The Rodriguez family's lawyer released the video of the incident during a press conference on Tuesday.
MOORE, Oklahoma -
A lawyer for the family
of a man, who died outside the Moore Warren Movie Theater while in
police custody, has released a video of the incident.
Luis Rodriguez died earlier this month after a confrontation with police outside the theater in Moore. 2/15/2014 Related Story: Family Says Moore Police Beat Father To Death
Police say the 44-year-old Rodriguez became uncooperative when
officers questioned him about a possible domestic disturbance. Police
handcuffed the man. 2/18/2014 Related Story: Moore Police Hold News Conference Concerning In-Custody Death
Rodriguez's wife and daughter say police then started beating him. Autopsy results are pending.
The Rodriguez family's lawyer released a cellphone video of the
incident and a statement at a Tuesday news conference in Oklahoma City.
The video shows 44-year-old Luis Rodriguez on his stomach on the
ground outside the theater with five police officers restraining him.
One officer holds Rodriguez's head down and the others are on top of him
as they handcuff his hands behind his back.
Rodriguez's wife, who shot the video, is later heard screaming and
asking if Rodriguez is dead as he is placed on a stretcher. We have attached the video to this story. Warning: the video may be considered graphic to some viewers.
"He was not involved in the disturbance. However, when police came,
they focused their attention on Luis. Taking him face down onto the
pavement, pepper-spraying his mouth, nose and eyes and putting the
weight of five grown men on top of him, and then handcuffing him as he
was unconscious or already dead," said Michael Brooks-Jimenez, attorney
for the Rodriguez family.
Moore Police Chief Jerry Stillings said he stands behind his
officers' actions and said he did not see anything inappropriate on the
cell phone video as far as his officers' actions.
There is security camera footage from the Warren Theater. However, that has not yet been made available for us to see.
OSBI has taken over the investigation into the death.
Police say three officers involved in the incident are on administrative leave.
The New York Times: There have been times when the CNN host Piers Morgan didn’t
seem to like America very much — and American audiences have been more
than willing to return the favor. Three years aftertaking over for
Larry King, Mr. Morgan has seen the ratings for “Piers Morgan Live” hit
some new lows, drawing a fraction of viewers compared with competitors
at Fox News and MSNBC.
It’s
been an unhappy collision between a British television personality who
refuses to assimilate — the only football he cares about is round and
his lectures on guns were rife with contempt — and a CNN audience that
is intrinsically provincial. After all, the people who tune into a cable
news network are, by their nature, deeply interested in America.
CNN’s president, Jeffrey Zucker,
has other problems, but none bigger than Mr. Morgan and his plum 9 p.m.
time slot. Mr. Morgan said last week that he and Mr. Zucker had been
talking about the show’s failure to connect and had decided to pull the
plug, probably in March.
Crossing
an ocean for a replacement for Larry King, who had ratings problems of
his own near the end, was probably not a great idea to begin with. For a
cable news station like CNN, major stories are like oxygen. When
something important or scary happens in America, many of us have an
immediate reflex to turn on CNN. When I find Mr. Morgan telling me what
it all means, I have a similar reflex to dismiss what he is saying. It
is difficult for him to speak credibly on significant American events
because, after all, he just got here.
I
received a return call from Mr. Morgan and was prepared for an endless
argument over my assumptions. Not so. His show, he conceded, was not
performing as he had hoped and was nearing its end.
“It’s
been a painful period and lately we have taken a bath in the ratings,”
he said, adding that although there had been times when the show
connected in terms of audience, slow news days were problematic.
“Look,
I am a British guy debating American cultural issues, including guns,
which has been very polarizing, and there is no doubt that there are
many in the audience who are tired of me banging on about it,” he said.
“That’s run its course and Jeff and I have been talking for some time
about different ways of using me.”
Mr.
Morgan said that his show, along with much of the rest of CNN, had been
imprisoned by the news cycle and that he was interested in doing fewer
appearances to greater effect — big, major interviews that would be
events in themselves. Although a change has long been rumored, it was
the first time that both he, and the CNN executives I talked to,
acknowledged that his nightly show was on the way out. Plans for a
replacement at the 9 o’clock hour are still underway, but Mr. Morgan and
the network are in talks about him remaining at CNN in a different
role.
Mr.
Zucker, the former chief of NBC, inherited Mr. Morgan from Jonathan
Klein, his predecessor, but it is now his problem to fix. In the year he
has been there, CNN has introduced promising shows around the edges and
will be unveiling documentaries along the lines of the very successful
“Blackfish” to run on Thursday in the 10 p.m. hour.
