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    Default Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    Dale Norman, a Florida man arrested for openly carrying a firearm in 2012, has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his misdemeanor conviction on the grounds that it infringed his right to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.

    Norman — who possessed a valid Florida Concealed Weapons License — was arrested because his otherwise legally-carried handgun became visible as he was walking down a sidewalk in Ft. Pierce. He was convicted of a second-degree misdemeanor and fined $300.



    Norman appealed his conviction, but as we reported, he was slapped down by the Florida Court of Appeals in 2015, and again by a deeply divided Florida Supreme Court in 2016. Backed by Florida Open Carry, Inc., however, he’s now asking for relief from the Supreme Court.

    In this age of racially conscious politics, it’s seems surprising that Norman — an African-American pushed face-down into the pavement by police officer — hasn’t gotten more attention. Indeed, Norman’s attorney — the estimable constitutional law expert Stephen Halbrook (below) — spends some time in the petition describing the racist history of gun control in America.



    At the Founding, no restrictions existed on the peaceable carrying of arms either openly or concealed. The open-carry restrictions invalidated in the above cases appeared in the nineteenth century. However, slaves were prohibited from carrying arms at all, and “Blacks were routinely disarmed by Southern States after the Civil War….”

    Mr. Halbrook also references the Congressional debate for ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which singled out 19th century Florida in particular. Much of which applies equally to all citizens in 21st century New York and California.

    Florida makes it a misdemeanor for colored men to carry weapons without a license to do so from a probate judge, and the punishment of the offense is whipping and the pillory. South Carolina has the same enactments…. Cunning legislative devices are being invented in most of the States to restore slavery in fact.

    I’m sure the California regulators think themselves quite cunning for their efforts to ban the so-called ‘bullet button’ rifles.

    There’s also this:

    A Florida enactment passed around the turn of the century making it unlawful, without a license, to carry a pistol or repeating rifle “was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers” and “was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.”

    Open carry has not historically had the emotional and legal baggage that came with concealed carry. I say this not as an advocate, but as a historian — laws could often be found in the 19th century banning concealed carry, but not the open carriage of firearms across the several states.

    Efforts to ban open carry typically were part of an attempt to disarm disfavored communities — newly freed black slaves in particular. For that reason, the Court might consider open carry bands to be more constitutionally suspect.

    When you throw in the general optics of this case in particular, and the historical analysis of racist gun control laws from Mr. Halbrook’s brief . . . well, there could be a greater chance of Supreme Court review here than in Peruta, which focused on concealed carry.

    Perhaps the Court will be slightly more willing to entertain the notion of a general right to open carry. Or perhaps not. The Court has disappointed gun rights activists before.

    https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/20...supreme-court/

    http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/sit...rman-final.pdf Is a link to the petition, with a detailed history of the racism involved in gun control.
    "Cives Arma Ferant"

    "I know I'm not James Bond, that's why I don't keep a loaded gun under the pillow, or bang Russian spies on a regular basis." - GunLawyer001

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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    An article on the Florida Supreme Court Ruling.

    http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/201...pen-carry-ban/


    In the matter of Dale Lee Norman v. State of Florida, a divided Florida Supreme Court affirmed the Sunshine State’s general ban on the open carry of firearms, even by persons holding a Florida Concealed Weapons License.

    In an opinion drafted by Justice Barbara Pariente, the Florida court conducted a rather lengthy historical analysis of the right to keep and bear arms in America. It correctly pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court left a number of issues open after D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, for which Federal Appellate Courts have effectively (and not to the Second Amendment’s benefit) been filling in in the gaps. The plurality opinion followed their lead, holding as follows.[1]

    (1) The Florida law was not an outright ban on possession of firearms, therefore it wasn’t unconstitutional on its face like the D.C. law in Heller. Because of this, the Court decided to apply intermediate scrutiny (as opposed to the high ‘strict scrutiny‘ standard often applied to first amendment issues, or the low ‘rational basis‘ test that the majority in Heller ruled should not be applied to the Second Amendment,) to decide if the open carry ban was unconstitutional.

    (2) Florida’s shall-issue licensing regime gives everyone who completes the objective requirements (background check + training) the legal ability to carry a firearm in public.

    (3) Intermediate scrutiny requires the state to show that the challenged law must further an important government interest by means that are substantially related to that interest.

    (4) Firearms are dangerous and can be used to further crimes; the state’s interest in public safety and reducing violence are important interests under intermediate scrutiny.

    (5) Florida’s ban on Open Carry is substantially related to that interest. Florida continues to respect the right to keep and bear arms — since anyone who isn’t a prohibited person can obtain a license–it’s simply channelling it into concealed carry. The Florida Court quoted favorably the brief filed by the State of Florida:

    An armed attacker engaged in the commission of a crime…might be more likely to target an open carrier than a concealed carrier for the simple reason that a visibly armed citizen poses a more obvious danger to the attacker than a citizen with a hidden firearm.

