No reply to that is appropriate.
aight.
So what is?
You can get the summary from the first paragraph:
Note it is styled the Militia Act and is all about the National Guard.
Something under the control of an individual state, at most, and probably not even that. When push comes to shove, the National Guard are under federal control, not state: If a governor does not want his state’s Guard deployed, but the President want it, deployed they will be.
The Constitution authorizes the president to command all militia. Article II, Section 2. And “not even that”? Certainly private militia never were envisioned or tolerated. The FFs saw the militia as an arm of government, not a countervailing force against it.
You’re describing something that doesn’t exist, then (and let’s let go the foolishness of the rest of the populace being a militia itself - it isn’t well-regulated if if isn’t even fucking *organized *:rolleyes:).
“Not even that”? Are you seriously offering to us that a gang of vigilantes waving their bangsticks and spouting off to each other about Freedom! and Tyranny! would have Constitutional protection?
For over a century, the militia has, in legal fact, *been *the National Guard. The states relinquished ultimate control of it to the feds by having their representatives pass the appropriate legislation to do so.
Don’t like it? MEBuckner can tell you what to do.
Don’t they?
Not in their vigilante activities, they don’t.
State Defense Forces? Something like 22 states have them. They’re made up of volunteers, can’t be federalized, and usually handle emergency management, but are trained in combat. The New York State Defense Forces mobilized after 9/11, and then after Irene and Sandy, handling search and rescue, medical care, and shipment of supplies.
Here’s their website, for instance:
These are two of the strangest posts I’ve ever read outside the Pit on this subject. And quite frankly, the textbook left-wing rhetoric makes it hard for someone who is not an NRA member and is willing to consider things like gun legislation to tune you (and your POV) out.
I don’t know if you were warned for these posts, and I don’t care. I didn’t report you. Just understand that statements like this make you sound uneducated, and make what you say lack credibility.
The second amendment, like it or not, is there. It was put there to make sure the citizenry would have access to arms to keep the government honest. It wasn’t just put in the BoR so every house could have a rifle or two to hunt deer and squirrels. It was to make sure that the government was not able to disarm its citizens. An armed populace helped keep the government honest. In 1776, this was an important notion. As Jefferson famously said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Having every resident of the country armed would certainly cause the federal government to think twice about changing the course of this country, for fear of a revolt or revolution to maintain the liberties fought for and guaranteed by the original constitution.
Of course, things have changed over the last 2+ centuries, and the notion of a mass public uprising or revolution in this country seems far-fetched and unrealistic. The federal government has chipped away at our freedoms over the past, to where the country and the federal government does not reflect what the founding fathers intended. However, that doesn’t mean we should give up our right as citizens to bear arms. People in favor of gun ownership are not interested in putting guns into the hands of mass murderers and children, and to suggest such a thing is preposterous…
And just so we are clear. Anyone with mental problems, who wants to kill, can and will still find a way, with a gun or without. So do you next ban knives? Baseball bats? What do you think, someone that wants to kill isn’t going to because they don’t have a gun? That is naive. And yet, you are willing to call people names and suggest that those who want to retain the freedoms guaranteed by our constitution are somehow unstable. All gun owners I know are extremely careful with their weapons. I don’t know what you think, but most gun enthusiasts don’t have sub machine guns lying around the house, waiting for a child to stumble on the thing and cause an accident to occur. Guns are under lock and key.
Criminals won’t stop obtaining guns illegally because the law says so. And they won’t stop using them, either. Why should an honest person voluntarily give up their rights and make themselves and their families less safe and secure?
Bills like the one in Colorado begin a slippery slope.
You could call Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns an “industry”, but if the word bothers you I was just using it to copy the language that I was quoting.
The point is that gun laws are different from laws about other things because you always need to keep in mind that many people disagree with guns being legal at all. This makes the usual process of evaluating proposals very murky.
Of course not. :smack:
Just to expand on what Stink Fish Pot said: Even if it’s conceded that the “militia” is only those armed persons who are under the command of a duly-authorized state or federal officer, the fact remains that the persons so mustered were originally supposed to bring their own guns. The original Militia Act of 1792 states as much as a requirement of law. The citizens were not supposed to stay unarmed until called to duty and then handed weapons from a locked government arsenal. That would defeat the entire point of having a citizen militia- a central armory could either be held by a tyrannical government or seized by an invader. The Swiss reservists keep their guns at home, the British Home Guard of WW2 kept their guns at home.
