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From the Constitution

Here is the text of the Fifth Amendment from the Constitution:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

The Grand Jury

The first part of the amendment talks about a grand jury. The grand jury is a jury that decides if a trial should be held. They look at all the evidence and then decide if a person should be charged with a crime. If they decide there is enough evidence, then they will issue an indictment and a regular trial will be held. The grand jury is only used in cases where the punishment for the crime is severe such as life in prison or the death sentence.

Double Jeopardy

The next section protects the person from being tried for the same crime more than once. This is called double jeopardy.

Perhaps the most famous part of the Fifth Amendment is the right to not testify against yourself during a trial. This is often called "taking the fifth." The government must present witnesses and evidence to prove the crime and cannot force someone to testify against themselves.

You've probably heard the police on TV say something like "you have the right to remain silent, anything you say or do may be used against you in a court of law" when they arrest someone. This statement is called the Miranda Warning. Police are required to tell people this before they question them as part of the Fifth Amendment. It reminds citizens that they don't have to testify against themselves.

The amendment also states that a person has a right to "due process of law." Due process means that any citizen charged with a crime will be given a fair trial that follows a defined procedure through the judicial system.

The last section says that the government can't take a person's private property without paying them a fair price for it. This is called eminent domain. The government can take your property for public use, but they have to pay you a fair price for it.

Read more from the original source:
US Government for Kids: Fifth Amendment - Ducksters

In November 2007, the novelist David Foster Wallace wrote a short essay for a special edition of The Atlantic on The American Idea. Writing about 9/11 and all that came after, Wallace proposed what some might consider a monstrous thought experiment:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, sacrifices on the altar of freedom? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of lifesacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Wallaces point was that, in the wake of 9/11, a host of policies had been put in placethe Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, private contractors performing military dutieswithout a substantive public debate about the trade-offs they represented and whether they were worth it. Wallace wanted to know what it said about us as a people that we were unable or unwilling even to consider whether some things might be more important than safety.

Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrificeeither of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious? he asked. And if we would not have such a conversation, What kind of future does that augur?

More than a decade later, we are still incapable of serious discussion of the trade-offs between safety and freedom. For the most part, were not even able to admit that such trade-offs exist.

Are you ready for another monstrous thought experiment? What if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to mass shootings is part of the price of the American idea? In some ways, mass shootings are a more apt example of what Wallace was talking about than terrorism. After all, we can arguably do something about a worldwide ideological and religious movement that uses violence as a political weaponand we have. Whether the aggregate cost in American blood and treasure has been worth it is another question, but it suffices to say that we can do much less about a random madman intent on killing innocents than we can about ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Set aside, for now, the facile arguments for gun control half-measures that wouldnt have stopped the Parkland shootingor Las Vegas, Virginia Tech, Newtown, or the others. Consider instead what the Left thinks it would really take to stop these kinds of shootings: a repeal of the Second Amendment, followed by mass confiscation of firearms and subsequent heavy regulation of private gun ownership, along the lines of policies in many European countries.

Im not trying to be provocative. Thats really what it would take. Are we willing to consider it? Should we? What does it say about us that we cant even acknowledge the trade-offs involved in keeping U.S. school children safe? The best we could manage last week were the worn-out, ritualized responses: outraged calls for anemic gun control measures from the Left and a naive insistence from the Right that tackling mental health issues will somehow solve the problem.

The New York Times Bret Stephens, for one, is at least willing to be honest about the thing. Back in October, he wrote a column calling for repealing the Second Amendment. Theres of course much to criticize in Stephens argument, beginning with his cherry-picked statistics that fail to explain how, despite a recent surge, the murder rate, and violent crime in general, has been plummeting since the 1990s even as gun ownership has steadily increased.

Im not going to pick apart Stephens piece (my colleague David Harsanyi did a fine job of that shortly after it ran). The point is that Stephens plainly states what most liberals are unwilling to admit: if we really want to stop gun violence in America, were going to have to make fundamental changes to our constitutional order so that the government can wrest guns out of the hands of Americans.