    Further, the Court said, “deranged persons and criminals would be less likely to gain control of firearms in public because concealed firearms — as opposed to openly carried firearms — could not be viewed by ordinary sight.”

    Therefore, the plurality held, the Florida ban on Open Carry does not violate the Second Amendment.

    There are two points of criticism that I have to offer for the decision.


    Justice Charles Canady
    The first was explained quite well by Florida Supreme Court Justice Charles Canady in his dissenting opinion. The plurality’s opinion on why the ban is ‘substantially related to the state’s interests’ is based on unfounded speculation. As Justice Canady points out, the real rationale for the open carry ban was never safety, but simply the campaign of fear that the opponents to Florida’s “shall issue” law were running when the law was passed back in the 1980s. He said:

    Such speculative claims of harm to the public health and safety are not nearly enough to survive the heightened scrutiny that applies to burdens on Second Amendment rights…. The suggestion that someone committing a crime ‘might be more likely to target an open carrier than a concealed carrier’ is subject to the rejoinder that a criminal confronted with the presence of an open carrier may be more likely to leave the scene rather than face the uncertain outcome of exchanging gunfire with an armed citizen…. Likewise, speculating about the disarming of individuals who are openly carrying firearms by ‘deranged persons and criminals,’ is a grasping-at-straws justification….

    [I]t is highly unlikely that these feeble proffered justifications had anything to do with the adoption of the statute banning open carrying…. The ban on open carrying is best understood as the Legislature’s response to the public concerns swirling around adoption of the…law…. [They] decided that the sacrifice of open carrying was…[an] appropriate response to the public opposition generated by the passage of the concealed-carry law….

    This truth should be acknowledged: opposition to open carrying stems not from concrete public safety concerns but from the fact that many people are (sensibly or not) made uncomfortable by the visible presence of a deadly weapon.

    Justice Canady also correctly notes that while Heller admonishes that laws that implicate the Second Amendment should not be subjected to a balancing test to determine constitutionality, the Circuit Courts and now the Florida Supreme Court have done exactly that. They’re applying a balancing test appropriate for rational basis review, using that to get their preferred policy position past a constitutional test, and labelling it ‘intermediate scrutiny’ as as smokescreen.

    Justice Canady goes on to note that the few cases relating to Second Amendment analogues ratified into the Bills of Rights of various states in the 18th and 19th century appeared to validate the idea that the Second Amendment protected a right to openly carry arms, citing in particular Nunn v. State of Ga. and State of La. v. Chandler.

    There’s another point that I feel compelled to mention.

    Because of Justice Scalia’s historical analysis of the right to keep and bear arms in the Heller decision, subsequent courts have made a point of revisiting that history (in great detail in some cases) when they issue a decision. It is commonplace for judges of all stripes to comment on various restrictions that existed at the state level in the 18th and 19th century even after ratification of the Second Amendment, and adoption of Bills of Rights with Second Amendment analogues in state constitutions.

    The Norman case is no exception, and for its explication of the history of the Second Amendment, the Florida Court relies heavily on an article from Saul Cornell, a history teacher at Fordham whose academic pursuits include fighting against the right to keep and bear arms.

    What none of these courts appear to understand is that the recitation of post-ratification legal history from state legislatures and courts in the 18th and 19th centuries does not really inform our understanding of the Second Amendment.

    The Bill of Rights are pretty absolute commands. In fact, they’re far more absolute than the Courts ever give them credit for being. I expect that this was known and understood at the time by the people who drafted them, and the people who voted to ratify them.

    This isn’t because the founding fathers were a bunch of paleo-libertarians who spent their time on philosophical arguments that would’ve been at home with Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman. One only needs to look at the laws being passed at the state level to understand that they were comfortable with restrictions on personal liberty that we’d find offensive today.

    The reality is that that Bill of Rights uses some pretty absolute language because it was only intended to apply to the federal government.

    Sure, the Several States passed all manner of laws concerning carriage of firearms back in the day. They also passed law respecting the establishment of a religion. Connecticut had an established church until 1818; Massachusetts until 1833. New Hampshire required state legislators to be Protestants until 1877.

    “But First Amendment!” you cry? “Horse-hockey,” I reply! The Bill of Rights did not even apply to the states until the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and even then, the courts did not start actually start applying them to the states until (in fits and starts) 1897. And the Second didn’t get its place in the sun until 2011. So, yeah, lots of laws were enacted until that point. So what?

    Now, Justice Scalia did do quite a bit of historical analysis in Heller, but most was to determine what the words of the Second Amendment meant at the time of ratification. The fact that some states had enacted restrictions on firearm possession or carriage is an interesting detail from the annals of the American Republic, but is no more relevant to present Second Amendment cases than the fact that parts of New England had laws to ensure conformity to their religious ideologies as late as 1877 informs our analysis of the First Amendment today.

