Decline of the 4th Amendment

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The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,...

That includes your OC'd gun, and you while OCing.

Forum member Custodian posted the link below on another thread. It took me a little while to read through it.

It is a real eye opener! I thought it deserved its own thread. Want to know how it hascome to be that police can do so many things thatseem to violate a basic understanding of the Fourth Amendment?It goes back further than you think.

Special thanks to Custodian for tipping us to this particular facet of the 4th Amendment.

http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/cops.htm

Itsquite likely to get some people's dander up.If you areone. Fine. Great, even. You wouldn't behuman ifit didn't.But, please keep it civil. And,pleasekeep it specific. No heated generalizations.

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I found the "RESISTING ARREST" section quite interesting.

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Sheriff wrote:

I found the "RESISTING ARREST" section quite interesting.

Click to expand...

What a stunning article, eh?

Notice that the author, Roger Roots, has a doctorate in law.Scroll to the first footnote and then go up to the nextline.

I was floored by the concept that law at one time was meant to restrain government.

"Heh! You can only punish people if they actually break a law. You can't do whatever you want. You have to govern within the law."

Here I was thinking all along that the law wasto restrain people from certain acts. I never really considered the other side of it, viewing rights declarations as the solerestraint.

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Bookmarked for later digestion. Great find! Thank you.

[align=center]POLICE AND THE "AUTOMOBILE EXCEPTION"[/align] The courts have been particularly unkind to Fourth Amendment protections in the context of motor vehicle travel. Since the 1920s, Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has allowed for a gaping and ever-widening exception to the warrant requirement with regard to the nation's roadways.[sup]391[/sup] Today, police force untold millions of motorists off the roads each year to be searched or scrutinized without judicial warrant of any kind.[sup]392[/sup] Any police officer can generally find some pretext to justify a stop of any automobile.[sup]393[/sup] In effect, road travel itself is subject to a near total level of police control,[sup]394[/sup] a phenomenon that would have confounded the Framers, who treated seizures of wagons, horses and buggies as subject to the same constraints as seizures of other property.[sup]395[/sup]

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I haven't finished yet, but this is really fascinating.