But
the chronic troubles of prime-time remain. Sometime before the network
“upfront” events in April, when advertisers buy commercial time for the
fall season, Mr. Zucker needs to signal how he will fix CNN’s prime-time
problem, and that begins with Mr. Morgan, whose contract ends in
September.
Mr.
Morgan has some significant skills that do translate across platforms
and cultures. While working as a newspaper editor and television
personality in Britain, he was involved in a number of controversies,
but he developed a reputation as a talented, probing interviewer. In his
current role, he has shown an ability not only to book big guests —
former President Bill Clinton, Warren Buffett, the real Wolf of Wall
Street among them — but also to dig in once they are on set.
“I
think I can credibly do news and the ratings reflect that, but it is
not really the show that I set out to do,” he told me. “There are all
kinds of people who can do news here. I’d like to do work — interviews
with big celebrities and powerful people — that is better suited to what
I do well and fit with what Jeff is trying to do with the network.”
Old
hands in the television news business suggest that there are two things
a presenter cannot have: an accent or a beard. Mr. Morgan is clean
shaven and handsome enough, but there are tells in his speech — the way
he says the president’s name for one thing (Ob-AA-ma) — that suggest
that he is not from around here.
There are other tells as well. On Friday morning, criticizing the decision to dismiss a cricket player, he tweeted,
“I’m sure @StuartBroad8 is right and KP’s sacking will ‘improve
performance’ of the England team. Look forward to seeing this at T20
WC.” Mr. Morgan might want to lay off the steady cricket references if
he is worried about his credibility with American audiences. (His
endless trolling of his critics on Twitter did not exactly help,
either.)
People
might point to Simon Cowell as a man with an accent and a penchant for
slashing discourse that Americans loved, but Mr. Cowell is dealing with
less-than-spontaneous musical performances, not signal events in the
American news narrative. There was, of course, the counterexample of David Frost,
who did important work in news, but Mr. Frost did popular special
reports and was not a chronic presence in American living rooms.
Mr.
Morgan, who was chosen in spite of that fact that he had never done a
live show, had the misfortune of sliding into the loafers of Mr. King,
who, for all his limitations, was a decent and reliable stand-in for the
average Joe.
In
a sense, Mr. Morgan is a prisoner of two islands: Britain and
Manhattan. While I may share his feelings about the need for additional
strictures on guns, having grown up in the Midwest, I know that many
people come by their guns honestly and hold onto them dearly for sincere
reasons.
Mr.
Morgan’s approach to gun regulation was more akin to King George III,
peering down his nose at the unruly colonies and wondering how to bring
the savages to heel. He might have wanted to recall that part of the
reason the right to bear arms is codified in the Constitution is that
Britain was trying to disarm the citizenry at the time.
He regrets none of it, but clearly understands his scolding of “stupid” opponents of gun laws was not everyone’s cup of tea.
“I’m
in danger of being the guy down at the end of the bar who is always
going on about the same thing,” he said. He added that he was sure there
were plenty of people in the heartland angry “about this British guy
telling them how to lead their lives and what they should do with their
guns.”
In
the current media age, no one is expected to be a eunuch, without
values or beliefs, but Mr. Morgan’s lecturing on the evils of guns have
clanked hard against the CNN brand, which, for good or ill, is built on
the middle way.
We
don’t look for moral leadership from CNN, or from a British host on a
rampage. Guns, along with many other great and horrible things, are knit
into the fabric of this country. There are folkways peculiar to America
that Mr. Morgan is just learning, including the fact that if you want
to stick out, you first have to work on fitting in.
Kim
Hye Sook suffered unbearable pain and emotional suffering when she was
detained for 28 years in a secretive North Korean concentration camp.
Brutal executions, starvation — even mothers killing and eating their
children to ensure their own survival — were regular occurrences.
Kim — who miraculously escaped from the Bukchang prison camp back in
2003 – granted CBN News with the first American television news
interview to discuss these horrendous conditions. She now lives in South
Korea, with the details of her escape remaining classified for security
reasons. This summer, she released a memoir entitled, “A Concentration
Camp Retold in Tears.”
When she was 13-year-old, her tragic tale began. The year was 1975
and in the blink of an eye the young girl was captured alongside her
entire family. After years of suffering, she didn’t taste freedom until
she was 41-years-old. Kim explains:
“My entire family went to prison. Some were taken to the
mountains; others were put in different labor camps all because of my
grandfather’s one mistake: he escaped to South Korea during the Korean
War.”
