Good Lord, man, I can’t support that! 
Not at all. There is no reason to read to the Amendments differently: to say that that the First Amendment should be read broadly and all sorts of additional rights should be inferred… but then the Second should be read narrowly, parsing each word to give it the most narrow effect possible, and then we should switch back to the braod expansive method for the rest of the Constitution.
It is for that reason that I compare abortion as a constitutional right with guns as a constitutional right. Not the proposed use of firearms as a medical instrument, although that was certainly a really good try.
Pretty sure they did not read abortion as a right in the Constitution.
They read Privacy in there and deemed abortion as a matter covered under privacy.
Nice attempt at conflation though.
You are… Opus T. Penguin or his editor.
Edit: Woah, what the heck, the board picked up a quote inside a quote? When did we get an upgrade?
Perhaps you can show me where I said that, then.
Just noticed that too…very nice.
Sure. Necessary consequence of the discussion quoted above. Or, more accurately, a slight exaggeration of the necessary consequence of the discussion above.
Maybe we can make this simpler: do you believe that each amendment should be analyzed the same way, with the same degree of “looseness” or “strictness,” or should different amendments be treated differently?
Are we talking about a hypothetical situation, or an ideal world?
I’m not sure that in the real world we can go back and reinterpret each Amendment to make sure we’re treating each one consistently. The whole point of Supreme Court precedence is that we have a reasonable expectation of how the law will be interpreted in the future.
Ideally, though, yes, we’d assign them all equal weight.
Thanks.
Do you believe that abortion’s grounding in the Constitution and the right to keep and bear arms are the result of equal weight? Put another way, does the same level and type of interpretation solidly confirm the right of a woman to have an abortion in the first trimester, but waver on the right to keep and bear arms?
Seems to me since they read a right to privacy into the constitution they can waver on whether abortion is covered under privacy.
When reading the 2nd I am all for giving it equal weight. Equal weight as interpreted with “militia” being an important and relevant part of the Amendment (considering it is right there, plain as day). I am surprised you are ok with Scalia essentially scratching out a part of the constitution as written. You may want an individual right to own weapons in the constitution but if so get an amendment in there that says that.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
It is perfectly plausible, grammatically, to parse that as supporting individual rights to firearms, presuming one takes everything before the second comma to be a rationale for everything after the second comma.
I understand the well-regulated clause to be interpreted in the archaic military sense of the word, namely, “conforming to standard; uniform”. A plain reading with THAT definition starts requiring a designated militia kit that “the people” are not infringed from possessing. Seeing as how “the reserve militia” is defined by statute as all males of military age (17-45) by the Militia Act of 1903, that’s a lot of dudes authorized to have rifles/pistols.
A lot of the argument about this amendment’s plain meaning seems to center on the commas, which appear to turn a straightforward statement into a grammatical mess. Most proponents of gun rights prefer to translate the punctuation to modern by eliding the 1st and 3rd commas, rendering it
“A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
That strikes me as the logical way to parse it. In fact, I can’t find any other way that’s even remotely grammatical to do so.
I also interpret it to recognize that firearms ownership can be constitutionally said to require training and proficiency in the use of firearms, both in terms of “hitting the target” and “making appropriate shoot/no-shoot decisions”, and would accept a national firearms registry with serial numbers associated with owners, and would also accept licensing for firearms with testing and training similar in cost and onerousness to drivers licensing (with more dangerous weapons requiring greater training in the same way we have car/motorcycle/CDL license classes (I analogize these to long guns/handguns/military weapons))
I’m sorry to metaphorically shred your strawman, but you’ll find most doper gun rights advocates are not afraid of non-punitive training and licensing–but you had best have a damn good reason to make it any more restrictive that car ownership/licensing (no one has yet come up with any damn good reasons, in the years I’ve been here), and as it’s enshrined in the constitution there’s a good reason to have much less, at least for basic militia (as in auxiliary military)-type rifles such as the AR-15.
Having said all that, I’d love to see a parsing, with examples as I’ve done above, of a reading of the second amendment that is grammatically valid and interprets it in any other way than “the first two comma-separated clauses are rationales supporting the individual right enshrined in the second two comma-separated clauses”. No one, to my knowledge, has ever tried to diagram or otherwise dissect the sentence formally in any way other than simply asserting that the first clauses override the second ones–which doesn’t seem to make any grammatical sense to me.
By the way, it’s not just certain modern readers who omit the first and third commas. The copy of the Constitution that was actually ratified by the several states (thus, by some argument, the binding version) also carries this simpler and clearer punctuation.
There is an excellent argument to be made for constitutional protection of abortion under the present Constitution, but a penumbraic right to privacy isn’t it.
I suppose one could legitimately argue that the Second Amendment doesn’t enshrine an individual liberty at all, but rather demands that the states don’t shirk their responsibility to raise militias.