To suggest anything less is intellectually dishonest because anything less simply wont work. Its no surprise, then, that Joe Scarborough took to The Washington Post on Friday to argue for stronger background checks, a ban on bump stocks, and assurances that military-style weaponswhatever that meanswill stop finding their way into the hands of terrorists, domestic abusers and the mentally ill. He puts these forward as substantive policies that will not only make a difference but wont require rewriting the Bill of Rights, neither of which are true.

Or consider the refrain that immediately popped up on social media after the shooting: that guns should be regulated like automobiles. Sure, there are myriad ways we could do that, from requiring things like insurance and a license, to heavy restrictions on what sort of guns manufacturers are allowed to sell to the public.

But of course owning and driving a car is not a constitutionally protected right, its a privilege that comes with certain duties and costs. If were going to regulate firearms like cars, were going to have to decide that owning a gun will no longer be a constitutional right but a heavily regulated privilege. If we do that, were going to have to be honest about what that means: changing the very nature of the constitutional system Americas Founders designed.

Here it must be said that the Second Amendment was not meant to safeguard the right to hunt deer or shoot clay pigeons, or even protect your home and family from an intruder. The right to bear arms stems from the right of revolution, which is asserted in the Declaration of Independence and forms the basis of Americas social compact. Our republic was forged in revolution, and the American people have always retained the right to overthrow their government if it becomes tyrannical. That doesnt mean that private militias should have tanks and missile launchers, but it does mean that revolutionthe right of first principlesundergirds our entire political system.

That might sound academic or outlandish next to the real-life horror of a school shooting, but the fact remains that we cant simply wave off the Second Amendment any more than we can wave off the First, or the Fourth, or any of them. They are constitutive elements of the American idea, without which the entire constitutional system would eventually collapse.

In this, America is unlike the European nations that gun control advocates like to compare it with. Germany can restrict the right to bear arms as easily as it canand doesrestrict free speech. Not so in America. If we want to change that, it will involve a substantial diminishment of our constitutional rights as we have known them up until now. After last weeks school shooting, some Americans are okay with that, especially those families who are grieving. But I suspect most Americans are not willing to make that trade-off, and might never beunless they suffer the same of kind personal loss.

Returning to Wallaces thought experiment, we might rephrase it like this: is the Second Amendment worth dying for? Thats another way of asking what the American idea is worth. Its not an easy question, and I dont pose it lightly, as Im sure Wallace didnt.

But its one we need to ask, even in the face of heartbreaking and devastating loss. Is ours a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices of our personal safety in order to preserve our democratic way of life? If we will not sacrifice some measure our personal safety, are we willing to sacrifice something like the Second Amendment? If so, what else are we willing to sacrifice?

See the rest here:
Is The Second Amendment Worth Dying For?

Weve seen some clarifying moments in the media since the Florida school shooting. If nothing else, the secret desires of the gun-grabbing crowd have been exposed as they feel more emboldened by a tide of national outrage. Rather than the usual calls for sensible gun laws or more background checks, some have simply come right out and called for the repeal of the Second Amendment. (Which is what a lot of them wanted all along, but were too timid to say it in polite company.) There are petitions popping up online all over the left, including places like MoveOn and Change.org.

Luckily for them, theyre getting some celebrity endorsements for the idea. I noticed one on Twitter last night from none other than singer and actress Alyssa Milano. She was blasting out a virtual poster explaining that the Second Amendment was a dumb idea because of all the other things which were popular in the same year that it was adopted.

This is apparently the sort of thinking which infects the minds of those who want to end gun rights. Take a look at that list. Certainly there were some ideas baked into the cake of 18th-century society which are abhorrent when viewed in the modern day. Slavery and gender inequality could be considered popular ideas for many living in that era. But lead paint? I dont know if that was popular so much as simply being the accepted industry standard before anyone had any idea how bad lead is for human beings.

