“Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”

-Sen. Hubert Humphrey, Know Your Lawmakers, Guns, Feb. 1960, p. 4

-George Mason

The Dick Act of 1902

The Dick Act of 1902 also known as the Efficiency of Militia Bill H.R. 11654, of June 28, 1902 invalidates all so-called gun-control laws. It also divides the militia into three distinct and separate entities.

The three classes H.R. 11654 provides for are the organized militia, henceforth known as the National Guard of the State, Territory and District of Columbia, the unorganized militia and the regular army. The militia encompasses every able-bodied male between the ages of 18 and 45. All members of the unorganized militia have the absolute personal right and 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms of any type, and as many as they can afford to buy.

The Dick Act of 1902 cannot be repealed; to do so would violate bills of attainder and ex post facto laws which would be yet another gross violation of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The President of the United States has zero authority without violating the Constitution to call the National Guard to serve outside of their State borders.

The National Guard Militia can only be required by the National Government for limited purposes specified in the Constitution (to uphold the laws of the Union; to suppress insurrection and repel invasion). These are the only purposes for which the General Government can call upon the National Guard.

Attorney General Wickersham advised President Taft, "the Organized Militia (the National Guard) can not be employed for offensive warfare outside the limits of the United States."

The Honorable William Gordon, in a speech to the House on Thursday, October 4, 1917, proved that the action of President Wilson in ordering the Organized Militia (the National Guard) to fight a war in Europe was so blatantly unconstitutional that he felt Wilson ought to have been impeached.

During the war with England an attempt was made by Congress to pass a bill authorizing the president to draft 100,000 men between the ages of 18 and 45 to invade enemy territory, Canada. The bill was defeated in the House by Daniel Webster on the precise point that Congress had no such power over the militia as to authorize it to empower the President to draft them into the regular army and send them out of the country.

The fact is that the President has no constitutional right, under any circumstances, to draft men from the militia to fight outside the borders of the USA, and not even beyond the borders of their respective states. Today, we have a constitutional LAW which still stands in waiting for the legislators to obey the Constitution which they swore an oath to uphold.

Charles Hughes of the American Bar Association (ABA) made a speech which is contained in the Appendix to Congressional Record, House, September 10, 1917, pages 6836-6840 which states: "The militia, within the meaning of these provisions of the Constitution is distinct from the Army of the United States." In these pages we also find a statement made by Daniel Webster, "that the great principle of the Constitution on that subject is that the militia is the militia of the States and of the General Government; and thus being the militia of the States, there is no part of the Constitution worded with greater care and with more scrupulous jealousy than that which grants and limits the power of Congress over it."

"This limitation upon the power to raise and support armies clearly establishes the intent and purpose of the framers of the Constitution to limit the power to raise and maintain a standing army to voluntary enlistment, because if the unlimited power to draft and conscript was intended to be conferred, it would have been a useless and puerile thing to limit the use of money for that purpose. Conscripted armies can be paid, but they are not required to be, and if it had been intended to confer the extraordinary power to draft the bodies of citizens and send them out of the country in direct conflict with the limitation upon the use of the militia imposed by the same section and article, certainly some restriction or limitation would have been imposed to restrain the unlimited use of such power."

The Honorable William Gordon

Congressional Record, House, Page 640 - 1917

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The NRA

Last year’s decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, concerned only federal laws and struck down parts of the gun control law in the District of Columbia, a federal enclave. The court ruled that the law violated the Second Amendment by barring law-abiding people from keeping guns in their homes for self-defense.
The new case was brought by residents of Chicago who say their city’s handgun ban is identical to the one struck down in Heller.

Several Supreme Court decisions, all more than a century old, have said that the Second Amendment does not apply to the states.

In June, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, affirmed the dismissal of the new case, saying it was up to the Supreme Court to overrule its own precedents if it wished to do so. Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel of the appeals court, added that it was not certain whether and how the Supreme Court might apply the Second Amendment to the states.

The Supreme Court has ruled that most but not all of the protections of the Bill of Rights apply to the states, thanks to the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, one of the post-Civil War amendments. (Exceptions include the Fifth Amendment’s requirement of indictment by a grand jury and Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive bail.)

Most legal scholars expect the court to apply the Second Amendment to the states. But many of them are urging the court to take an unusual route to that result. Rather than continuing to rely on the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, the court should, these scholars say, look to the amendment’s “privileges or immunities” clause, which says that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”

There is some evidence that the amendment’s writers specifically wanted the clause to apply to allow freed slaves to have guns to defend themselves. Scholars on the right and left believe, moreover, that the clause could play a role in protecting rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.

A decision that the Second Amendment applies to the states would not answer most questions about what kinds of gun laws are vulnerable to challenges under the Second Amendment. In the Heller decision, Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to identify quite a few kinds of laws that are presumptively constitutional.

“Nothing in our opinion,” Justice Scalia wrote, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

The antiterrorism law at issue in a second case the court agreed to hear, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, makes it a crime to provide various kinds of “material support” to organizations the government says have engaged in terrorist activities. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that the law’s bans on providing “training,” “service” and some kinds of “expert advice and assistance” were unconstitutionally vague.

The case was brought by people and organizations who sought to provide support for what they said were lawful and nonviolent activities of a Kurdish political party and a Tamil group. The two organizations, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department.

In its brief asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, the government said the appeals court’s decision frustrated “a vital part of the nation’s effort to fight international terrorism.” The brief added that the federal government had charged approximately 120 defendants with violations of the material-support law since 2001 and had obtained about 60 convictions under it.

The law’s challengers filed a separate appeal to the Supreme Court, objecting to another aspect of the appeals court’s ruling, this one upholding bans on providing support consisting of “personnel” or of expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge. The Supreme Court consolidated that appeal, Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, No. 09-89, with the government’s appeal.

“The material support law resurrects guilt by association and makes it a crime for a human rights group in the U.S. to provide human rights training,” David D. Cole, a lawyer for the challengers, said in a statement.

Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the case was “extraordinarily important.” The material-support law not only provides federal prosecutors with an important tool, he said, but it may also provide the government with a basis for bringing cases in civilian courts against prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay.