You want your debating partner to concede the tautology that if law-abiding citizens relinquish their self-defense weapons then those law-abiding citizens will no longer possess those weapons. Your debating partner seemed more concern about the practical results of disarmament that can be discerned from real-world evidence.
(I assume you mean ‘inalienable.’) Supporters of the Second Amendment impress me more when they have reasons for their support. “Something is an inalienable right because some dead white guys said it is an inalienable right” does not appeal to my sense of logic. Is that “syllogism” really fundamentally different from “2+2 is 5 because George Carlin once said 2+2 is 5.”
And I hope that this “syllogism” was intended just as parody. If I don’t have an inalienable right to drop bombs on the Coca Cola bottling plant, do they have an inalienable right to poison their soft drinks?
I don’t want a nuke, but if I’m going to stand my ground against a strong assault team sent by a repressive government I think I’ll want rocket launchers and howitzers just to start.
Suppose when the civil war comes, a gang of 10,000 fights a gang of 2000. Is it your contention that the gang of 2000 should be the gang that prevails if they’re the ones who can afford better guns?
Yes, it’s quite different. You need to check your sense of logic.
The syllogism runs like this.
[ul]
[li]The Constitution is the supreme law of the United States.[/li][li]The right to keep and bear arms is defined as a right in the Constitution.[/li][li]When the Constitution was ratified, the right to keep and bear arms was brought under the protection of the federal government.[/li][li]If you think it is not, or should no longer be, a right under the protection of the federal government, you have to convince enough other people that they will go thru the process of amending the Constitution.[/li][/ul]Whether or not it existed before the Constitution was ratified is irrelevant.
About like the Afghans or Iraqis were well and truly fucked? Same thing for the Viet Cong, the Boers, the IRA, etc…
It would be rather insane to try and square up against a modern army in a force-on-force fight; hell, no other country could stand toe to toe with the US Army and win. But in a guerrilla style war, civilian arms would be extremely effective, and the sheer numbers of civilian weapons would make this even more so in some sort of rebellion against totalitarianism.
The argument is not one or the other - not inalienable or protected because it is in the constitution. These are parallel ideas that are simultaneously operative. In our current system of government the right to arms and self defense are protected. That is so because it is in the constitution and has been upheld over the hundreds of years since it’s adoption.
Parallel to that, we enjoy the inalienable right to self defense. Granted this derives from first principles that there are natural rights. Lots of folks don’t believe in natural rights I know. It is a belief that predated the founding of the U.S., and influenced that founding and continued to do so through much constitutional jurisprudence.
So in my view there is a legal argument, and a philosophical one. So when **septimus **expresses dismay about reliance on ‘some dead white guys’, this is speaking to the philosophical argument. When **Shodan **reiterates how the constitution operates, this is speaking to the legal argument.
Fortunately, both the legal and the philosophical arguments support the right to self defense and the right to arms. The legal argument in this country has consistently recognized the philosophical argument as valid and the truism of the pre-existing right of self defense in arms.
That doesn’t follow. And it is directly contradicted by the Ninth Amendment.
The Constitution talks about enumerated rights, not the inalienable ones. Presumably the FF would agree that all the enumerated rights are inalienable, but it doesn’t make any difference. The Ninth Amendment makes it clear that there can be - not “there are”, there can be - other rights, inalienable or otherwise, that exist apart from their enumeration in the Constitution. And the Tenth Amendment goes on to define who has the power to determine what those rights are or are not, and whether or not they should be brought under the protection of the federal government.
Whether or not the right to keep and bear arms was a right before the Constitution existed is missing the point. The Founding Fathers decided that it was, they brought that right under the protection of the federal government by enumerating it, the Constitution was ratified, and thereupon became binding on the United States. If we, and by “we” the Constitution means “the states or the people” decide that the Founding Fathers were wrong, and the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a right, inalienable or otherwise, then the states or the people are provided with a mechanism to change the Constitution.
The OP poses the question of ‘are there limits to weapons ownership?’.
That raises the issue of interpretation of the second amendment.
The founders created the second amendment to answer the need of
a frontier society with no standing army.
They would not use the same wording today. The significance being that
the second amendment has outlived it’s usefulness and needs to be replaced.
Cite? You’ve made at least 3 posts in this thread claiming to know what the founders would do if they were alive today. These are bold claims with no evidence presented. Do you have any?
I’m open to necromancy or a visit from a Time Lord if it would provide evidence.
Short of that, there’s a bit of asymmetry with these types of claims. I am not comfortable making the opposite claim, e.g.that the founders would do such and such, however they can be made without challenge because as you say, they are simply opinions with no basis.
The only viable way to combat the asymmetry of these unsupported opinions is to question their underlying genesis, and to point out the flaw of channeling the founders as debate support because these claims are unfalsifiable and making them are a matter of faith.