What are Rights for? Where do they come from? Including 2nd Amendment

[Kimstu]

@Thudlow_Boink

If I were a person from 1791, I don’t think this is the first kind of scenario I’d think of when I thought of self-defense. Fewer people lived in cities then. I think I’d be likely to think of someone living in a less urban area, having to defend himself against wild animals and hostile humans.

That doesn’t appear to be how people at the time saw it, though:

The Second Amendment to the Constitution, on which modern-day arguments for widespread gun ownership rest, is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia.

As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”