    The purpose of the constitution, after all, was to ensure that the power of the federal government remained limited. As Yale Professor Akhil Reed Amar points out in his 1998 book The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments — in particular the First Amendment — were conceived not as ways to protect the voices of unpopular minorities. Instead, they suggest . . .

    an even stronger kind of majoritarianism…. The body that is restrained is not a hostile majority of the people, but rather Congress…. [C]ongressional majorities may in fact have ‘aristocratical’ and self-interested views in opposition to views held by a majority of the people.

    Thus, although the First Amendment’s text is broad enough to protect the rights of unpopular minorities (like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Communists), the Amendment’s historical structural core was to safeguard thje rights of popular majorities (like the Republicans of the 1790s) against a possibly unrepresentative and self-interested Congress.

    See Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights (1998) at p. 21.

    From a framer’s perspective — even from a ‘strong government’ sort of guy like James Madison — it’s easy to make a series of absolute commands to one branch of government, especially when you think that the other parts of the government will fill in the gaps. We’d never get such clear, decisive language in any putative Bill of Rights drafted de novo today, because anyone walking in the door to draft them would expect the federal government to do a mess of things that just weren’t contemplated in 1789.

    At the end of the day, if the people needed — or wanted — laws touching on speech, religion, press, firearms…well, those would be handled by their local legislators in their local governments. The local representatives in the state legislatures, after all, were their friends and neighbors, the people they went to church with, who showed up at weddings and drilled with them for militia duty. In 1790, the population of Pennsylvania as a whole, for instance, was a third of the 2010 population of Philadelphia alone. The people were free to elect representatives who would pass a Bill of Rights analogous to that in the federal constitution. Or not.

    What happened?

    Well, the Fourteenth Amendment really messed things up. The fact that it arrived in the interim and upset a bunch of (presumably) carefully-crafted laws regulating all manner of morals and mores that the States had enacted may be too bad for them. But whatever those laws said, and however they were interpreted, they ought to be irrelevant to our analysis of the words in the Bill of Rights.

    Ultimately, what matters is what was said and meant in 1789, and at that point, they were commands to the federal government, not a description of what the citizenry could do without fear of federal harassment. If we’re really applying them to the states as written and intended, it’s actually a pretty broad proscription on every level of government. If you don’t like the absolutist language, well, there’s a perfectly serviceable way to amend it.

    Now, that said, I’m not going to recommend that you try that argument in Court at this time. The Courts are already headed in a specific direction, and for the Second Amendment, that’s called ‘intermediate scrutiny.’ It will take a Supreme Court decision or a Constitutional Amendment at the federal level to knock them off that track.

    Or, perhaps, a push in the several states for Vermont-style Constitutional Carry. Eliminate the law at the local level, then it doesn’t matter what the federal courts think is permissible for all levels of governments.
    "Cives Arma Ferant"

    "I know I'm not James Bond, that's why I don't keep a loaded gun under the pillow, or bang Russian spies on a regular basis." - GunLawyer001

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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    He should have been carrying a fishing rod.. I have been told that Open Carry in Floriday is allowed to/from/while fishing or hunting

    It is total BS that with a permit to CC you are in violation anytime any part of your firearm becomes visible even it by accident
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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    He has not gotten the media attention because he's a licensed (and likely law-abiding) gun owner.

    If you can pass a background check to get a CC license, you should be allowed to OC as well. Not all states allow OC like PA does (or fails to forbid).

    The Democrats of the black community and media likely view this man as a traitor to his race because he dared to get a carry permit and protect himself legally. If he were a gangbanger pushed down by a white cop, he'd be a hero and they'd be showing protests in his honor on the news every day.

    Supporting him would confuse them, because they'd be supporting the 2A.

    The media will never do anything to support the 2A, even if it means letting an innocent man face punishment.
    Galations 6:9...And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    Quote Originally Posted by alpacaheat View Post
    He has not gotten the media attention because he's a licensed (and likely law-abiding) gun owner.
    If you can pass a background check to get a CC license, you should be allowed to OC as well. Not all states allow OC like PA does (or fails to forbid).
    The Democrats of the black community and media likely view this man as a traitor to his race because he dared to get a carry permit and protect himself legally. If he were a gangbanger pushed down by a white cop, he'd be a hero and they'd be showing protests in his honor on the news every day.
    Supporting him would confuse them, because they'd be supporting the 2A.
    The media will never do anything to support the 2A, even if it means letting an innocent man face punishment.
    Every time I look at your avatar, I feel like that animal hates me and it's thinking evil thoughts about ending me :P
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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    That's the intention.
    Galations 6:9...And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    Quote Originally Posted by alpacaheat View Post
    That's the intention.
    LOL.
    It's working.
    How can you have any cookies if you don't drink your milk?

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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    My wife is Peruvian and looks at me like that at least once a day.

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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    Ecclesiastes 10:2 ...........

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    Default Re: Florida Negro dares exersize 14th amendment in antebellum south. Assaulted by Cop

    I'm a bit confused. Was he actually "open carrying" or as the OP states "legally-carried handgun became visible" by perhaps his cover garment, vest or jacket being opened by a gust of wind? Does Florida law require that a licensee keep hi firearm concealed at all times?


    "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities".

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