Two women are watched by a North Korean guard (Photo Credit: AP)
Today, Kim wears dark glasses to ensure that her identity remains
concealed. While she lost seven family members in the re-education camp,
she currently has two sisters and a brother who are still imprisoned.
She described a typical day at the camp:
“I attended indoctrination classes in the morning. In the
afternoon the children were sent to push trolleys in the coal mines,
often without any safety gear.
People were dying in the mines. There were numerous mine
collapses, so many injuries, people who lost their legs, many who were
buried alive. It was horrible.
I was treated like a slave and worse. I hardly slept. It
was inhuman. But I never complained. I just followed all the rules. I
had to find a way to survive.”
Kim claims that the conditions were so terrible that she thought
about committing suicide “hundreds of thousands of times” during her
28-year detention. But because there was always someone watching her,
this simply wasn’t an option:
“Each prisoner is assigned to watch four or five other
prisoners. So if anything happens, the other prisoners would alert the
guards because they didn’t want to get into trouble themselves.”
While her descriptions of executions are absolutely horrendous,
nothing is more disturbing than her memories about those individuals who
she saw kill their children in an effort to stave off hunger. In one
instance, she recalls a mother boiling her 9-year-old daughter. In
another fit of desperation, a woman killed her 16-year-old son, chopped
him up and took him to a butcher to obtain some corn in exchange.
Kim admits that these details are difficult to share, but she bravely
proclaims, “I want the world to see these images and to hear my
testimony.” In describing the conditions in the isolated
and volatile nation, she says, “I am living proof that there are no
human rights in North Korea.” In September, she was invited to
Washington, D.C., where she testified before a congressional panel about
the conditions she faced.
Watch her story, below:
She is out playing to the low information voter.... "hey yall im just
like you so we are cool together, right" NO you are an evil extension
of Progressive Socialist Democrats attempting to destroy American way of
Life Liberty and the Freedom to do as we wish in a personal responsible
manner. I can take care of me and mine and do not need you to look
after my children or family thank you very much now go to some other
country that wants to be under your stinking regime.
She Allegedly Went on a
Simple Jog in Her Toe Shoes. So Why Did She End Up Screaming and in
Handcuffs? ‘I Didn’t F**king Do Anything Wrong!’
It allegedly started with her jogging in her toe shoes and sporting
headphones. It ended in video of her screaming and being led away in
handcuffs. What happened in between is a matter of debate, but video
showing parts of the incident is certainly gaining traction online.
“I was doing nothing wrong,” she said at first to a nearby witness
while sitting on the sidewalk with her hands behind her and one officer
standing over her. “I was just crossing the street.”
But as police escorted her away while pedestrians passed by, things got ugly.
Whatever the woman did to get the attention of Austin, Texas police, a
witness’ video of cops detaining her on a city sidewalk Thursday
morning then escorting her to a nearby squad car indicate she was not
happy with their actions.
“I didn’t f**king do anything wrong! I didn’t do anything wrong!” she
yelled before being placed in a nearby squad car. She then began crying
as she pleaded, “I f**king crossed the street.”
The Daily Texan,
the student newspaper for the University of Texas at Austin, reported
that police arrested the woman for failing to provide identification.
Student Chris Quintero, who the Daily Texan reported witnessed the
arrest, said he saw the woman jogging with headphones on when police ran
after her. When the woman failed to stop, the officer grabbed her by
the arm and handcuffed her, Quintero said.
“She repeatedly pleaded with them, saying that she was just
exercising and to let her go,” said Quintero, who also shot the video
and took photographs of the incident.
The woman can be seen in the full video attempting to get up from the sidewalk and being kept down by police officers.
Austin police did not return phone calls from TheBlaze about why the woman was detained.
According to a statement to The Daily Texan from police spokeswoman
Lisa Cortinas: “[In this case], the call is titled failure to identify.”
