Lot of logical fallacies and opinions here for what is still a GQ thread.
I don’t know, there was a strong cultural tradition of gentlemen carrying swords up until the early 19th century I believe, at least in Europe. I’m also not sure that swords are regulated “objectively”, it seems like they’re just blanket banned because they have a fixed blade over a certain length which runs afoul of many State/local laws on carrying blades.
There was always some level of right to private weapon ownership in England but it varied over time. But the British don’t really have the concept of “sacrosanct” rights, as their all-powerful legislature can change anything at any time with virtually not check to the scope of its changes (I think this is a good thing in the year 2014, but was a frightening thing back in the 18th century and something the Founding Fathers were correct to try and prevent at that point in history.) British colonial law certainly allowed suspension of these rights, especially to suppress rebellions and head them off before they broke out. So the British action to seize militia weapon stores that lead to the first shots of the war would have been appropriate, legally.
How would you know until you tried it? State and city laws are practically meaningless; guns simply get brought in from where they’re abundant and easy to get.
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You raise a fine point here, one in which I mentioned in another thread. Yet your thinking on this point is too limited. Do you really think that a federal ban on firearms will keep guns out if the hands of those willing to use them for illegal means? The ban on cocaine, marijuana and child porn have fallen well short of keeping those items out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them. How do you suppose out government will be any more successful with firearms. What a ban will do if simply make firearms harder to obtain by those wanting to use them for illegal reasons (but with a little effort they’ll get them), but completely deny law abiding, well intentioned, responsible citizens access to firearms for sport and personal protection.
Unfortunately you can not under any circumstances outlaw criminal behavior and expect it to stop that behavior. Laws are for the most part punishment. A person intent on committing mass murder is hardly going to be deterred or intimidated by a ban on firearms.
Derp? What’s your point? You made a factual error that the 2nd amendment was about guns. It’s not, it’s about arms. You can argue all you want about what should or shouldn’t be considered ‘arms’ for this purpose, but not only was that not the point, but it has already been determined what constitutes 'arms. You are wrong. So very very wrong.
Wrong again. Tell that to the Sikh and their Kirpan:
This, btw, is the perfect one-sentence summation of my stance on guns.
But they can’t revolt, because they don’t have guns anymore.
Yes, it is a very common argument that the gap between common civilian arms and military arms both proves that guns may be restricted and that the insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment is moot. In response I would say[ul][li]For decades after the enactment of the Bill of Rights private citizens could and did own cannon and large stocks of gunpowder. As late as the 1920’s a private citizen could buy a Browning .30 cal machine gun (through the mail!). Until the 1960’s you could buy dynamite at rural hardware stores. So although there have been state and local laws enforcing various restrictions (due to the lack of Fourteenth Amendment incorporation), it’s only been comparatively recently- pretty much since WW2- that there was a sharp dichotomy between civil and military arms. It’s still not quite technically impossible to legally own machine guns, cannon, etc.; merely taxed and regulated to the point of being extraordinarily difficult. And a fully-functional tank or fighter aircraft is something that few individuals are going own anyway due to expense.[]For almost all practical purposes, the question of what weapons civilians can own rests on the constitutionality of laws restricting access to explosives, since virtually all modern heavy military ordinance uses either explosive warheads or charges of propellant large enough to count as explosive devices. AFAIK, the Supreme Court has never addressed this. Any lower court cites anyone?[]Article One Section Ten of the constitution reserves several sovereign powers to the Federal government and forbids the states from trespassing on those powers. One provision of the third clause (the Compact Clause) forbids the states from keeping “ships of war” in peacetime; i.e., the states are forbidden from having state navies, since the federal authority is granted a monopoly on foreign relations. A not-unreasonable interpretation of this restriction might be that more broadly the states- and presumably private citizens as well- can be forbidden to own strategic weapons systems designed to project military power against a foreign nation. Certainly weapons of mass destruction like nukes would count, as would long range missiles and bombers.[/ul][/li]
I think we went through something similar with Prohibition. Prohibition was a reaction to an alcohol abuse crisis that was astronomical by current standards. Yet T-total restrictions were tried and proved unworkable, and eventually what shook out was the lawful sale of alcohol, but with enough restrictions that you didn’t end up with a bar on every second corner. If we ever do go through “Gun Prohibition”, I think more or less the same thing will happen.
The Third Amendment does sound strange to modern audiences. In fact, it’s worth a look at exactly why this seemed important enough to merit a place in the Bill of Rights.
It pretty much goes back to the seventeenth century when England was going through a series of upheavals (the English Civil War, the Commonwealth, the Protectorate, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution). Maintaining an army was expensive, and the power of the purse strings held by Parliament was a significant limitation of the ambitions of Charles and James. So the monarchs pulled various shady work-around’s to bypass Parliamentary authority. One of these was quartering- simply declaring it a duty of citizenship to provide bed and board (i.e. lodgings AND meals) for the King’s soldiers. That this amounted to demanding that the people support their own oppressors was not lost on anyone, and was one of the things banned by the English Bill of Rights passed after the Glorious Revolution.
So it was understandable that the American colonists were aghast when the British passed the Quartering Acts, demanding that the colonials put up with something that was banned back in Britain; and again, the idea that a subject population should pay to support occupation troops was seen as the very embodiment of tyranny. The Third Amendment was added because the Bill of Rights was largely about limiting federal power, and it was desired that no one should ever try this stunt again.
Modern methods of supply and provisioning make this largely moot, but the broader principle that no lawful government should resort to summary requisitioning to support it’s troops is still a worthy one.