I thought it had been settled that, originally, the ‘militias’ in question were local armed groups formed for the purpose of suppressing slaves. Militias were the enforcement arm of the police state that kept the slaves in bondage. The importance of preventing the federal government from infringing on this right to bear arms lies in the notion that the feds couldn’t de-fang the enforcement mechanism of slavery by taking people’s guns away. The ‘final’ expression of the militia described in the 2nd Amendment isn’t the National Guard but the lynch mob.
Note- none of the above is meant to suggest that citizens somehow don’t have a constitutional right to bear arms- that stands regardless. The only point is that this talk of the Founding Fathers laying the groundwork for the overthrow of the government they were establishing is nonsense. Slavery was a controversial issue even then, Southern interests wanted to see it protected, hence the 2nd Amendment.
I have never heard that the 2nd amendment was for the sole purpose of suppressing slaves. As you stated, the issue of slavery was controversial even at the time of the writing of the constitution. S much so, in fact, that any notion of ending slavery would have kept the southern states from joining the union.
To suggest that the 2nd amendment was put in the BoR to create legal lynch mobs to suppress slave revolts sounds like revisionist history to me, written by an anti-gun advocate to help make the 2nd amendment’s origin sound unsavory and therefore easier to get rid of. I would love to read any information on this that you have… From an accepted source, that states your reason is why the 2nd amendment was created. Has anyone else ever heard of this?
I can’t see how the northern states would have agreed to this amendment at all if it was an amendment to create lynch mobs for rebellious slaves. State militias were not some quaint idea. The founders never wanted an all powerful central government to field a permanent, standing army.
To take away a citizen’s right to “bear arms” would have been seen as something the new government was doing to “de-fang” the population. Of course the founders didn’t want their citizens in a constant state of revolt. But to try and take away a freedom that permits the citizenry from arming itself for the protection of their own land, their state or their country is an important right, and one we shouldn’t chip away at. The idea of free speech and assembly, and the ability to bring grievances directly to the government was put in place for many reasons, but one thing it did do was make citizens feel they would be heard without first resorting to something like an armed rebellion.
You have to remember the times to understand some of the amendments. The quartering of soldiers, for example, seems like a strange thing to it into the constitution from today’s perspective, but it was a very real problem in colonial America… The British had no problem doing just this sort of thing,
As Lumpy points out, it was also thought that people would bring their own weapons to a militia call up. The federal government was not and didn’t want to be in the armory business. But beyond that, a gun was a necessary part of frontier life.
The Founding Fathers were not a single monolithic entity, on any topic. The Bill of Rights represented what a consensus of them could be persuaded to agree to, and sometimes that required vague language. No doubt some of them liked the Second Amendment because it would allow for lynch mobs to suppress slaves, and voted for it for that reason, but others did not, and so the amendment couldn’t be worded that way, but had to be worded in ways that could be interpreted the ways they wanted, or at least in ways they found acceptable. This is part of the problem of looking at “original intent” for the Constitution: There was no single one original intent.
I agree with this statement. However, I have yet to see a source that indicates that the second amendment was written into the constitution for the purpose of permitting lynch mobs to be formed in slave holding states. Now, that may be what Virginia, NC, etc decided to do with the amendment… Use it for their own benefit to keep their slaves in line. But I have never heard an account where debate over the constitution and the second amendment led to the topic even being discussed. Nowhere have I read that someone like John Adams said "hey southern states… You know what? The second amendment, if you vote for it, will permit you to create marauding gangs to keep your slaves in line. Hell, the northern states would have never gone for that.
Again, the slave holding states may have thought that, and then again maybe they didn’t. Clearly they could have armed citizens for this very purpose and thought they were protected by the second amendment to do so, but I can’t recall reading this idea anywhere in my life. Surely, for those of you that believe this to be the case, you could point us to a few cites that would support your contention? That this was discussed during the writing of the constitution and BoR?
True.
False. If so, the Constitution would not authorize the president to command the militia. Any use of weapons to “keep the government honest” equates to what the Constitution classifies as “insurrection,” which is neither protected nor tolerated.
I disagree. A population that is armed is inherently more free than one that isn’t, regardless of who the constitution says commands the militia.
Here’s a fun fact for you: In the great state of NH, the state constitution gives the right to bear arms…
It also specifically grants the right of revolution against the state, if needed…
They got it right. The US Constitution should have a similar right. Let’s replace the third amendment with that. Who’s with me?