Cholera, smallpox and typhus? Does anyone honestly think those were popular in the colonies? Oh boy, honey. I hear theres another outbreak of smallpox. I sure hope we get some of that here!

Dying during childbirth? I hate to disillusion Ms. Milano, but that was as much of a tragedy then as it is now. The same goes for unsanitary surgical procedures. Medical science simply hadnt advanced enough at that point. Nobody was praying for infections and amputations after surgery. And dont even get me started on chamber pots. If youd shown any of the colonists an actual modern toilet they would have sold like hotcakes.

Were traveling on foot or on horseback popular at that time? Does the former star of Charmed think that the rest of the world was driving cars at that point, but the idiotic settlers in the new world were opposed to them? People walked to get around or, if they were fortunate enough, might have been able to afford a horse.

Milano is supposedly taking some time off from acting so she can travel around the country and lead the way in various activist morangings, raning from #MeToo to repealing the Second Amendment. Shes going to be spending some time in Houston this month doing precisely that. But if this is the leadership that activists settle on, theyve got a long, uncomfortable slog ahead of them.

See more here:
Alyssa Milano explains why the Second Amendment is horrible

Its been a sad week to be a liberal, again. Nothing seems to be going right for our betters and aspiring masters. America continues to prosper, to their dismay. Their conspiracy theories are turning into borscht. Donald Trump is breaking their collective collectivist spirit. They cant even manage to effectively blame conservatives for things conservatives didnt do.

Bathe in their tears. The salty goodness of their sob juice will add a radiant glow to your skin and put a spring in your step.

People are digging the tax bill, which is weird since it killed all of those who survived the mass extinction that followed Trumps withdrawal from the Paris Climate Grift. The stock market bump has largely stopped bumping. Remember the other week when the savvy market players at MSNBC were hoping that Paul Krugmans stock tips were finally going to pay off? Yeah, not so much. There is nothing that liberals hate more than the inevitable prosperity that follows the inauguration of a truly conservative administration.

But what about George W. Bush!?!?!?!?

Like I said, the inevitable prosperity that follows the inauguration of a truly conservative administration.

The Democrats tiptoed through the tulips into the kill zone of Donald Trumps immigration ambush and still probably think they won even as their fantasies of a dozen million new Democrats lies there, a pile of smoldering rubble. Trump played it as we hoped he never really wanted to give the amnesty he offered, but he offered enough to build up the dreams of the Dreamers knowing that the Democrats would crush those dreams under their Birkenstocks. See, if the Democrats had gone for Trumps proposal and imposed real border security, not only would that have turned off the Fresh Democrat Voter spigot but would have left them with zip to pretend to trade for amnesty for the big score, the other 10 million plus illegal aliens who have invaded our country. But now the Democrats have nothing, and Trump is tweeting to Dreamers accurately that the Democrats betrayed them because all the Democrats really care about is replacing the current electorate with a more bueno one.

Democrats, why do you hate Dreamers dreams?

The liberals were also sad about how they cant blame the recent shooting on conservatives at least not honestly. How many outright false stories did their Democrat transcriptionists in the mainstream media have to correct as they desperately tried to tie this murderer to patriotic conservatives? Its got to be deeply disappointing when, time after time, the killers stubbornly refuse to be conservative, observant Christian or Jewish NRA members. Instead, Jackie Earle Haleys mutant doppelgnger cultivates the kind of anti-Semitic, race-obsessed weirdness that would have made him fit right in on any liberal college campus.

The liberals lies no longer work, and they are realizing it. Too bad they got nothing else. They demand more power for the government, yet in seemingly every one of these cases it turns out the government has totally dropped the ball. Perhaps tracking down a guy who babbles online about shooting up a school cuts into their on-the-job sexting action. Better give the bureaucrats who screwed-up this and multiple other cases even more power, and take rights away from the citizens who didnt do anything wrong becauseuhwell, uh, you must like mass murder if you dare ask questions like that!

