, not tot nuclear weapons.
You seem confused. The founders believed right to keep and bear arms is god given and recognized this in the constitution as a backstop against tyranny of the courts or any branch of government. They did not anticipate the courts decision to necessarily be final or correct.
They did anticipate (and in fact mandated) courts to interpret the Constitution, which they did and they do. I didn't claim the courts' decisions are necessarily "final or correct."
I'm saying if you believe that courts are routinely violating rights then you don't know how rights are derived in this country.
Good point, "mandated" is probably overdoing it, though in practice to judge a case necessitates an interpretation of the relevant law.
Judicial review was officially challenged and affirmed in Marbury v Madison. That wasn't where it was "decided" they could do it. As the article you just posted (and a basic understanding of western judicial tradition) clearly explains, judicial review in America predates not just Marbury v Madison, but the Constitution itself.
The Marbury decision itself is predicated on the prior point: it is literally not possible to have a judiciary that doesn't interpret the laws themselves.
I think that is really what it comes down to: courts can't do anything if they can't interpret the law.
The scope and extent of that interpretation should be fairly limited -- the tendency of the common law system to accumulate "judge made law" can lead to inconsistencies (and certainly has, with regards to the 2nd Amendment) -- but how could law ever be so thorough and systematic as to obviate the need for such interpretation entirely?
Philosophically sure, but note the rather elaborate system they created to encode that philosophical view into reality. They clearly did not think that God would do the heavy lifting. That's what we're talking about here.
You’re completely missing the point of the nuclear weapons here.
Their purpose in this argument is to show that the principled stand is a lie. It’s not about belief in a god-given right to bear arms without restrictions. Basically everyone on all sides of the argument believes there should be restrictions. The disagreement is just about what those restrictions should be. Some people who want looser restrictions pretend, maybe even believe, that their position is a principled, absolutist one. But it isn’t, any more than “ban all guns except single-shot pistols” is.
What if the reason people can't own nuclear weapons has nothing to do with them as weapons?
The debate people have about 2A and nukes is usually pretty low resolution: I don't ever see any references to the CFR but there's plenty of stuff (in Title 10, I believe) that restricts nuclear materials for any purpose whatever.
You can amend the Constitution to forbid the Supreme Court from interpreting it to allow for unhindered access to weapons of mass destruction. Not super difficult if everyone agrees.
Moreover, Elon Musk can not launch anything with enough mass to come remotely close to the yield on even a small nuclear weapon. Kinetic bombardment of say, a 200 Mg tungsten rod from orbit, impacting Earth, would have a yield equivalent to only ~350 tons of TNT.