Well, I’m sure that’s the ‘point’ BG is attempting to make. I’ll just say it’s debatable as to whether this was the sole ‘Actual-intent’ that the folks who wrote the Amendment. I subscribe to the view point, based on early revisions of the Amendment, things like the Federalist Papers and writings and views of folks like Madison that there are two separate things being addressed in the Amendment, and that taking out the part about the militia being well regulated would have zero effect on the second part of the Amendment. Personally I don’t see the actual intent stuff being unclear at all. But, seeing as we’ve had these discussions in the past, I know that this seemingly cut and dried answer (to me) will be rancorously contested, usually by simply quoting the Second as written over and over using the posters simple reading of the text as proof that it says what the poster says it says.
Everyone claims the intent is debatable, but a simple reading of the English language shows that it’s not. The first part of the second amendment is a dependent clause. If it is no longer true, then the entire sentence falls apart. Just like if I said “Being a good person, I never kill.” If I add “I am not a good person” to that, “I never kill” goes out the window.
And this has nothing to do with whether I think gun ownership is a good idea.
Except, you know, you are wrong. Context is everything. It’s not like we don’t have those early drafts of the Amendment, or those writings by the folks who, you know, drafted and wrote the thing, and thus have to rely on ‘a simple reading of the English language’ without any context or deeper understanding of what they meant. Seriously, this is a silly argument to make. Consider…how often on this message board does one person write something that is either taken out of context or misunderstood by someone else? Especially after years have gone by. Now, take one post out of context (i.e. don’t look at the history of the poster in question, don’t look at the rest of the discussion, just look at one post)…a ‘simple reading of the English language’ could completely change the intent of what the original poster meant. Same goes here. Originally, the Second was talking about two separate things. During redrafts in committee we ended up with the current cluster fuck. The INTENT of the original drafters, however, is clear…they wanted people to have access to personal arms. And they wanted a well regulated (i.e. duly constituted) militia. Two things, not one all jumbled together.
Why was the Bill of Rights created? It was a declaration of the unalienable rights of the individual and those rights do not apply to the government. The Federal government does not have a 1st Amendment right to free speech. The State governments do not have a 4th Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. The governments standing military does not have a 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. Only individuals have these unalienable rights.
In United States v. Miller, the U.S. Supreme Court noted that, *“The Militia, which the States were expected to maintain and train is set in contrast with Troops which they were forbidden to keep without the consent of Congress. The sentiment of the time strongly disfavored standing armies; the common view was that adequate defense of country and laws could be secured through the Militia–civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion.”
The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. “A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline.” And further, that ordinarily, when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time*.
In the 1770’s, the “militias” were private citizens who owned their own rifles, pistols, flints, powder, and shot and could be called upon to defend themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their government.
In order to insure ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the Federalists and Anti-federalists argued many points and principles. One of their conconclusions was that “the people” needed to know that certain personal rights could not be taken away on the whim of some future government. No BOR = no ratification of the Constitution.
So you are interpreting it as:
As long as a well regulated militia is needed for the security of the free state then the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.
He forgot slaves.
His point was tyranny by majority rule, but you can always move, right?
In this modern age you must balance the probabilities of a bunch of Walter Mitties, nut jobs, religious extremists, people with low self esteem and/or potential criminals being a bulwark against your country being taken over by a totalitarian government, rather then restricting the every day freedoms of ordinary citizensto live their lives without the fear of armed crime or poorly trained idiots accidently killing or wounding innocent third parties and their loved ones.
It is more likely that a totalitarian government would be instituted by armed extremists calling themselves “militias” then from the duly appointed armed forces of a democratically elected government.
The Western Liberal democracies have moved on since the two hundred odd years when the American Revolution happened.
In todays world for example, Somalia is big on militias, not so big on democracy.
On a personal basis, as an experienced weapon handler, I’ve never found it easy to trust the the motivation of those people who get a thrill out of weapon ownership/handling, rather then looking on weapons as just another tool like a wrench or a lawnmower.
I would not be stunned with amazement if more then a few gun owners got excited about having the power of life and death in their hands first, before finding some sort of cause to justify their ownership to themselves and other people.
As opposed to those who passionately espoused causes before, and then became gun owners as some sort of protection for their cause.
These I suspect are a little bit thin on the ground when compared with the former.
That’s reason enough for it to be enshrined in the Constitution.
I’m not terribly interested by the argument about the Second Amendment and modern society, that’s a tired old argument that everyone just screams platitudes about.
What I do find interesting is BrainGlutton’s claims that even in the 18th century, the second amendment was a bad idea. If you look at the history of the colonies it seems like a very reasonable provision in light of recent history. Under the colonial system, one of the reasons that the colonists were able to hold out any sort of fight against the British at all in the beginning was because of organized militias spread throughout the colonies. These militias had regularly training, their members owned personal firearms, and they had armories where they housed large stockpiles of weapons.
