As the Supreme Court gets ready to render a decision this Spring on the challenge to the District of Columbia’s stringent hand gun law, I was curious what people think about the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution. It follows:
“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.”
I interpret this as stating the necessity of an armed militia and the need for keeping arms. The people make up the militia in their bearing of their arms. At that time in history your neighbor literally was the militia. Today your neighbor may have weapons at home but it probably has nothing to do with the country’s defense. I don’t believe the 2nd Amendment states that all citizens have the right to bear arms. In my mind if that were the case there would be no need to mention militia, all people would bear arms. To me it seems more like the legal guarantee to create and arm a standing army if necessary rather than a grant for everyone to own a gun.
What do you think?
Holy crap! Here we go again! Banning guns will mean that only criminals and the rich will have them. How many times must we keep repeating this?
Be assured my friends, one can go to certain areas an any large city, any hour, day or night 24-7 and within a very short time have nearly any weapon desired and ammo to go with it for a price. Anyone who has been around the block knows this! Gun control is just another strike against our constitutional rights and and a means to eliminate any resistance to a fascist government!
Paul harvy said it all and sait it best.
Commentary by Paul Harvey:
“Are you considering backing gun control laws???”
Do you think that because you may not own a gun, the
rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment don’t
matter?
CONSIDER THIS…
In 1929 the Soviet Union established gun control.
– From 1929 to 1953, approximately 20 million
dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded
up and exterminated.
In 1911, Turkey established gun control.
– From 1915-1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to
defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Germany established gun control in 1938.
– From 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews, gypsies,
homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others, who were
unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and
exterminated.
China established gun control in 1935.
– From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents,
unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and
exterminated.
Guatemala established gun control in 1964.
– From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to
defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Uganda established gun control in 1970.
– From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to
defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Cambodia established gun control in 1956.
– From 1975 to 1977, one million “educated” people,
unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and
exterminated.
That places total victims who lost their lives because
of gun control at approximately 56 million in the last
century.
Since we should learn from the mistakes of history,
the next time someone talks in favor of gun control,
find out which group of citizens they wish to have
exterminated.
It has now been 12 months since gun owners in
Australia were forced to surrender 640,381 personal
firearms to be destroyed, a program costing the
government more than $500 million dollars.
– The results Australia-wide; Homicides are up 3.2%,
Assaults are up 8 %, and Armed robberies are up 44%.
In that country’s state of Victoria, homicides with
firearms are up 300%.
Over the previous 25 years, figures show a steady
decrease in armed robberies and Australian politicians
are on the spot and at a loss to explain how no
improvement in “safety” has been observed after such
monumental effort and expense was successfully
expended in “ridding society of guns.”
It’s time to state it plainly; Guns in the hands of
honest citizens save lives and property and, yes,
gun-control laws only affect the law-abiding citizens.
Take action before it’s too late, write or call your
delegation.
Paul Harvey
Comment by kerry — March 18, 2008 @ 8:43 pm
I could care less if DC legalizes guns,but
All guns would have to be registered and sent in for ballistic fingerprinting.
Extensive background tests and screening for prior legal and psychiatric activity.
Gun safety classes mandatory and trigger locks for storage.
D.C should lead the country by setting an example with stringent laws.
Thats just me though.
What I suspect will happen is the NRA and the extreme right will raise hell and millions of dollars for the RNC causing pressure
from the unitary executive(or nots) to compel
McCaskey to advise Roberts of the needs of the freemarket which is struggling despite the best efforts of Gingrich’s congress and inability to
blame the democrats for the laissez faire f*ck-ups.(Phew!)
I would speculate that Dr.Tom Coburn-Git-(R)-Done-Oklahoma will be in attendance working crosswords followed by tearful pleas to confirm for Jeeezuuusss!
Damn it,Kerry,Your forcing me to agree with Paul
(Horse Rapist)(R)Harvey,Damn!
Damn!
Alright I’m cool now.
Comment by Rainlander — March 18, 2008 @ 10:00 pm
What do I think? First off, I think the opening salvo in the Second Amendment is but a subordinate clause: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state…”
You could substitute it with non-sequitur nonsense and still leave every individual’s 2nd Amendment rights intact: “The excellence of chocolate, being completely beyond dispute, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The subordinate clause is not dispositive to the force or end-result of the construction as a whole.
Secondly, the Bill of rights describes and preserves certain individual rights, but no state (militia) rights. Can anyone really believe that all the *other* Amendments preserve individual rights — just not the 2nd Amendment?
In any case, I pack heat and shall forevermore.
Comment by rhetor — March 18, 2008 @ 10:53 pm
Rain wrote:
(1)All guns would have to be registered and sent in for ballistic fingerprinting.
(2)Extensive background tests and screening for prior legal and psychiatric activity.
(3)Gun safety classes mandatory and trigger locks for storage.
(4)D.C should lead the country by setting an example with stringent laws.
Dear Rain, I can’t believe an intelligent person like yourself wrote that! Especially after reading the history of gun control. You did read it didn’t you? ;O)
1 Never happen! I would not do it!!!
No self respecting gun owner who knows the history of gun control would do it!
This would only place people like me, and I suspect many others on this blog, in the
catagory of being criminals.
2 Useless, the rejects would only
(A)have someone else get them a gun,
(B) steal a gun or (C) pick one up from a street source. Believe me, as a nurse
I met a lot of street people in intensive care who offered to “get me anything I wanted” or “DO someone” for me.
3 Gun safety classes I can see, but what use is an unloaded gun, locked in a cabinet
with a triger lock on it when some crazy, doped up SOB is kicking in your door?
