The Declaration does talk about those aspirations, but your contention that Jefferson here clairvoyantly encodes the Second Amendment of 1791 is odd, I have to say. "Life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" are obviously general and open to broad interpretation. One could cite all three as a justification to place some limits on the weapons citizens may own and use.KindaSkolarly wrote:The Declaration of Independence talks about Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That covers MILLIONS of rights that we are born with. The right to keep and bear arms is one of them. Sorry, but you're a natural-born gun owner.
If you're talking about Constitutional/unConstitutional, the Declaration isn't relevant, anyway. It hasn't been seen as part of U.S. law.
The Supreme Court gets it wrong, then, in your view, by declaring there is nothing unconstitutional about banning machine guns. But Chief Justice Marshall got it right in 1803 when he established judicial review? In doing so, he said only that the court could decide whether or not a law was "repugnant to the Constitution." The Court has decided that gun laws are not necessarily repugnant, while upholding the right to bear arms.And the law banning machine guns is unconstitutional. It is "repugnant to the constitution" (see Marbury v Madison above).
Do you mean that simply by virtue of being federal laws they are unconstitutional? That is one argument people make, but doesn't the Constitution leave the matter of what may be the federal govt's purview fairly open?We have tens of thousands of unconstitutional federal laws. The legal system has been corrupted.