Eventually in the long war foreign aid, weapons purchases, and eventually the professional Continental Army became more important over time…but we had to stand up to the British for several years and across all thirteen colonies before it got to that point. If those citizen militias hadn’t existed, it’s very unlikely a serious armed resistance to the British could have sprung up so quickly. The British recognized this, and that is why they sought to disarm the militias.
From the perspective of the colonists who prevailed over the British, they and their ancestors had come over here sometimes almost two hundred years prior and were basically left to their own devices. In the early days large proportions of the colonists died to native americans and disease. Even in the lifetime of many of the revolutionary era Americans they had been predated upon by indians, had to defend their land from them and etc. To the colonists way of thinking, they had mostly been required to solve all their own problems, with token help from the British. Because of that, they had colonial governments that handled most day to day governing. Technically the Board of Trade in London was required to ratify colonial legislative acts, but traditionally the colonies just saw this as a mostly irrelevant procedural step and just moved along more or less independently.
Then the Parliament in London started to exert greater control, and altered the relationship from one of more or less “benevolent neglect” to one in which Parliament basically expected the colonies to kneel down to their authority. The great enemy thus was the Parliament in London, or the British government.
When the U.S. Constitution was first written, it was extremely controversial. The voters in the respective states were not even told that a new constitution was being drafted (and the convention in which it was done was not originally called for that purpose.) Two factions emerged, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, and one of the only reasons we were ever able to get the Constitution signed is the Anti-Federalists were placated with a promise that one of the first things the new government would do would be to draft a Bill of Rights.
There were many different proposals as to what type of government we should have; personally I think Hamilton’s plan was the best and would have given us a stronger country and a more governable country even today. However, unfortunately Hamilton’s plan was totally unacceptable in its day and never would have made it out of the convention and would never have been ratified if it had. The plan we ended up going with basically kept a lot of the old system in tact, which was a colonial-level (or State, rather) government focused system.
Issues like individual ownership of firearms were really to be dealt with by State governments. The Bill of Rights was never designed to protect citizens from the State governments, but only to protect States and citizens from the Federal government. It wasn’t until the 14th Amendment and some follow-up SCOTUS cases that the Bill of Rights were considered to actually be a restraint on State government.
This is all relevant because it goes back to motivation. The people who created the Bill of Rights primarily saw the United States as a union between thirteen sovereign States. Almost every issue of policy between government and citizen, and any regulations of citizen behavior, would be handled by State legislation and State constitutions. For whatever reason, people back then weren’t as afraid of Virginia or New York prohibiting free speech, but they were afraid of the boogeyman of this new Federal government. Maybe this new Federal government would pass laws prohibiting free speech or free expression.
If you want to understand the anti-federalists, and essentially the bill of rights, think of the Federal government as “Parliament in London.” The fear was the Federal government could become a remote, unresponsive body that would infringe on the rights of the citizenry and would not be accountable to voters the way State governments were.
The original constitution contains nothing in it that is a real guarantee that the early Federal government couldn’t pass a law outlawing State militias. And that was what the Second Amendment was really designed to do…it was to protect the ability of Massachusetts, New York etc to maintain militias. If you prohibit State militias then the States have no real power, and they have no independent means of providing for their own defense. It’s worth noting even a few decades later in the War of 1812 this military independence was important. It was primarily State militias that protected American territory from Britain’s indian allies in that war. The view was, if the Army was fully Federalized why would a Virginia politician expend any great resources to protect the borders of New Hampshire and Maine when the British were landing in the Chesapeake Bay? Military independence was seen as crucial. When the politicians in Washington wanted Massachusetts men to cross the border into Canada as part of an invasion that New Englanders wanted no part of, because these men served in State militias they could basically say no. By and large New England militias during the War of 1812 would fight in defense of their territory but they mostly refused to cross the border into Canada. Conquest of Canada was something New England wanted no part of, and that was mostly driven by the newer western states.
Truly sovereign states can’t be truly sovereign if they can’t protect their borders, and if the Federal government could simply shut down state militias at a whim, then sovereignty was nothing but an illusion.
To me that all makes perfect sense in the year 1789, and if State sovereignty is important to you and you’re an 18th century American it makes perfect sense you don’t want to allow a Federal government to exist that could just disband State militias at a whim.
All this talk about the second amendment being part of the “right of self defense”, or a “protection against tyranny” gets it wrong. Yes, it prohibits the Federal government from banning firearms ownership (and because of later changes this restriction extends downward to State / local government.) But the people who drafted it weren’t imagining a scenario in which a few rednecks would be fighting a large standing army. Instead they were imagining State government sponsored and backed militias, with professional arsenals and regular training, potentially fighting against a rogue Federal government. They weren’t imagining rag tag bands, but large militia forces as a hedge against Federal power, and since they also imagined keeping any standing army small or non-existent as part of national policy, it suddenly isn’t so far fetched that a few large State militias from New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia could be a real hedge against the ability of the Federal government to sort of become a “body unto itself” separate from and unresponsive to the states.
