Thoughts on the Second Amendment

“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.”

Far be it from me to be a pedant about punctuation, but the statement is separated by commas, not periods. Seems an important detail. Though clearly the courts have spoken to rule otherwise.

I think trying to decipher things like original intent, or the true meaning of the Constitution, matters less and less these days, and political concerns are becoming more clearly the driver of judicial decisions. Right now, the Republicans own a majority of the SCOTUS, so their preferred interpretation of the 2A rules… in the future, maybe Democrats will own a majoity, and their preferred interpretation will be the one that “counts”.

Maybe things will improve, and SCOTUS will recede from politics, but without a massive sea-change in politics, it’s hard to see how that could happen.

Just like all those other rights are collective and predicated on being in some special group, right? Only if you are in the press, say, do you get a special protected right to speech, or if you are in a religious organization do you get a protected right of freedom of religion. Yeah, it all makes sense!

No, it doesn’t. It never has. It’s ridiculous to look at what the authors actually wrote and make the conclusion you are making except, as you already noted, you don’t care what the authors wrote on the subject as it doesn’t conform to your conclusion. And you have to match your already pre-determined conclusion with the facts or what fun is it all?

The Senate has adopted rules whereby a Senator can invoke a filibuster without actually having to stand at the podium and read the unabridged dictionary for hours and hours.

Can’t we adopt a rule by which the individual citizen can invoke a revolution against the government and if the government can’t get 3/5 of the populace to overrule it, they have to disband or something, without doing the gun thing?

I mean, it isn’t like a basement supply of AK-47s is going to enable the local activist to resist the firepower available to the federal government. Now if the 2nd amendment were to be interpreted as giving me as an individual the right to amass an arsenal of tactical nukes, well maybe. Throw in some positioning satellites for good measure. But as far as I know, the 2nd amendment is not interpreted in that fashion, so there are already limits on what I’m allowed to own, firepower-wise, yes?

Perhaps that’s why free speech and religion didn’t have the preambles stating that their purpose wasn’t for having a well-regulated press or priesthood.

Actually, Federal law draws a distinction between the “organized militia”, which is the National Guard, and the “unorganized militia”.

So technically, if you’re between male, and between 17 and 45 years old, you’re part of the militia whether you know it or not. And presumably, the right to keep and bear arms would extend to you as part of that unorganized militia, not just to the National Guard in its capacity as the organized militia.

And it would require you to become well-regulated if it ever came to mean anything tangible.

And, interestingly enough, the original draft(s) of the 2nd didn’t either. Weird, huh? Must be as you say, they really meant it to only apply to a special, protected class…

(which is, ironically true, if you restate ‘special, protected class…’ to equal ‘white people’. It’s just not the restriction you are implying)

How many of those fellows in the standing army do you think would support the cause of getting rid of the guns?
I’d bet 80% of them are staunch 2nd amendment advocates …

No, the communist puppet governments in eastern Europe couldn’t survive without their Soviet overlords. Massive protests didn’t work as well at Tiananmen.

Congress could, it’s just that commerce raiding is obsolete militarily and the USA agreed with other maritime nations to stop doing so in order to prevent high seas piracy.

This link, (admittedly pro-gun) gives several quotes from the Oxford English Dictionary over the years, demonstrating the archaic use of the phrase “well regulated”. So no, it doesn’t mean “under control of an authority”- which incidentally the term “disciplined” was used for at the time of the 2nd and contemporary writings like the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. I’ve read them all.

And regarding documents contemporary with the 2nd Amendment: the word “militia” is invariably used in a context that makes it clear the writer is talking about the populace at large. They never, ever say “a militia”; it’s always “the militia” i.e., a plural noun, as constructed from the Latin.

Funny, years before that the Report of the Subcommittee On The Constitution of the Committee On The Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, second session (February, 1982), SuDoc# Y4.J 89/2: Ar 5/5 said

Doesn’t sound like a bunch of rednecks to me.

