Constitutional Rights and Amendment

Limiting Constitutional Rights to Bear Arms

The capital issue in the hypothetical court case detailed within Application 1.2 is the boundaries for limitations on the personal right to bear arms. Those boundaries are unclear in this case, because the defendant is exercising his right to bear arms as denoted within the second amendment to the United States Constitution. However, this person (known as Lloyd) has stockpiled enough arms that his store is dangerous to others living around him, which is why they have sued Lloyd claiming that his actions under the second amendment violate their constitutional rights. Specifically, they are claim Lloyd is infringing their rights outlined in the fifth and ninth amendments to the constitution. The relevance of these amendments to this case is that the fifth amendment states no person should suffer the loss of their life or property, whereas the ninth mandates that rights granted in the Constitution (and in its amendments) should not cause an infringement of the rights of others. The core of the matter, then, is whether Lloyd's rights to bear arms infringe upon the ninth amendment rights of his neighbors, which states that granting constitutional rights to others should not impinge upon the rights of anyone. The fifth amendment is the basis for Lloyd's neighbors claiming his rights to bear arms are infringing on their right to own property safely.

Rule

The general rule which is applicable to this case is the ninth amendment, which is readily paraphrased as the listing of certain rights in the Constitution should not impede upon or reduce the rights of other people as guaranteed by that same document.

Analysis

When applying the ninth amendment to the fifth amendment rights guaranteed to Lloyd's neighbors and which they claim he is violating by exercising his right to bear arms under the second amendment, it is pivotal to understand the nature of Lloyd's activities and how they apply to the second amendment. The Constitution allows for private citizens to bear arms. However, it largely appears as though Lloyd is doing so in an extremist way which very could infringe upon the rights of his neighbors. Typically, when people gather arms they merely possess firearms. Lloyd, however, has pushed the limits of the constitution in that he is a private citizen with a considerable amount of explosions -- in addition to a cache of firearms.

Ultimately, it is the possession of the amount of explosions which Lloyd has which may decide this case in the favor of his neighbors. His neighbors believe that any sort of detonation near Lloyd's house could trigger his arsenal of explosions, which in turn could either damage or destroy their own property which is situated next to his. Therefore, Lloyd is not only stretching the limits of the second amendment by possession both firearms and an inordinate amount of explosives, but he is also potentially endangering the rights of his neighbors to own private property -- which is expressly allowed in the fifth amendment.

Thus, this case actually revolves around a contradiction of Constitutional rights, which is ultimately how the ninth amendment pertains to this case. Again, that amendment is the central rule to this case because it states that the exercise of constitutional rights which infringe upon the rights of others is not sanctioned under the ninth amendment. When one examines the aforementioned factors of this case, it greatly seems as though Lloyd has violated this facet of the ninth amendment. The strongest point of corroboration for this perception is that in this case, Lloyd is described as a radical. Thus, it is not outside the realm of possibility that he may even choose to detonate his arsenal of weapons on his own, to say nothing if there were some sort of natural disaster which might inadvertently produce the same effect. All of these reasons help to illustrate that the pertinent facts in this case support the notion that Lloyd is quite possibly violating the ninth amendment rights of his neighbors because he is impinging upon their right to own property as delineated in the fifth amendment.