The amendment says “shall not be infringed”.

Which means “shall not be destroyed,” a far cry from “shall not be regulated in any way, shape or form.” If I hum a few bars of a copyrighted song, have I “infringed” the copyright?

“You can’t just remove that right. You got to regulate consistent with the second amendment.”

The amendment says “shall not be infringed”.

“Anyway, the point still stands, until First Amendment rights are regulated in a manner that is designed to prevent one from exercising them, rather than specifying consequences for their abuse, those regulations are not analogous to Second Amendment restrictions as they exist today.”

Can you say “McCain-Feingold”?

Now that I had the blog go down at a horribly inconvenient time, I’m thinking about setting up a redundant front end on the DVR and a redundant database on my workstation/server. That way if I lose one of them, it’ll just take a few seconds, and a port redirection on the firewall to get everything back up.

Sebastian, off topic, but if you can handle a prompt in a chroot jail, perhaps you’ll like my new host, http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net . Since you only pay for the bandwidth and storage you use, as a backup, NFS.N will be super cheap for you.

I’ve only had them for about a week, but I really like the TOS.

They’re my primary, and with me getting about 100+ visits a day, plus bots, total cost for this month looks like it will be around 90 cents, plus or minus two bits.

They’re not for everyone, but if you can install your own blog on your own machine and can handle a BSD prompt, perhaps this is the backup host for you.

As for federalism and whether the 2nd applies to the states:

1) Notice the word that is present in the 1st and not in the 2nd: “Congress”, as in “Congress shall not”. The 1st as written was thus specifically a limitation only on federal power. The 2nd just says “shall not be infringed”, with no limitations on who shall not infringe. If they meant only the feds, they should have written it so it applied only to the feds. (A limit on Congress is a limit on the whole federal government. The executive branch would be nothing but the President and Veep standing in an empty field with nothing to do and no salary if Congress hadn’t passed laws authorizing taxes, created the departments of the executive branch, appropriated money to run them, and passed laws for them to enforce, or for the military, appropriated funds and wrote the governing regulations. With neither executive agencies or laws, the federal courts would be just the Supreme Court, unpaid and without a building. I’m not saying that Congress is supreme over the other branches; without tax collectors and courts, they could pass all the laws they wanted while working unpaid and standing out in the rain, but nobody would enforce them!)

2) The Dred Scott court clearly thought that the 2nd protected an individual right against both the states and the feds. One reason they cited that free blacks couldn’t be citizens was that it would give them the RKBA… (And then, they’d rise up using those guns, slaughter the slaveowners to free their enslaved kin, and rape all the white women. Especially the old and ugly ones.) (That’s sarcasm, if you’re wondering, but the Court’s blindness and bigotry on the race issue doesn’t invalidate their expertise on other issues. They didn’t cite cases or arguments about the RKBA because to them there was no controversy; it was simply common knowledge that law-abiding citizens had a RKBA inviolable by any government agency, just like the text if the 2nd said.)

3) Even if the 2nd didn’t originally apply to the states, if the badly-written 14th amendment means that the rights protected by the 1st are also protected against the states, then there is no reason at all that it also wouldn’t protect the RKBA against the states. Except that !@#$%^& federal courts don’t bother to be consistent…

I assume you agree with me since you just added evidence to support my point.

Thank you.

Very true. But you don’t have to undergo a background check, etc., before you can yell at all for fear you might yell “fire” in a croweded theater. However, if you do yell “fire” in a crowded theater, you’ll be responsible for the consequences. I think the lawyer phrase is “prior restraint.” Prior restraint (or at least, what I imagine that phrase to mean) isn’t usually applied to First Ammendment issues, but it sure is to the 2nd.

Doesn’t it strike you as strange the number of people that cannot tell the difference between a right and abuse of that right? It is unfathomable to me what is so hard about knowing when the exercise of your rights interferes with the someone else’s exercise of his rights. Do you have any idea why so many prefer to screw everybody, rather than make judgment call regarding actual violators of others’ rights and abuse of their own?

Is it mental laziness? Or is it moral paucity?

I truly don’t know. It doesn’t seem that difficult to me. I could do a dissertation on why it doesn’t seem so difficult, but suffice it to say, that we weren’t encumbered with more intellectual theory than was useful or appropriate. We were actually engaged in living not in theorizing about how “those other people” do it.

So if your house is on fire and I stand outside your window and shout “FIRE” I can be arrested?

This is my (non-lawyer) interpretation of this issue, any lawyers out there may feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about anything. I do realize that I am oversimplifying, I’m just trying to get the basic point across:

The controlling factor is intentionally or negligently causing harm (in other words, violating someone else’s rights in the exercise of your own).

If, in the course of an argument, political or not, I say something objectionable to you, unless it causes you actual harm or conveys a threat, that is protected speech. I may get a punch in the nose, but no one ever said exercising rights should be consequence free.

If I make an untrue or defamatory statement that causes actual harm, loss of income, damaged reputation etc; that would cross the line into non-protected speech and would be actionable. I believe in many states, actual malice must be demonstrated for a charge to stick.

I believe that you are probably correct in that the founders primarily were concerned with political speech when penning (quilling?) the first amendment, but they were pretty smart people. I imagine if they felt that the natural right is restricted SOLELY to political speech they would have clearly said so.

Of course, back then if I defamed you, you wouldn’t sue me, you’d challenge me to a duel.

Barret .50’s at 1000 paces anyone?

Anyway, the point still stands, until First Amendment rights are regulated in a manner that is designed to prevent one from exercising them, rather than specifying consequences for their abuse, those regulations are not analogous to Second Amendment restrictions as they exist today.

I pay for Verizon FiOS for Business, so I can run servers. They don’t restrict me. I did this even before I started the blog, because I need static IPs for other reasons, plus I hate the idea of someone telling me how I can use what I’m paying for. My router/firewall handles all the incoming connections on port 80, and redirects them to the server.

I run the apache/PHP front-end on my Linux workstation/server in my office. The MySQL database runs on my DVR box attached to my TV. The DVR software already needed MySQL, so I figured it was easier just to set up another database instance on there to deal with wordpress.

Now that I had the blog go down at a horribly inconvenient time, I’m thinking about setting up a redundant front end on the DVR and a redundant database on my workstation/server. That way if I lose one of them, it’ll just take a few seconds, and a port redirection on the firewall to get everything back up.

It would probably be easier just to pay for hosting, but since I’m already paying for this setup, I figure I might as well put it to use. Plus, it’s probably better than I have no one to blame but myself when stuff like this happens

That argument is pure sophistry.

There are no “exceptions” to first amendment rights, only consequences for misusing same. There is no law PREVENTING anyone from speaking or writing what they want, only laws that effect conseqences for doing so in a harmful way.

No one has ever, to my knowledge, put forth the theory that the unfettered exercise of rights should be consequence free. If you misuse First Amendment rights and harm others, you should be charged and punished just as you should if you misuse your Second Amendment rights and harm others.

The problem is that Second Amendment infringements disguised as “restrictions” or “regulation” are used to prevent one from exercising the right at all, not to effect consequences for misusing said right.

Were you required to beg government permission, be background checked, fingerprinted, investigated, charged a fee and issued a license before you were permitted to make your comment? When you are required to jump through those hoops to exercise your First Amendment rights, then you’ve got an argument. Until then, it’s nothing more than a straw man.

But, yeah, there are reasonable restrictions on all rights. NYC gun laws go far beyond reasonable.

I have to respect him for sticking to his guns, so to speak, even if I have no respect for his position.

In other words, I no longer see him as a lying, scum sucking politician, just an incorrect, scum sucking politician.