Nope, not an effective argument. And the liberals seem to know it. They are just going through the motions with their reflexive claims that the Normals who had nothing to do with this atrocity are to blame. Whether you are some stand-up comic tweets about how Normals blood on your hands because a dirtbag mutant a continent away committed a crime after the FBI shrugged, or a millennial doofus who writes for Vox trying to explain Heller without stating its basic holding, it just doesnt work anymore. Nor do tweets about how awful it is that Trump is smiling with the heroes from that awful day it must means he likes school shootings, I guess. Seems legit. Whatever.

The left is shooting intellectual and rhetorical blanks, because now were wait for it woke. We see the truth. No one who wants us to give up our guns does so because they want us to be more able to defend ourselves from crime or tyranny. Their agenda is clear, no matter how much they lie and deny.

Disarmament is key to converting us from citizens to subjects, and were just not playing that game. So they mutter about the NRA which you need to join if you dig freedom and we keep buying guns and ammunition to create the facts on the ground that will ensure their long-sought after end state of another Venezuela will never happen here.

And for the folks who forgot about that whole American Revolution thing, and are unfamiliar with the insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, heres a look at the power of armed citizens with small arms and how they can absolutely fight and win against would-be dictators in the modern world.

Then theres their pivot to the latest bimbo trying to use an alleged ancient fling with the president to get some attention. The liberals once again got all aroused by the idea that this would do him in with his fans: Well, your so-called president got with a Playboy Playmate and also a porn star and also a Slovenian super model and..andwait

Yeah, thatll totally take out Trump. Well turn on him because he allegedly scored with too many hot women.

You know, we kept warning them how they would hate the new rules, and now they so do. You normalize Oval Office trysts with chubby cigar aficionados and then when you start whining because a then-playboy canoodles with a then-Playboy Playmate, and youre stunned that instead of us hanging our heads we start offering high-fives?

We dont care. Thats the new rule. Learn it. Know it. Live it.

And then theres Robert Mueller and his agonized admission that no American citizens were willingly involved with Russian meddling in the election. Note the word is now meddling. They dont use the word collusion anymore since Mueller admitted that there was no collusion which is what weve been saying for over a year in response to Team Felonia Milhous von Pantsuits pathetic attempt to explain away her humiliating defeat at the hands of patriotic Americans.

Instead of frog-marching the whole of Trump World out of the West Wing for partying with Putin, Muellers festival of liberal onanism has instead resulted in indictments of a bunch of trolls who remain safely out-of-reach in Vladivostok, the better to avoid the feds being humiliated in court like they were by Cliven Bundy. But hey they were going for Trump and instead got the mastermind manipulators behind 13 follower accounts such as @MAGATrumpMAGAGuy and @BernieSuperFan72, so thats almost as good.

Collusions fades to meddling which fades to random tweeting which fades to framed victim of liberal machinations Mike Flynn either withdrawing his coerced guilty pleas or getting a presidential pardon based on the tidal wave of recent revelations of wrongdoing swirling about his railroading. Either one works.

Yeah, its been a sad week to be a liberal, again. Good.

See the original post:
Liberals Fail, Volume XXXVII - Kurt Schlichter

And some are former residents of the Jungle, the camp near Calais, Frances main ferry port for travel to Britain, that became a symbol of the global migration crisis in 2015, home to migrants from the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

When the French government closed the camp in October 2016, evacuating thousands and offering to resettle them around the country, many made their way to Brussels, another international transit hub. Over the summer, tents and makeshift shelters appeared in Maximilian Park. Migrants who might once have headed for Calais continue to arrive in the city, hoping to journey onward.

Mr. Khater certainly does not want to stay in Belgium. I am afraid here, he said, because I dont have an education, I dont have money, I dont speak French.

Most important, he added, Belgium doesnt understand the politics of Sudan; if I ask asylum here, Belgium may send me back to Italy immediately, or worse, even to Khartoum.