Sitting at Starbucks, on the corner of 24th and San
Antonio, I noticed a particularly odd situation.Two Austin Police
Officers standing outside the Castilian just lingering. Every time I
looked back there was a different student holding a carbon copy of what
looked to be a jay walking citation. Suddenly one of the cops shouts at
an innocent girl jogging with her headphones on through West Campus. He
wobbled after her and grabbed her by the arm. Startled and not knowing
it was a cop, she jerked her arm away. The cop viewed this as resisting
arrest and proceeded to grab both arms tightly, placing her in
handcuffs. She repeatedly pleaded with them saying that she was just
exercising and to let her go. She repeatedly cried out, “I did not do
anything wrong…just give me the ticket.” The other officer strolled over
and not they where making a scene. She tried to get up. I doubt she was
running away, as she was in handcuffs, but the second cop pushed her
back down to the ground. Because of the commotion, they walked her to
the cop car in the alleyway next to the Big Bite, where she, overcome
with frustration, yelled loudly to gain attention. Because of that, the
cops tightened their grip causing her to squirm and kick. Then came two
bike cops from down the alley. Now we have four cops and one small,
helpless girl in the back of a cop car, because she was just going for a
run.
UPDATE: As TheBlaze pointed out earlier this year, citizens have a variety of rights when it comes to interacting with police, including whether or not you have to show ID, and laws vary from state to state.
According to the infogrpahic in TheBlaze story from January and other sources,
in Texas you only have to show ID once you’ve been arrested, not
before. If you’re lawfully detained in Texas, you do not have to provide
ID. However, you cannot give false information about who you are.
It’s still unclear if the woman in the video was arrested or detained
or if she had ID to show or provided information of any sort to police.
TheBlaze will update this story when police provide the information.
Here is a tentative list of modern mass murderers and the estimated number of
people killed by their orders (excluding enemy armies).
In many cases (notably Stalin's and Mao's cases) one has to decide how to
consider the millions who died indirectly because of their political decisions.
The Chinese cultural revolution caused the death of 30 million people
(according to the current Chinese government), but many died of hunger.
Stalin is held responsible for the death of millions by Ukrainians, but
"only" half a million people were killed by his order.
Khomeini sent children to die in the war against Iraq, but it was a war.
Read the bottom of this page for frequently asked questions on controversial
actions such as the atomic bombs, the Iraqi war, etc (that always involve
the current superpower and usually the current president of that superpower).
I welcome feedback if i forgot anything or posted
the wrong data, but please always provide reliable
sources: webpages are gossips, not sources (and the worst one is
Wikipedia, edited by anonymous people).
Reliable sources are books written by professional historians who spent decades
researching the event.
An impressive number of readers don't seem to know what "20th century" means
and keep sending me emails about the Atlantic slave trade, the Native Americans,
the Irish famine, etc.
See also
Wars and Casualties of the 20th and 21st Century.
Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50)
49-78,000,000
Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945)
12,000,000 (concentration camps and civilians deliberately killed in WWII plus 3 million Russian POWs left to die)
Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908)
8,000,000
Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39)
7,000,000 (the gulags plus the purges plus Ukraine's famine)
Note: this website has been banned in China and Turkey since 2006. Please help boycott these countries.
The crimes committed by right-wing dictators have always been easier
to track down than the crimes against humanity committed by communist leaders,
so the figures for communist leaders like Stalin and Mao increase almost yearly
as new secret documents become available. (to be fair, the numbers for Stalin
have decreased in recent years by admission of the Ukrainian authorities). To this day, the Chinese government
has not yet disclosed how many people were executed by Mao's red guards during
the Cultural Revolution and how many people were killed in Tibet during the
Chinese invasion of 1950.
We also don't know how many dissidents have been killed by
order of Kim Il Sung in North Korea, although presumably many thousands.
I often get asked if Hiroshima/Nagasaki qualify
as a genocide. I disagree. First of all, why only
nuclear weapons? The carpet bombing of German cities and of Tokyo
killed the same number of people.
Second, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman did not start that war:
they ended it.
It is even debatable if these bombings killed or saved lives:
Hiroshima probably saved a lot of Japanese lives, because a long
protracted
invasion like the one that took place in Germany would have killed
a lot more people (Germany lost 2 million people, Japan only 300,000,
because Japan was never invaded, while Germany was invaded from all
sides). Actually more Japanese died in two weeks of battles with
the Soviet Union in Manchuria than in the two nuclear bombings.
I suspect a nuclear bomb on Berlin would have killed 100,000
people but caused Germany to surrender right away, thus saving
many German lives.
(I know, it is gruesome to count dead bodies like this; but, again,
i didn't start that war, the Germans and the Japanese started it).
The USA had a casualty rate of 35% in the battle of Okinawa: they
expected
to lose one million soldiers in a land invasion of Japan, and the
estimates
were that Japan would lose the same number of soldiers and many more
civilians.
