Domestic Tranquility

[Editorial]

What happens when two parts of our Constitution are in conflict? Which section wins.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

What happens when an amendment is in opposition to the Preamble to the Constitution?

What about my right to live without violence? Supreme Court decisions on guns harm survivors.
The damage of gun violence is a spreading blight on American society. It affects not only the victims but also their survivors, who must live with emotional loss and psychic trauma indefinitely.
USA Today
By Richard Alba Opinion contributor
December 27, 2022


I have lived since the age of 2 with the damage inflicted by a gun death.

My father was killed while serving in the U.S. military in late 1945 by another soldier test-firing his souvenir Luger in a barracks. I can still feel the powerful reverberations of that shot. It immediately threw the life of what remained of my family onto a much more difficult trajectory – less upwardly mobile, much less happy – than it had been on before. 

[…]

Recent Supreme Court decisions have torqued that difficulty. The District of Columbia v. Heller decision of 2008 established for the first time an individual right to gun ownership and invalidated a widespread previous understanding that the Second Amendment referred to a collective "right of the people," organized in a “well regulated Militia.” 

Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion offers a tutorial on the conservative doctrine of originalism, as he strove to demonstrate the general acceptance in the 18th and 19th centuries of the principle that guns are necessary for individual self-defense.

But there is a glaring lack of balance in the opinion because Scalia, while admitting limits on Second Amendment rights in the abstract, provides no systematic reasoning or principles that might help us establish where the individual’s right to gun ownership ends and the right of the community to live without the constant threat of gun violence begins.

I have heard that some trans people are nervous about going out in public because of all the attacks on LGBTQ nightclubs. Some are anxious about going to public spaces like malls.

The damage of gun violence is a spreading blight on American society. It affects not only the victims themselves but also their survivors, who must live with emotional loss and psychic trauma indefinitely. 

In refusing to consider how to balance the Second Amendment’s right to gun ownership with the right of other citizens to live without the constant threat posed by ubiquitous weaponry, the court is contributing to the deterioration of the United States as a civilized society.

What is the cost of unfettered access to guns in the United States?

Now more and more states are going to permitless carry gun laws… it is the return of the wild west!

When I was driving through the Midwestern states you could drive for miles between homes, Bismark the capitol of North Dakota has a population of only around 75,000. just in the Bronx there are around 1.5 million people. It is totally insane to do away with concealed gun permits and to allow people to walk around with open-carry of guns.

The Preamble says to “Domestic Tranquility” what is tranquility?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary define tranquil as,

a: free from agitation of mind or spirit
b: free from disturbance or turmoil

Having someone shooting up a mall isn’t tranquil!

Having fear of going to a Pride event isn’t tranquil!

It is time for the courts to look at the whole Constitution not just a part of one sentence “...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

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Update January 15, 2023

I just saw something on what Warren Burger said,

These are the kind of questions the American people must answer if we are to preserve the “domestic tranquillity” promised in the Constitution.

He wrote an article in the January 14, 1990 issue of Parade Magazine and said,

The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires. 

[/Editorial]