The founding fathers put the second amendment there for a reason. It would seem logical that the reason was the reason they felt compelled to explicitly state: the security of a free State. For which they reasoned a well-regulated militia was necessary. You would have to assume the arms of the militia were intended to keep pace with whatever innovations they might face in maintaining the security of the free State.
I don't think the wording of the constitution is much help, therefore, in arguing against gun ownership, given the (possibly wonky) interpretation is there already that any individual is allowed a gun whether they are anything to do with a militia or the security of the State. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
However, common sense and the ninth amendment might argue the second amendment does not hold absolute sway. The natural right of self preservation suggests civilians should not be walking around with these kinds of weapons casually in day-to-day life. And the ninth amendment says: the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
At the very least, you'd think even if everyone has a right to own a gun to maintain the security of the state, that a nice sensible law would be that in everyday life it should be stored securely at home until such a time as it was required to rise up against that tyrannical government that one day is a-comin'...
Edited by Peter Martin on 21 October 2021 at 1:22pm
The founding fathers put the second amendment there for a reason. It would seem logical that the reason was the reason they felt compelled to explicitly state: the security of a free State. For which they reasoned a well-regulated militia was necessary. You would have to assume the arms of the militia were intended to keep pace with whatever innovations they might face in maintaining the security of the free State.
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Hollywood notwithstanding, how many here think a bunch of weekend warriors would really be able to protect their state’s “security” if all the usual lines of defense were gone?
“Minute men” would be a description of how long they’d LAST!
It has been years now since a majority of the Supreme Court held that the first words of the 2nd Amendment: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state... were a non-binding and impotent (my word, not theirs) prefatory clause. With the only clause having any real teeth was the active clause: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Personally, I find this rich with irony. For DECADES conservative politicians, scholars and jurists have been excoriating more liberal judges for "finding" things in the Constitution that do not exist. Here we have a case of conservatives seeing words that DO exist and they act like they are NOT there!!
Marc
Edited by Marc Baptiste on 22 October 2021 at 8:23am
There are often complaints that the Second Amendment is "hard to read" because it's "inside out", but it's really no more than the formal phrasing of the time.
In modern English, it would read "A well regulated militia is needed to protect the security of a state, so the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be messed with!"
A definite problem arises tho, when those arms, and not invaders, are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. It begins to have echoes of the old joke, "The operation was a complete success, but the patient died."
That is where the federal and state legislatures were to come in an fill in the gaps - similar to where the Constitution says the states may regulate "time, place and manner" of elections; they don't spell out WHAT time, WHERE or in WHAT manner, of course, those are for lawmakers to flesh out.
However, in the case of the 2nd Amendment, it seems today's Supreme Court has chosen to foreclose on almost all "regulations" the federal or state legislatures want to institute in favor of an unfettered individual right to bear arms (which the amendment does NOT say). Again, what happened to "well-regulated" which it DOES clearly spell out??!!