Most historians believe that it was the atomic bomb to
convince Japan to surrender, and it was the second one: after the first
one,
there were still members of the Japanese cabinet that were opposed to
surrender
(the cabinet had to be unanimous in order for the emperor to surrender).
The dissenters who wanted to continue the war even tried a
coup to overthrow the emperor rather than obey the order to surrender.
After the first bomb, Nishina (head of the Japanese nuclear program) was
asked
if it was possible that the USA could build another atomic bomb within
six
months: obviously the people who asked him the question were not going
to
surrender unless a second bomb was possible.
Koichi Kido, advisor to emperor Hirohito, said: "We of the peace party
were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war."
Hisatsune Sakomizu, chief secretary of Cabinet, said that the atomic
bombs were a "golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the
war."
Thus the Japanese themselves (those who wanted to surrender) seem to
indicate
that the two atomic bombs were indispensable to end a war that was
killing
hundreds of thousands of people per battle (the battle of Okinawa killed
more
Japanese than the atomic bomb on Nagasaki).
It is also estimated that throughout Japan-occupied Asia about 200,000
civilians were dying every month (of disease, hunger, etc): if the
atomic
bombs helped Japan surrender even just six months earlier, that saved
the
lives of one million Indonesians, Indochinese, Philipinos, Chinese, etc.
(Notable dissenting voices were the two most powerful USA generals,
Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, who both felt that the atomic
bombs
were unnecessary to finish Japan).
People die in wars. During the previous world-war, millions died
of everything from guns to chemical weapons. The fact that a more
or less efficient weapon is used to fight a war does not
constitute genocide, per se.
It is not the weapon, but the intent. Churchill's and Truman's
intent was to end the war, not to exterminate the peoples (which
they could have done easily, had they wanted to).
In fact, i think that Churchill and Truman are exemplary of how to
treat a defeated enemy: instead of annihilating the enemies, they
helped Germany and Japan to rebuild themselves and become stronger
wealthier than they had been before the war. It may have been the first
time in history.
Furthermore, we know that Werner Heisenberg in Germany and
Yoshio Nishina in Japan were working on an atomic bomb: what if they
had had the time to complete one? Heisenberg in Germany had failed to correctly
calculate the critical mass of uranium required to sustain a chain
reaction, but Nishina in Japan had just done that in 1944. It was a matter of
time before German and Japanese scientists would find out the right
recipe. Thus the first bomb
saved a lot of lives, probably millions of lives (not just Japanese lives,
but lives of all the nations that were being massacred by the Japanese).
Last but not least, the USA dropped 720,000 leaflets on Hiroshima and other
cities two days earlier, warning of the impending destruction of the city.
It is certainly debatable, instead, if the second atomic bomb was necessary.
The USA only waited three days to see the
effect of the first atomic bomb and of its leaflets.
Today sitting in our living rooms we can calmly debate this issue forever.
Of course, it was a different kind of decision for the man sitting in the
White House in the middle of a world war that had been raging for four years.
I've been asked why i blame the USA only for part of the civilian deaths in
Vietnam while i blame the Soviet Union for all of the civilian casualties in
Afghanistan. The USA "invasion" of Vietnam is not as clearcut as the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan:
1. Even today many in Vietnam think that the aggressor
was North Vietnam, not the USA, at least at the beginning,
whereas everybody in Afghanistan blames the Soviet Union for that
invasion. Nobody welcomed the Soviet Union, whereas about half of
Vietnam welcomed the USA.
2. When the Soviet Union withdrew, almost no Afghani followed them,
whereas, when the USA withdrew, about eight million Vietnamese
left with them and about three million ran away from Vietnam in
the following decades risking their lives (the "boat people").
3. There are documented large-scale atrocities by the North
Vietnamese against their own population (read the Black Book of
Communism) while i haven't seen evidence of any large-scale
atrocity by the Afghani fighters against their own population
4. The Soviet Union tried to invade the WHOLE of Afghanistan.
The USA never tried to invade the northern part of Vietnam: it
simply fought the Vietcong that wanted to annex south Vietnam to
north Vietnam (if you read the history of the country, north and
south Vietnam have fought wars for more than 1,000 years: go to the
Timeline of Indochina and look for Annam
and Champa. the ancient names of the two kingdoms). When the USA
bombed civilians in North Vietnam, then i consider it a war crime.
The most frequently asked questions are always about current
unpopular USA presidents: Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II... The moment the USA
elects a new president, i start receiving emails asking to add him to the list
of "genociders". The moment the president leaves office the same people forget about him and jump on the next one.
