Second Amendment: What does "well regulated" mean exactly?

Great Debates
261

My saying that the right to self defense and the basic right to arms exists without any interdependency with any constitutional provision including any reference to the 2nd Amendment is not saying that the 2nd does not secure an individual right. Is it your position that a constitutional provision must grant or establish the right for the provision to be held to be a claimable immunity and guarantee said right?

For my purposes, to make the point I was making, the quote from Robertson might as well read, “The law is perfectly well settled that the first 10 amendments to the constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were not intended to lay down any novel principles of government, but simply to embody certain guaranties and immunities which we [possessed before the establishment of the Constitution]”. . .

The issue you bring up is a strawman which is a worthy discussion but not one that is at all pertinent to the point I was making. I will say that Englishmen did enjoy a right to arms, heavily conditioned and qualified as to religion, status as a landholder (with income) or title of nobility . . . It was exactly those types of conditions and qualifications our founders / framers disdained and endeavored to never permit exist in the United States.

I don’t equivocate or vacillate or wander around . . . I am always consistent in my analysis and commentary. You not understanding the principle of inherent, pre-existing rights and not understanding what I wrote is not an indictment of my argument.

I am fully aware of the term’s meaning and confident that I used it with absolute precision describing some people here.

This thread is perfect evidence that the most outspoken and obnoxiously incorrect posters disappear when I dissect and destroy each of their arguments. Some come back and like you, pick out one little sentence and try to make it support you but really, you are going to ignore the other quotes and the body of my commentary, analysis and argument to call me out on Robertson (without making any point, just asking if I had read it) . . . Really??? Are you kidding me?

Tell me . . . Where did everybody go?

262

That did not help. Don’t call people cowards and be very careful about commenting about their reading comprehension.

263

It’s not a strawman at all. It’s the very reason your arguments don’t make sense. If these rights don’t spring from the Constitution itself, or from the common law of England, where did they come from? Presumably, they must be written down somewhere. If you are referring to the Bill of Rights of 1688, then I suspect you may encounter some resistance in asserting that “the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law” is the law of the land.

If they’re not, then to what to we refer to determine if they actually exist?

No. It’s my position that your post was awkwardly phrased. I will accept that you didn’t intend for it to read as I said.

264

Rights are supposed to be inherent in human nature, or created by God if you believe in that, and “self-evident” in the words of the Declaration of Independence. According to the DoI, governments and laws don’t grant rights but “secure” them- enable people to actually exercise and enjoy them. Of course that admittedly leaves us with the problem of when people disagree that something is a natural right or not; or claim that an action of the government violates their rights if the founding charter of the government doesn’t expressly recognize that right. But the basic principle is that a right isn’t something that the government graciously grants you, or even is considerate enough to admit you possess; in theory the government isn’t supposed to have ANY power it wasn’t expressly granted, with any and all rights retained by the people.

265

Which makes for great speeches but pretty shitty jurisprudence.

266

They are understood to be inherent with some being inalienable. The Constitution is a charter of conferred powers. We the People are the source of all power, we possessed ***all ***of it and through the Constitution lent to government precise, strictly limited powers to perform the specific tacks listed and none other.

All not conferred is retained by the people; some of those never surrendered powers are formally declared and held out as “rights” and stand as “exceptions of powers not granted”. The right to keep and bear arms is among those.

It was the Federalist’s argument that it was impossible to list them and to try to list them was dangerous and absurd which is among the reasons they fought against adding a bill of rights to the Constitution.

No, again, it was the conditions and qualifications found in English law and even the benevolent William and Mary giving Protestants arms rights, such limits were assailed by our framers. Our rights and their protection is greatly expanded and enlarged over what English subjects were living under.

Well, again, rights are essentially the uncountable, unlistable “great residuum” of the powers NOT CONFERRED to government:

[INDENT][INDENT]“It has been said that in the federal government [a bill of rights] are unnecessary, because the powers are enumerated, and it follows that all that are not granted by the constitution are retained: that the constitution is a bill of powers, the great residuum being the rights of the people; and therefore a bill of rights cannot be so necessary as if the residuum was thrown into the hands of the government.”

James Madison Addresses the House of Representatives, 8 June 1789, on the Necessity of Amendments to the Constitution LINK[/INDENT][/INDENT]

So, if one really, really needs to refer to a document to try to find the rights of the people in the USA, one could reverse engineer such knowledge because where there is no power, ***that’s ***where the right is . . .

I suggest you inspect the body of the Constitution for an express grant of power that allows to government to have an interest in the activity under consideration. For this discussion you will find no such power ever granted to government that would allow it to even contemplate a thought about the personal arms of the private citizen . . . and there you have a full and complete definition and explanation of the RIGHT to arms retained by the people . . .

Congratulations!

267

What court cases are you reading?

SCOTUS has never wavered from those principles.

Under whatever political philosophy you assign to the USA, what is the definition and significance of “un/inalienable rights”?

268

The ones you are linking.

**RNATB **is correct here–you’re making an argument not supported by your cites.

As it happens, I’m a card-carrying NRA member and as pro-gun as you are, just to derail your usual strawman when you are called out.

