Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT
"Jefferson owned many guns. And he recommended carrying a gun with you"
Not on a college campus, he didn't. Therefore, he was OK with certain restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, in the interest of broader public safety.
Jeez...
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I answered this in post #208 of this thread. Constitutional law cannot conflict with its purpose. Personal, private property rights are understood to be protected from encroachment by other laws unless such encroachment is specifically granted in the constitution. People have the right to restrict guns being carried on their property. The right to bear arms, or anything else, including yourself, on someone else's property can be restricted by the owner. This can be said about speech, religion, or other rights in The Bill of Rights. Your example does not imply some vague, unspecified right of government to restrict the right to bear arms.
I might also add that broader public safety was constitutionally meant to be a local and state issue, not a federal one.
And the federal government already has accomplished unlimited power for itself by expanding its scope beyond its enumerated limitations (as in the example in post 188 which responded to your questioning how expanding laws could make bad law). Broadening its scope of power outside of its enumerated powers, as in giving it the ability to regulate the country's public safety, would certainly give it even more of what little power is left for it to take. And, given that its established enumerated power is already considered limitless, imagine what regulatory claims it can have on all facets of society if it can add to that the ability to find a safety issue concerning any constitutional right.
Your method of using various peripheral laws, especially those that are mostly state issues, as examples which can be used as precedents for similar federal expansion of its other powers or to give it powers it doesn't already have, can eventually make the Constitution irrelevant. It is actually a Progressive model which pretty much does that.