The word of the day is once again desuetude:
In law, desuetude is a doctrine that
causes statutes, similar legislation, or legal principles to lapse and
become unenforceable by a long habit of non-enforcement or lapse of
time. It is what happens to laws that are not repealed when they become
obsolete.
And it’s time the Supreme Court owned up that the Second Amendment has fallen victim to desuetude. It would be a truly conservative act to make that admission. Here is Justice Robert Bork (The Tempting of America (1990)) on this issue:
“There is a problem with laws (which are not enforced). They are kept in the code books as precatory statements, affirmations of moral principle. It is quite arguable that this is an improper use of law, most particularly of criminal law, that statutes should not be on the books if no one intends to enforce them. It has been suggested that if anyone tried to enforce a law that had moldered in disuse for many years, the statute should be declared void by reason of desuetude or that the defendant should go free because the law had not provided fair warning.”
The Second Amendment relates to a framework of national defence which died out probably before the ink was dry on the Constitution, which is something I've gone into ad nauseum.
But if the game of the day is to take obsolete sections of the US Constitution, I say let's take the domestic violence clause out and let it run havoc! Full text of Article IV, Section 4:
“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.”
Scalia demonstrated ignorance of the law when he said:
Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.
Actually, you dumbfuck, that is precisely what you should have done if you didn't want to make the US system of justice into a blatant joke (it already was a joke).
On the other hand, there are loads of domestic violence victims who could benefit by the reinterpretation of the Domestic violence clause.
And it's not even an amendment!
Let havoc reign in the halls of "justice"!
