He quoted the Constitution. He wins. Them’s the rules.
So, in the 17th century, “regulated” didn’t mean the same thing that it does today and we have to take that into account. Did “arms” mean the same thing in the 17th century that it does today? Why do we have to discount that completely?
If you’re trying to make an “arms means muskets” argument, then I assume you’d also be okay with a “speech equals yelling at town square and printing political pamphlets”, too, right? Otherwise what’s your point? What alternative meaning for arms are you proposing? Maybe the words like “the” and “state” and “free” all had different meanings then too.
[snotty pedant mode] 18th Century [/spm]
Always gets me, how a discussion of serious 21st century issues is to be resolved according to the vocabulary of 18th century minds.
I hope you’re generally anti-constitution as to be logically consistent in this viewpoint then.
In any case, the argument relies on a misunderstanding of that parlance. The argument is made “It says right there well regulated, so the government can do whatever it wants” which runs contrary to both linguistic analysis and more importantly logical analysis of the document. As cecil says, “But it’s silly to think the framers would guarantee a right in one half of the Second Amendment only to allow the government to unguarantee it in the other half.”
But we’re in “we’ve argued this 1000 times before” territory. You can see any of the dozens of second amendment threads about this.
Hmmmm…
So if every adult male is in the militia, and the Congress has the responsibility under Article I Section 8 to arm the militia, then you as a militia member have the right to bear whatever arm Congress provides you.
And if every adult male is in the militia, and the president is the commander in chief of the militia, then all adult males are duly bound to obey his orders, including which weapons he may use in his duties in the militia.
Seems to me that the “every male is in the militia” myth actually works in favor of gun control.
You’re the one who brought the different meanings of words back in the 14th century (or whatever goddamned century it was back then (little help, luc?)) - I’m just trying to keep up.
Congress doesn’t have responsibilities, it has powers. They have the option to arm and train, but it’s not a requirement. As for the rest - the intent of the avoidance of professional standing armies and intent of a civilian militia isn’t mysterious. To say the president is the CiC of the militia and therefore he can violate their rights and force them to disarm is also to say that he’s their CiC so he can order them to accept quartering during peacetime, or order them to give up their right to a fair trial.
“But it’s silly to think the framers would guarantee a right in one half of the Second Amendment only to allow the government to unguarantee it in the other half.”
You are attempting to make, or support, an argument based on the language of the constution, and then you dismiss any attempt to understand that language. Your argument is self defeating.
If their intent was not to have a standing army, that didn’t work out so well, did it? So if the need for a militia is because of their loathing of standing armies, and now we have a standing army, what need is there of a militia?
And why should we care whether or not they liked standing armies? They aren’t here. We have a standing army. That’s the hand we’ve been dealt. So it doesn’t match the ideals of 18th century aristocratic slaveowners. BFD.
I was responding to *your *attempt to make, or support, an argument based on the language of the constitution. You’re the one dismissing me based on the identical criteria you used to bolster your argument (“things meant different things back then”).
Good question. And that could be an issue for a constitutional amendment. Until then, the 2nd amendment stands.
Understanding why those who wrote the constitution said what they said is sort of important when you’re trying to get its meaning.
We still are legally required to abide by the writings of these aristocratic slave owners. We largely don’t. But it’s hypocritical to example support the ACLU if their mission is to defend first and fourth amendment rights as valid parts of the constitution while saying that other parts of the constitution aren’t important. It’s a big package deal.
You were trying to make an implicit argument. To respond to what you actually said - did arms mean something different in the 18th century? No.
To give a silly analogy. Let’s say there was a part of the constitution to say “A shiny press corps is necesary to maintain political freedom, therefore freedom fo the press will not be infringed” - and let’s say that “shiny” in 18th century parlance could mean “well informed”. The argument that says “well-regulated” means that the government can regulate them as much as they want, including regulating them out of existance is roughly equivelant to saying “only press members that are actually shiny and reflective of light are guaranteed freedom of the press”
Your part in this analogy would be the one saying well if you say shiny has a different meaning, then press corps and political freedom must too.
What the fucking eff?
You are the one who was trying to make an implicit argument with your “regulated doesn’t mean regulated” argument. I was responding to that. Now you seem to want it both ways – oh, I can interpret “well-regulated” any way I want, but if anybody interprets "arms"any way but precisely as I’ve dictated then they are obviously wrong.
And it’s all laid bare as idiocy with your cockamamie, “what if there was a ‘shiny things’ clause in the constitution?”
You are dragging your goal-posts all over the place.