The fear of a rogue Federal government was also perfectly rational. While the French Revolution was not yet underway, the framers studied history extensively and had found examples of revolutions and government rewrites that went badly off the desired path.
It’s specifically a “right of the people” because to protect the ability of State militias to exist, back in the 18th century, individual persons had to own their own firearms and keep them in their own homes. So effectively a Federal firearms ban on private citizens would disarm the State militias and make the States toothless. But note that the original constitution does nothing that would prevent Connecticut or Delaware passing laws to prohibit personal firearms possession. It would basically be unthinkable that a State would willingly disarm itself, and further at that point in time firearms were such an essential tool for many people that there just wouldn’t be a realistic thought of banning them. Plus, they were easily made by any local gunsmith. They weren’t today’s sophisticated weapons and were much easier to fabricate with thousands of professionals trained in their fabrication all over the country. It’d be like trying to prohibit quilts, you’d have to ban a lot of basic commodities from private ownership to hope to stop people from quilting.
There was also no professional police forces really anywhere in the 1780s. The concept of needing some specific self-defense laws didn’t make sense. Dating back to medieval England criminals were dealt with ad hoc by posses who would apprehend them and in theory transmit them to the courts for trial. Since there were no professional police, if you wanted to stop a crime in progress it’d always be private citizens doing it. But whatever self defense issues might come up under the law, in 1789 that was considered a state level issue. No one thought a Federal self defense protection needed to exist, and in fact would note that the constitution does not enumerate any power of the Federal government to regulate self defense laws.
Seriously, read a damn newspaper from any time in the twentieth century. Military coups and attempted coups have happened consistently throughout the history of standing armies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coups_d’%C3%A9tat_and_coup_attempts
But my broader argument is that the American fetishisation of the founding fathers and the constitution is stupid, wrongheaded, and either symptomatic of or the origin of what I consider to be the number one American cultural flaw, which is this obsessive need for everything to be codified. Americans love to pretend that they’re this free-spirited, individualistic, common sense society when the reality is quite the opposite. I personally think that whilst Americans individually may believe that they personally are quite intelligent, they think that absolutely everyone else is a complete knobhead that society needs protecting from. But you can’t, of course, say that, because the other thing about Americans is that they’re supposed to hate and/or distrust the government --ignoring for a moment the cognitive dissonance betwixt the veneration of democratic ideals and distrust of the democratically-elected ‘government of the people’ – so that’s where the constitution comes in. One can still be nominally anti-government whilst adhering to a disturbingly fundamentalist mentality regarding the constitution and the founding fathers because by God, they knew what government was supposed to be about, and it just so happens it coincides almost exactly with my own political beliefs.
So yes, the second amendment was completely and utterly a product of the particular colonial political and cultural climate of the time. It has absolutely zero practical relevance to the nation that the USA has become over the centuries since. But it’s in the damned constitution. Repeal it, or amend it, and of course something horrible will happen. Presumably something more horrible than all of the gun murders that happen every day in America.
The U.S. Constitution and BOR were well thought at the time. It had to be a compromise that would encourage the voters living under 13 separate governments to create a central government. Without blood letting between the colonies. The Constitution was designed to be changed. A process to amend was part of the overall package. IF enough people in enough States agreed to the changes.
The U.S. Constitution was ratified September 17, 1787. It’s survived an invasion by a major foreign power, a civil war, a depression, several assinations, and two impeachments. It will survive your dislike of the 2nd Amendment, also.
I don’t know what political system you live under so I don’t know if you are a citizen or a subject. You may trust your government enough to allow them to disarm you. On the other hand, your government may not trust you enough to allow you to own firearms.
Oh yeah, poignant and well said mate. You’ve certainly put me in my place, by pointing out that the US constitution was in fact relevant back in 1787 and for a little bit after that. And that it managed to survive some difficult times, as opposed to every other first world government, each of which obviously collapsed at the first sign of trouble as they didn’t have unyielding faith in the dickheads that drafted the document that their government was based on. And now I’ve totally realized that I should feel disenfranchised that my government doesn’t trust me or give me the right to obtain semiautomatic weapons in order to massacre my fellow citizens. So yeah, I withdraw my comment. Obviously it’s much better your way. Best of luck.
Only and exactly in the sense and to the degree that being free to possess and use recreational drugs is a significant part of your personal freedom; and not in the sense nor to the degree that freedom of speech or worship is part of your personal freedom.
Only according to you. The majority of taxpaying voters disagree with your assessment.
The majority of taxpaying voters agree with the individual rights listed in the BOR. They believe that everyone has an individual right to self-defense, including the use of firearms. No one is forcing you to bear arms, no one is forcing you to buy arms, and the majority isn’t buying your appeal to remove or amend the 2nd Amendment.