269

How do you come to that conclusion? And just so we can be sure we are discussing the same thing, first state what it is that you believe my argument to be. It seems things get read into my posts that aren’t there or what’s there is confabulated into jaberwocky.

Can you supply some links so I can examine your scholarship? I’m not often surprised and I haven’t been for quite a few years but who knows, you could do it!

270

What exactly are you asking for here?

271

Just a link or two to a post or three where his constitutional knowledge and support for gun rights is laid out. Many claim to be supporters but when their posts are examined deficiencies in their claimed support become evident.

Anyone can claim to be anything but I have a hard time with an argument that what I cited does not support the premise that:

“The Supreme Court has never wavered from the principles that government is not the origin of rights; that rights pre-exist the establishment of the Constitution and that they are reservations of powers not granted to government by the people via that compact (with some exactingly, expressly reaffirmed in the Bill of Rights).”

and that:

“includes the right of the people to keep and bear arms without any appeal or reference to the words, punctuation, syntax or grammar of the 2nd Amendment nor any later “interpretation” of the words, punctuation, syntax or grammar of the 2nd Amendment.”

I would be eager to read any quote from a majority opinion stating what Zeriel believes is true, since he apparently disagrees with my assessment of these SCOTUS statements on the origin of rights.

I wonder if Zeriel can parse the quotes I supplied and offer his analysis of their meaning?

272

Which brings us full circle: why would you cite a case that stands for the proposition that we have those rights because we inherited them from England?

273

To attack my point you would need to demonstrate that the quotes (including Robertson) DO NOT affirm that “the Supreme Court has never wavered from the principles that government is not the origin of rights; that rights pre-exist the establishment of the Constitution and that they are reservations of powers not granted to government by the people via that compact (with some exactingly, expressly reaffirmed in the Bill of Rights).”

Whatever we might have inherited from our English ancestors, whatever nature of liberty those prior guaranties and immunities manifest under the US constitution, it is quite clear that according to SCOTUS, those liberties **PRE-DATE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION. **

Your rebuttal to my position is what again???

274

… is laid out pretty clearly on the preceding page, is what. I was going to expand on it, but I think I’ll wait until you finish with your meltdown.

275

Meltdown??? LOL, I do this for relaxation. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and when I started and for at least 10 years the anti-gunners were 'winning". The case law was on ‘your’ side and arguing ‘my’ side was an uphill battle. Nowadays it is actually extremely difficult to find a decent debate on the 2nd and what’s found now is a mere shell of what was the norm back then. (This board included)

You have offered nothing for me to get excited about. If you think you have a worthwhile argument you might as well present it because you are boring me with this shell game you are playing. That I’m even engaging you is because all the other anti-liberty posters have disappeared . . . That always seems to happen.

276

Pro tip: relaxed people generally avoid random capitalization unless they’re new to keyboards. The other posters might have disappeared because you call them “anti-liberty”. People generally rapidly tire of debating people who behave like dicks during debates. They might also have disappeared because your posts are incoherent.

However, I’ll restate my argument*, since you ask. You claim that there is a pile of inherent rights which apparently don’t stem from the Constitution and don’t stem from the body of common law. Okay, fine. Now, what are they? If you can’t list them, then your theory- even assuming it has merit- is nothing more than “rights are what Abatis says they are.” I’m sure you’d be the most benevolent of dictators, but you’d still be a dictator. Does the term “Constitutionalist”, which you seem to enjoy so much, mean “ruler by fiat”?

*I wouldn’t call it “my argument”. I’d call it “the gaping hole in your argument”, and I wouldn’t be so vain as to think I’m the only one who spotted it.

277

Capitalization was not random and what you see as a “gaping hole” in my argument I see as a gaping hole in your civics education.

Is the concept of “Inalienable rights” just meaningless jibberish under your political philosophy?

278

It’s meaningless gibberish, period. If those rights are unalienable, there would have been no need for the American Revolution, because George III couldn’t have taken them away.

Do I have the right to cook methamphetamine in my garage? If not, where in the Constitution did We The People waive it?

279

Guys? I think you have gotten hung up in the meta- argument regarding citations and are missing the actual point.

The Constitution lays out no right to self defense, because it is presumed to exist.
The Constitution lays out no right to marriage, because it is presumed to exist.
The Constitution lays out no right to procreation, because it is presumed to exist.
The Constitution lays out no right to sleep or sustenance, because they are presumed to exist.
There are numerous rights of similar sorts that are not enumerated because they are presumed to exist, without any “granting” of them by the government.

The Second Amendment enumerates (in a clunky way) a specific condition regarding one form self defense, but it does not address self-defense, per se.

Loving v. Virginia addressed various laws that put restrictions on one’s right to marry specific persons, but the right to marry, itself, was never in question.

DOMA attempts to limit the rights to marry to specific conditions, but it does not address the general right to marry, at all.

As far as I know, there has never been an effort to restict the right to eat or sleep, (aside from the Eighteenth Amendment that addressed only a specific category of drink), as it is considered a given that such rights are “unalienable.”

280

Easily enough. RNATB has a history of producing excellent legal scholarship on this board. You’re some guy who sounds like every other guy at the gun club. His judgement on these matters has proven trustworthy and his analysis is sound.

You, meanwhile, are a guy who somehow got the impression that Czarcasm is anti-gun.