The Embarrassing Second Amendment pointed out how differently the 2nd has been treated from all other articles of the Bill Of Rights, and how problematic this is for progressives who want to promote human rights but at the same time be in favor of gun control.

Why, why, why, why, WHY do some people insist that a pro-gun interpretation of the Second Amendment would mean that any tiny band of yahoos can rebel against the government? They can try, certainly, but they’ll be heavily outvoted by lots of other people with guns; just for starters, those volunteers from the posse comitatus and the militia that form our civil police forces and National Guard. That was the whole point: an armed population would be democracy in its rawest form, in situations where civil law and voting had failed. From 1861 to 1865 a very large group of people decided to rebel against the US government; they only failed because an even larger group of people chose (or at least, acquiesced) to fight against them.

As for the argument that the civilian population is inadequately armed to resist a tyranny, gun proponents agree: by a series of legal sophistries it has became all but impossible to legally acquire select-fire rifles. Many gun proponents want the 1934 NFA scrapped.

What it means is that most of the arguments that the militia = National Guard aren’t quite that easy, as the militia is defined more broadly than that.

And as the 2nd Amendment is written, the whole ‘well regulated’ part is more of a preamble than a condition- it defines why the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, not that it’s a necessary condition for the right to keep and bear arms to remain uninfringed.

Specifically, it’s defined as two types: the “real” one (the Guard) and the imaginary one (the unorganized thing).

And the standard response to that common claim is that, if they didn’t intend it to guide the understanding of its meaning, why did they even put it in?

The free exchange of ideas being essential to a well-regulated message board, the right of people to join and post shall not be infringed.

Therefore, only the mods are allowed to post.

Regards,
Shodan

N.B.: We don’t have a militia any more. The NG is a different animal, and private “militia” organizations don’t count.

Good for them.

I assume you wrote this because you thought it was relevant to what I said?!? :confused:

The relevant question would be how many of those fellows in the standing army would support whatever cause had led me to pick up my weapons and ammunition, me thinking, at the time, that what I was lending my support to was in the nation’s best interest?

I genuinely (as opposed to disingenuously) think that some of the time they would support that same cause, even if the structural organization claiming to be “the United States of America” was no longer on the same side. But more often, not.

I can’t speak for “some people”, only for myself. I’ve always assumed that the most important legitimate reason for the populace to remain armed is to protect ourselves from the force most likely to infringe upon our freedom. That would be our own government. See for example the events leading up to the document of 7/4/1776.

Don’t assume I’m baiting you, or even that I’m anti-2nd amendment / pro-gun control. I often think the ideal world would be one in which every person on the planet held the ability to turn said planet into a cinderball at will. Be that as it may, I wouldn’t want that power handed over to us all overnight. People are as they are (including mindset) in part because of our lack of power.

Nice try but not even close.

*“Therefore, only those who register on the message board are allowed to post”.
*
See, by joining, you are a registered member of a group with specific privileges, and subject to its rules and regulations.

No civilian has any legitimate use for an automatic or semi-automatic rifle. That’s much more firepower than you’ll ever need for home defense, and it would be unsporting to use such a weapon to hunt.

Are you familiar with the Tenth Amendment?

That’s certainly one opinion, although it’s not one I can see any reason to give any weight at all.

Which is why before 1934 most people didn’t go out and buy a Thompson submachine gun or a Browning Automatic Rifle. And didn’t before 1986, when it was expensive and difficult but still legal to buy new ones. These would definitely be “in case of emergency, break glass” weapons. But if you’re saying “beyond target shooting, no civilian would ever have a legal reason to shoot one”, then that sort of gets to the point: if a serious dispute ever arose over what was legal and what wasn’t. No government is ever going to say that its edicts are illegal, so you can’t go by that to determine if a despotism has arisen. A government that had the broad support of an overwhelming majority of the populace would have nothing to fear by permitting guns.

And in fact I can think of rare but plausible situations- namely when on the defensive and outnumbered- when it would be useful to have a full-auto firearm. And I broadly believe in the following quote from a 19th century state supreme court ruling: “If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege.”