Can we consider President Bush a genocider due to all of the civilians killed
in Iraq under his watch? I don't think so, because the vast majority of
civilians killed in Iraq were NOT killed by US troops.
It is genocide, but the "genociders" are others, and the situation
is still too murky to decide who exactly killed those 100,000 civilians.
(If Bush is indirectly guilty of it, then certainly Islam is too).
The USA bears some clear responsibilities for the chaos, but
ineptitude, miscalculation, ignorance, etc do not qualify as genocide.
Otherwse the United Nations and France would be responsible for
the genocide in Rwanda (900,000 people).
Even if one wanted to count all the civilians killed in that civil war as
Bush's and Blair's responsibility, it would be (as of 2013, long after the
USA and Britain withdrew) 120,000 people in ten years, i.e. 12,000 a year.
In 20 years Saddam Hussein was responsible for the killing of 600,000 people
(that he personally ordered), an average of 30,000 a year. Therefore,
technically speaking one could argue that the war, by removing Saddam,
saved and is still saving 18,000 lives a year.
Putin would be a better candidate for "genocider", since the vast majority of
Chechen civilians killed under his watch were killed by Russian troops.
However, i have never received a single email nominating Putin...
Specifically about Bush II (the hot topic between 2003 and 2008).
I have seen no evidence whatsoever that he or anybody working for him
or the British prime minister or the Australian prime minister wanted to kill Iraqi civilians.
And even less evidence that Iraqi civilians were killed in any large number
by US soldiers. The Iraqi civilians killed by US soldiers are estimated
at about 4% of all deaths, which is a little over 5,000. With all due
respect for those families, a seven-year war that kills only 5,000 people
(less than 1,000 a year) does not register anywhere in the history
of the world.
All the other civilians were killed by militias, suicide bombers, etc.
and almost always in the name of Islam (so it would be more appropriate to
vent your anger at that religion than at the USA).
In fact, all the documents show that some caution was taken by the US
and Britain to avoid mass civilian casualties. Compare with Vietnam, when the US
bombed densely populated areas knowing that thousands of civilians
would die. In fact, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might be the first
large-scale wars in which the winners went out of their way to avoid mass
civilian casualties. Compare with any other war.
Future generations (who will face other crises and will be more concerned
with their presidents than with Bush II) may see more clearly who is
responsible for those killings. Most of them were killed by fellow Iraqis
or at least fellow Muslims, not by US soldiers. Once we remove all the
personal emotions against this or that politician,
it is self-evident who/what killed those Iraqi civilians.
If you simply scream hysterically against the president of the USA, you are
not helping solve the real problem of those places.
Coming to more serious issues,
Lothar von Trotha massacred the Herero and Namaqua in Namibia in 1904-1907.
That episode is not listed here (despite the large number of victims) because
the German government never ordered those massacres. Once the facts became
known, outrage in Germany among the political class forced the Kaiser
to fire Von Trotha.
So i consider this event the folly of one overzealous and racist man rather
than a real genocide.
The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution protects the right of individuals[1][2] to keep and bear arms.[3][4][5][6] The Supreme Court of the United States
has ruled that the right vests in individuals, not merely collective
militias, while also ruling that the right is not unlimited and does not
prohibit all regulation of either firearms or similar devices.[7]State and local governments are limited to the same extent as the federal government from infringing this right per the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, as part of the first ten amendments comprising the Bill of Rights.
The Second Amendment was based partially on the right to keep and bear arms in English common-law and was influenced by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Sir William Blackstone
described this right as an auxiliary right, supporting the natural
rights of self-defense, resistance to oppression, and the civic duty to
act in concert in defense of the state.[8]
In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court of the United States
ruled that, "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution;
neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its
existence" and limited the applicability of the Second Amendment to the
federal government.[9] In United States v. Miller
(1939), the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government and the
states could limit any weapon types not having a “reasonable
relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated
militia”.[10][11]
In the twenty-first century, the amendment has been subjected to renewed academic inquiry and judicial interest.[11] In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision, expressly holding the amendment to protect an individual right to possess and carry firearms.[12][13] In McDonald v. Chicago
(2010), the Court clarified its earlier decisions that limited the
amendment's impact to a restriction on the federal government, expressly
holding that the Fourteenth Amendment
applies the Second Amendment to state and local governments to the same
extent that the Second Amendment applies to the federal government.[14] Despite these decisions, the debate between the gun control and gun rightsmovements and related organizations continues.[15]
d