Your argument is fundamentally nonsensical. “Well-regulated” in this sense has an idiomatic meaning that has been lost in time. “Arms”, on the other hand, has the same definition today as it did then.
You seem to be saying that my argument is “it was the 18th century, therefore none of the language means the same thing”, which is of course ridiculous. No, my specific argument is that the specific phrase “well regulated” had a meaning that fell out of common use. It’s more related to the word “regular” than “regulation”. This is something that linguists can confirm, it’s not some arbitrary change in definition I dreamed up. The idea is also logically inconsistent with the intent of the people writing the constitution.
Your attempt to argue that arms doesn’t mean the same thing, is at best, an incomplete argument. Present a case for it if you want it to be more thoroughly rejected.
So in other words, you **SenorBeef ** are the official arbiter of what words meant different things in the past, and what words mean precisely the same thing that they meant 200 some odd years ago.
Is that about right?
When the FFs wrote all of this stuff back in the day, did they originally code the words in different colors to correspond to which words had flexible meanings that could change at any time and which words had permanent fixed meanings that could never ever change no matter what happened with languange and society in the intervening centuries? How did they have the foresight to know which words would always and forever mean exactly what they meant in the 18th century and which words would change in time? That’s awfully prescient of them.
How in the world could you pull that interpretation out of your ass? If they had known how the words “well regulated” would be interpreted 200 years later, they’d have rewritten it. I’m saying quite the opposite - that they weren’t prescient, and that the language did change. They did not intend the words to be flexible, and that’s the point. You seem to be making an argument for my case and against your own.
So how do we know what they meant? Well, they wrote a whole lot of stuff explaining exactly what they meant. It’s only those who wish to interpret the second amednment as narrow and logically contradicting who wish to just focus on the exact language - not the actual meaning of the language, but what it can currently be interpreted as - and throw out all of the contextual documentation that we have that clears up any ambiguity.
So we have 1) the fact that the people who wrote the damn thing say it means an individual right to bear arms 2) the fact that it must logically be that way, because the entire purpose of the bill of rights was to specifically enumerate individual rights, and it’s also logically contradictory for one half of the amendment to contradict another, and 3) we have a linguistic explanation as to why it was worded as it was while still intended to convey its meaning.
I’m not trying to be the arbiter of anything. Historical documentation is on my side. It’s only those who insist that we not look at the intended meaning, and the words of the people who wrote it themselves, but that we must interpret in a specific, narrow way that both has the amendment contradicting itself and contradicting its purpose in the bill of rights, who torture the language as narrowly and literally as possible who can manage to try to deny that it doesn’t mean what it plainly means.
You may think it’s outdated, you may think it’s wrong, you may think we should repeal it, but it’s disingenuous to pretend that we don’t know what it means.
How in the world could you pull that interpretation out of your ass? If they had known how the words “arms” or “militia” would be interpreted 200 years later, they’d have rewritten it.
:shrug:
But not so silly to think they had restrictions on its applicability in mind. In fact, it’s the only right in the Constitution whose range is *explicitly *limited.
Since we appear to have, once again, wandered into the wasteland of 18th century semiotics and deconstructionism, perhaps we are focusing our attention on the wrong words. The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Now, the first and foremost understanding of that would be that no regulation of firearms is constitutional, whatsoever. Pretty absolutist, doesn’t admit much in the way of wiggle room. So, a point for the Constitutional absolutists, the Sacred Writ is clear and explicit. Kinda fuzzy on why they are saying so, whether its about well regulated militia or defying tyranny, but that isn’t the crux of the biscuit. If it said “That little bitch Jimmy Madison is a poopy-head, and the right of the people shall not be infringed” it would amount to the same thing, the operative word is the last.
But that is, of course, ridiculous. Clearly, the Founding Fuckups accepted an unspoken list of exceptions. A highwayman has no right to possess a firearm, certainly not after he is arrested. I doubt if any of the framers was determined to assure that the dangerously lunatic were armed. Any number of people should not be armed, and they knew that as well as we.
So, the absolutist interpretation of the 2nd is ludicrous unless we assume that the Founding Fuckups were the dumbest bunch to ever put quill to parchment. They made common sense presumptions, just as we do.
But if you do want to mount that jackass and ride it, then the 2nd Amendment has never been honored as written, from day one. Now, I don’t think even for a moment that such was their intention, I think that “shall not be infringed” is a turn of phrase rather than Holy Writ.
