“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state…”
By your narrow construction, only one state may have a militia; it does say “…a free state…,” singular, not “the states,” or “the several states.”
A state.
The best and only logical conclusion is that the first half is an explanatory clause, not a conditional one, as there were 13 states at the time of the writing of the BOR, and 14 (+Vermont) by the time of its ratification, with the 15th (Kentucky) following just 6 months later.
As to our earlier quibble, of course Hamilton would argue that the militia should be regulated (under the control of) the federal government; he was one of three writers of the Federalist Papers!
I found it interesting that you left out a few critical sections of 29:
In one paragraph, he makes a case for both the regulation (training, organization, etc.) of the militia even as he calls for the regulation (subordination to national authourity) of the militia.
He uses both accepted definitions of the term regulate in the same paragraph, with the context in which they are used quite obviously giving which definition is in use in any particular instance.
Further:
If you want to “regulate” me, you can station a militia officer or magistrate at my local gun range and see me at least once a month! Me being one of those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned “fetishists” and all.
I actually wouldn’t mind seeing the U.S. going back to Hamilton’s original vision, and all good liberals should, too. That way national leaders like “W” and Darth Cheney couldn’t lead us into futile, bloody wars of imperial agression and oligarchal oppression against whomever, for lack of a sufficiently sized national army to do so.
You can’t be serious. Drug cartels aren’t shipping handguns from foreign lands into the US to arm most, many, or any significant number of crimals. They don’t need to, they can already be purchased legally here.
Actually, there are quite a few police reports of drug cartels engaged in gun-running, for the obvious reason that they’d rather get the profit themselves than let some other gun dealer get it.
That is what we heard during our briefing. I understand what your saying though, but if you commit any kind of felony, you are no longer aloud to purchase firearms Legally. And I was mostly talking about assault weapons.
I’m not even good with tools and I could put together a functioning single-shot pistol or shotgun in about an hour out of stuff purchased at Home Depot. A fellow with some basic machine tools and skills can run off basic blowback submachineguns and suppressors. A guy with something like a tool and die shop can produce basically any gun he wants. The invention of computer controlled machine tools has caused a nifty little boutique gun industry to spring up in the US…
Bottom line is guns are never going to be uninvented. If I were a goblin and possessed of goblin spite, and I decided I wanted a gun; I’d have one and no law would stop me. If I couldn’t make one or buy one on the black market, I’d move up to ambushing a cop or soldier and taking his.
Further, I’d probably want to indulge my goblin spite through arson, explosives, and the like if destabilizing the government was my goal. I wouldn’t need any gun at all for that.
Very true post. My friends Dad made a .410 zip gun out of steel pipe and such. It worked every time he shot it. And your right about bomb making, many household chemicals can be turned explosive. And anybody can buy a gallon of gas, rag and a lighter.
Many countries that currently have a firearms bans had to deal with this exact situation and they did not experience the phenomenon that you describe. One example would be South Korea after the Korean war when there were M-1 Garands and AK-47s literally lying on teh ground. The government banned civilian ownership of firearms and pretty soon, the criminals were threatening citizens (and each other) with swords and axes.
Of course the early history of the Republic of Korea also includes a dicatorship by the only folks who had guns (a military dictaroship) that lasted until relatively recently in korean history.
I don’t know how to tell you this but most guns are not manufactured in Mexico, the drug cartels get their guns from teh same people they sell their drugs to. At least is helps even out the trade deficit.
Surely someone has published statistics showing a cross-section of illegally-held firearms used in the perpetration of crimes by manufacturer and model. Right?
Unfortunately, the relationship of the militas and the Federal government was turned on it’s head early in the Twentieth century by two things: first, the 1903 Militia Act defined the entire “select” or “organized” militia- those that step forward to volunteer for service- as effectively Army Reserve troops, and that status has become more entrenched with every decade until we now have National Guards troops fighting a foreign war with multiple or even indefinite extensions of their tours. Hence “One Weekend a Month, MY ASS”. The second was the Supreme Court ruling during World War One that the power of Congress to declare war included an implicit power to make sure the Army had the troops it needed- by conscription if need be. (This would have astonished Abraham Lincoln, since during the Civil War the Union payed millions of dollars in bounties to get men to sign up for three-year tours of duty in the regular army, rather than serve short term in miliia units.)
I’'m sure that if we did have universal military training like the Swiss or Israelis, people like Cheney would find some legalistic excuse to claim they would have to serve abroad indefinitely. Of course then you might have something like what happened during the Civil War when, according to James Macpherson, “armed bands of draft dodgers and deserters practially ruled entire counties”
Yep. The most commonly used firearms in crimes were small caliber, low magazine capacity cheap firearms (like kel-tec) and pump action shotguns (also cheap).
I never once said that guns were manufactured in Mexico, not one time. Please read all the posts before you try to shove your misinformed words on me. In fact I said that the largest single cashe of guns found were made in Yugoslavia found still in their packing grease.
Yes, well, certain 20th-Century establishments worked it out that you don’t take a man with dangerous ideas and crucify him in public; you simply cause him to quietly vanish in the middle of the night. If Gandhi had been dealing with that kind of establishment, you never would have heard of him.
Absolutely. it has nothing to do with “who could do a better job” (whatever that means). It’s about legitimacy. Our system of government has built in mechanisms at the Federal, State and Local levels for replacing members of that government if their constituants feel they aren’t doing a good job.