European Union law requires migrants to apply for residency or asylum in the first country in the bloc they reach. In the past three years, tens of thousands of Sudanese have crossed the Mediterranean by boat, landing in Italy, Greece or Spain. Most applied for asylum, and only a few hundred have been deported, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Many Sudanese, however, seek to move on, in secret and without papers, to Britain. Often that involves camping for months near bus stops, truck stops, train stations or seaports.

So what do countries owe such transitory migrants? Belgiums state secretary for asylum policy and migration, Theo Francken, has argued that the state cannot take responsibility for those who do not claim asylum.

His reasoning is that if Belgium allows a few hundred migrants to reside illegally on its territory, it could attract millions of others, potentially plundering Belgiums generous social security system.

Seeing unauthorized migration rise in Brussels last summer, the Belgian government ordered a series of heavy-handed raids on informal camps and homeless shelters. Those raids along with falling temperatures have largely succeeded in breaking up camps in public parks, and received wide popular support.

Even so, hundreds of Belgian families have reacted by inviting migrants into their homes. (Last month, the government proposed police raids on the houses of citizens suspected of sheltering unauthorized migrants.) Medical charities are providing food, clothes and assistance, and volunteers have set up shelters like the one where Mr. Khater sleeps, in a former office building. The total cost of sheltering one migrant is about 10 euros per night, organizers estimate.

There have been several demonstrations against the government policies, and about 3,000 people formed a human chain around migrants at the Gare du Nord last month to prevent a police raid.

The crackdown has also exposed Belgium to the possibility of rebuke on human rights grounds.

In September, the government invited Sudanese officials to help identify and expel people in the country illegally who did not want to apply for asylum. Ten Sudanese were subsequently sent to Khartoum, and accounts quickly surfaced that at least three had been abused upon their return.

The Belgian government ordered an investigation of the allegations. It concluded earlier this month that Brussels had not done enough to assess the risks faced by those deported, and warned that migrants who had not applied for asylum still had the right to be protected from torture.

The report said it was impossible to establish whether the abuses had taken place.

At the Gare du Nord, Mr. Khater and several fellow travelers showed wounds and scars that they said had been inflicted by the Belgian police. One had a dislocated thumb, another a fresh cut across his jaw, yet another a stitched eyebrow. Several had open wounds. All said they knew Sudanese men who had recently been deported to Khartoum and then dropped out of contact.

Why arent the police kind to us? Mr. Khater asked. I am running for my life. I did do nothing wrong. I dont understand the politics here.

Mr. Kassou, the shelter organizer, agreed that certain officers in certain towns, not all police could be pretty violent with migrants. We very regularly have people who enter with wounds, even bites from police dogs, he said.

Sarah Frederickx, a spokeswoman for the Belgian police, said that officers treated transitory migrants in a very empathic and humane way. That being said, she added, it is possible that during certain operations, for instance when people fiercely resist police actions, officers use force, but in proportion.

Many aspects of what is happening are familiar, according to Johan Leman, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the Catholic University of Leuven who is an expert on Belgian migration policy and has worked with migrants in Brussels for decades. Irregular migration from Africa to Europe isnt new, he said. Tough return policies have existed in Europe since the 1980s, and the continent experienced a refugee crisis in the 1990s after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

What is new, he said, and what I have never seen before in Europe to this extent, is, first of all, that ministers are pounding their chests, saying, Look at me, how many people I have deported now. And secondly, that people are being deported back to a country of which we manifestly know that the government is violating human rights I am thinking of Sudan here.

Sudans president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for trial on charges of war crimes and genocide.

When police officers arrested several Sudanese migrants, including three minors, around the Gare du Nord last year, Mr. Francken, the state secretary for asylum policy, described the operation on Facebook as a cleanup. After a public outcry condemning the remark as xenophobic, he offered his apologies to the prime minister, who did not accept them.

Continue reading here:
How the E.U.s Migrant Crisis Reached the Streets of ...