But if anyone wants to insist that it means precisely what it says, and that it says no regulation, no restrictions, no infringement is permissible, then they must further accept that it has never been applied that way. Hence, the regulation of firearms is not forbidden, and the 2nd Amendment is largely irrelevant to our conversation. And pretty much always has been.
So why in the name of Bleeding Og would we start now?
Well, that’s just it–we didn’t just start now, it seems like they started before the ink was dry and, many moons later, we’re still trying to get it all straightened out rather than just rewriting the damn sentence so it makes sense.
Well, it comes down to what we mean by militia.
A lot of folks seem to be under the impression that militia means the national guard or something like that. The fact of the matter is that at the time of the writing of the constitution, every state defined its own militia (usually as every able bodied male of an appropriate age).
The constitution does not contemplate a standing army (therefore the requirement that all branches of the armed services operate on a two year budget except the navy) and the notion was that we would call up the militia when necessary to defend ourselves (remember that at the time, we were surrounded by larger more powerful imperialistic powers).
Militias were state or local creatures and until called upon by the federal government. there was no federal militia. The federal authority over the militia did not exist until called into active service. The federal government could create standards for training and could provide for such training but the second amendment explicitly prevents the infringement on the right of to bear arms.
For a long time, some people thought this meant that the second amendment only gave rights to the states against the federal government but the states were free to regulate firearms however they saw fit. Heller disabused us of that notion. The federal government does not get some extra power to regulate firearms because of the first clause of the second amendment.
Now you’re getting it. In a situation where someone is breaking into my house, their life is not worth even a remote risk to my family’s life. Here is what you learn in home defense classes. Get your family, get your gun, let the invader know you are armed, hole up in a room and call 911. If the home invader enters the room, shoot to kill.
Yeah, thats what training is for, if you to impose a training requirement on all gun owners, I don’t have a personal problem with that (although I have a constitutional problem with that). And there is one way to avoid this problem altogether, don’t break into my house.
I was trying to point out that your notion that “things” are not worth someone’s life" is not true. I was trying to relate a personal story (in the jewelry store context) to the home invasion context. I had a college acquaintence drop out of college because his father’s jewelry store got robbed.
If a criminal is carrying a gun, their life is forfeit as far as I’m concerned. I’l take the chance that I might be killing the guy that would have cured cancer.
Yeah, like I said, I’m OK with the CDC as long as the CDC asks questions like "is violent crime more or less prevalent in areas with lot of legal gun owners or places with fewer gun owners.
The questions that are asked are also important. If you are trying to find out if banning guns would reduce gun deaths or deaths in general then the answer is almost sure to be yes. But most of those avoided deaths would be suicide.
If you ask whether violent crime is more or less common where there is a high incidence of legal gun ownership, you don’t get more violent crime corresponding very well with high concentrations of legal gun ownership. In fact the opposite seems to be a better correlation.
I think you’ve suggested that those opposed to gun control are intransigent and uncompromising. You may have been talking about some small subset of the gun rights crowd but you certainly have been using a pretty broad brush.
I’m pretty sure that noone would have a problem with an FBI report on guns and crime. In fact they give us raw data every year. And every year, the people who commit crimes with guns are overwhelmingly criminals who are not legally allowed to have guns. Every year we see that rifles (of which assault weapons are a subset) account for 3-4% of gun murders while accounting for 33% of guns owned.
Cite that anyone considers these conclusive proof of anything?
Yeah, now you sound like Republicans when the polls were consistently going against them. “oh you can’t believe those polls” they’re inaccurate and biased. Unless you can poke a hole in the methodology of the questionnaire itself you are just questioning the science/art of these sort of studies generally.
- To put or maintain in order
“regulated” means the same thing today that it meant back then. you’re just using the wrong definition of regulated.
- A weapon, especially a firearm
same with “arms”
Congress has the power to do so, they do not have the exclusive power to do so. In fact most militia required each member to provide their own firearms. Thats right, people used to be REQUIRED to own firearms.
only when called into active service. So the next time we have a draft, the federal government is allowed to issue whatever equipment it sees fit.
I think a lot of the seeming has to do with the prism through which you are seeing things.
We have little to no need for the third amendment. Its still a valid amendment until repealed. And frankly, we may not have a standing army that is capable of meeting all foes.
Yes, and it took a constitutional amendment to fix that. If we went through the trouble to get a constitutional amendment for something that was so obviously wrong, why do you think we can skip that step for something that seems mostly a matter of your preference over mine?
How is the second amendment’s range explicitly limited? You seem to be reading a lot into the first clause of the second amendment that isn’t there except by virtue of wishful thinking.