Or, you could do as SCOTUS did for a while, and hedge.
Or, you could do as they appear to be doing now, and ignore the first clause completely.
Either way, no, it certainly isn’t the same level and type of interpretation.
It’s not doper gun rights advocates that are the problem (except that one guy who insisted that he could take a gun into somebody’s house regardless of whether they allowed it, because he’d never fallen asleep in an armchair).
I would happily let you or Una drive around in a fully armed Sherman tank, if you so wanted.
However, as with all things, Doper gun owners tend to be a little more enlightened than the unwashed masses. You may not have a problem with registration or training requirements, but the NRA has consistently opposed registration, arguing that it’s the first step down a slippery slope to mass confiscation:
Now, the NRA may not speak for you, but as the largest portion of the gun lobby it is the de facto legislative voice of gun owners.
Obviously, the original intent of the Framers was to guarantee the right of individuals to own and carry single-shot powder rifles, pistols, and swords. 
Yup. And their “press” was a hand-cranked and inked printing press, too. No application to TV or radio there…
Strawman indeed…that “strawman” was the operative definition the SCOTUS had till Heller.
Note it is you who are changing things around to read as you like. The FFs were pretty smart guys and excellent writers. I am sure they pored over the language of the constitution closely. But hey, Zeriel knows better than they what they meant to write. :rolleyes:
As for others having a different interpretation it has been done.
From Justice Stevens’s dissent in Heller I’ll walk you through it:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,”
Stevens: The preamble thus both sets forth the object of the Amendment and informs the meaning of the remainder of its text. Such text should not be treated as mere surplusage, for “*t cannot be presumed that any clause in the constitution is intended to be without effect.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 174 (1803).
“…the right of the people…”
Stevens: As used in the Second Amendment , the words “the people” do not enlarge the right to keep and bear arms to encompass use or ownership of weapons outside the context of service in a well-regulated militia.
“…to keep and bear Arms…”
Stevens: The absence of any reference to civilian uses of weapons tailors the text of the Amendment to the purpose identified in its preamble.
Read this bit again: *“t cannot be presumed that any clause in the constitution is intended to be without effect.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 174 (1803).
Yet you are fine with hand waving it away, rewriting it to suit your purposes and then call my interpretation the strawman.
Not true at all.
Presser doesn’t mandate a collective rights view. Presser simply says that private paramilitary groups may be regulated under the law.
In any event… who cares? It’s done. Heller and MacDonald are the law of the land. Whatever ambiguities might have existed from that paragon of reasoning Presser v. Illinois have been eliminated. The Court in Heller and MacDonald could hardly be more precise.
The court has issued other crappy rulings before so while Heller currently stands the debate is not over. Unless you think after decisions like Plessy v Ferguson everyone should have tossed up their hands and let it be.
It may take decades (it may take forever) but you do not get to say the debate is over because it was decided a particular way.
If you believe that to be true then the right should stop fighting abortion…it’s decided. Go home and shut-up.
I’m basically going to ignore the histrionics in the first bit of your response as not germane, since the “strawman” I was shredding was the myth that all doper gun rights advocates are screaming NRA ninnies, when in fact very few of us are–which you didn’t address, apparently thinking I was somehow referring to your incomplete reading of the 2nd amendment.
So how are we to deal with Stevens’ handwaving away “the people” to mean “not really the people, just some of the people” here? This is where Stevens fails to make a convincing argument…
…as well as here, where he seriously argues that “keep and bear arms” doesn’t mean that one can USE arms, because of course that makes perfect sense. :rolleyes:
Let me repeat what I said before: I believe that the first clause (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,”) means that the militia (currently, as cited before, defined as “all males in the US between 17 and 45” at a minimum by statute since 1903!, and if you ask me that needs an update to simply “all able-bodied citizens capable of participating in the national defense at times of need” in keeping with our more egalitarian culture) uses of weapons are paramount (“being necessary” and all). “Well-regulated” means that those weapons, their usage, procurement, and storage can of course be regulated under the law to militia-appropriate standards, IMHO, but “shall not be infringed” and “the people” mean something too.
That’s not “hand-waving”. That’s “reading the words”. I addressed every single clause in the amendment, complete with statutory definitions for those things that had such, and a discussion on what “well-regulated” could have meant to the framers in a militia context. You may disagree that I’m reading them or interpreting them correctly, but insulting the completeness of my defense of my interpretation is frankly insulting.
I tend to think the NRA is best served by playing up the education and gun safety portions of its operations. As it stands, their politics are ridiculous. “Shall not be infringed” doesn’t mean “shall not be regulated” or “shall not be recorded just in case we have some scary-ass left-winger who magically makes the police take all our guns away”.
I appreciate the vote of confidence and will do my best not to run over your car.