The rest is too invasive of my privacy and my natural right as a living being to defend
myself which I have done with a weapon several times.
4 D.C. can’t set an example in cleaning up their own act much less be an example
for anyone else. They could make a start by enforcing the laws that are already in
place and enforcing the full prison terms. It has always irked me that a criminal could
get out years early for GOOD BEHAVIOR and that they can get thousands of dollars
in free grants for a college education etc. that the rest of us have to work for.
Very clever example rhetor. LOL
BTW see Obama and Gun Control… here on bartblog ….
500%tax increase on guns? GET REAL!
10 years in jail for crossing a state line?????
Lets see now, if I wanted to cross the USA from California to Main and camp out in remote areas and stop overnight in some rest stops I would cross at least 12 to 14 state lines or
more depending how straight a route I took…
now at 10 years per line….. would I have to spend the rest of my life in prison if I took a gun along to protect myself from two and
4 legged animals?
SIGHHHhhhhhhhh
Doctors kill more people per year than persons with guns. That’s a fact, google it!
SO BAN DOCTORS!
Comment by kerry — March 19, 2008 @ 11:57 am
Kerry,
Yes I read,understood and agree and disparage only on the grounds of Paul Harvey said it.
I dont believe Guns should be banned just the lobbyist’.
Paul Harvey,We’ll ban him and Limbaugh on the same day just on principle of good taste.
In the interest of brevity not being terse,I leave the following:
Obama is a politician stumping for votes.
Enforcment of laws and prison sentences=Good thing.
More police with resources and expanded prison capacity,very good.
Its your trigger lock,do what you want so long as you have one.
War,Automobiles,Cigarettes,Alcohol and Doctors more deadly than home/personal defense,True.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I dont have the answers,if I did someone might nominate me and then I would be a politician.
Its surely bad enough to just have an opinion.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call Me a criminal if you will but I too have transported guns across statelines on many happy trips to America’s wilderness with no intent of hurting anyone whatsoever.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I hope this clears up the mis-understandings.
Thanks for Your attention and good wishes.
Cheers,Rain.
Comment by Rainlander — March 19, 2008 @ 5:04 pm
Ok, time to inject some facts and logic:
FACT: Despite the 2nd Amendment, 15-20 million American Indians were killed by the US Goverment in the 19th Century – in terms of % of population, that’s more than all the countries mentioned above combined. So we can dismiss your argument of any causal relationship.
FACT: So far, the ONLY reputable study on legal gun ownership and crime is that done by the National Academy of Sciences. Their conclusion: it had NO effect on reducing crime, but DID reduce public safety.
FACT: England is essentially our closest socio-politcal predecessor (for example, we take our legal system and attitudes about sex and religion from them). They ban citizen ownership of guns, yet their homicide rate due to guns is over 46 times LOWER than ours.
LOGIC: If we read the 2nd Amendment as an absolute right, then we MUST allow private citizens to own chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons. Is that really what you want to argue?
FACT: The reason for the existence of the 2nd Amendment was a conflict between those espousing the rights of states vs. the rights of the federal goverment. State advocates feared that a future President might use the federal goverment’s power to raise an army to march upon the individual states and force them to submit to its will. Therefore the 2nd Amendment gave each state the power to raise an army of its own under its command – “a well-regulated militia” – to counteract this potential threat.
LOGIC: Some argue contrary to the above, that the 2nd Amendment was drafted to enable citizens to defend themselves against threats internal or external. This is provably false. The 2nd Amendment was never intended to give individual citizens the power to decide what constitutes a legitimate threat -if it were so, then (for example) a group of citizens could declare right-handed-blue-eyed-blond-haired-Protestants to be a threat, and legitimately exterminate them by force of arms with no fear of legal retribution. We see then that this argument is not only nonsense, but vigilantist nonsense. The power of citizens to decide what constitutes a threat external or internal is done so collectively at the ballot box, and exercised through elected offcials and their appointees.
FACT: The courts have agreed with the 2nd Amendment not espousing an individual right .(Miller, et al.). In our system, the courts decide what the law means (and in fact it was always intended so, as explicitly spelled out in Federalist Paper No. 78).
LOGIC: If we take the 2nd Amendment as literal, then citizens are allowed to bear arms in the form of guns, but NOT to bear AMMUNITION. The first does not imply the second: the dictionary defines “arm” as “a weapon (any implement of war)”. If “arm” implied “ammunition” it would therefore be logically impossible to have an “unloaded weapon,” gun or otherwise. (And why would the magazine be called “Guns AND Ammo” and not just “Guns”? :))
FACT: In keeping with the courts – and what everyone knew to be the proper interpretation of the 2nd Amendment cities, towns, and villages in the US allowed citizens to bear firearms, but kept all *ammunition* is central storehouses, to be distributed only in the case of a state-declared emergency Thus policy was in force until massive Western expansion made it impossible to enforce (an example of the Doctrine of Unintended Consequences).
LOGIC: Let’s look at the wording of the 2nd Amendment and make a logial/mathematical substitution:
“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.”
Say you are a parent going on vacation and leaving your 18-year old at home. You make the following agreement:
“The ingestion of food in sufficient quantities being necessary to human survival, the right of your access to my bank account shall not be infringed.”
So let’s use some common sense. Let’s put aside the specific wording, and focus of the spirit of it. What did you mean by this?
Did you mean your kid could use your money to buy a new I-Phone? No, of course not.
Did you mean that your kid could use your money to buy tons and tons of food? Of course not.
Did you mean your kid could use your money to buy candy, soda, all sorts of junk food? No, of course not.
You meant for them to buy just food, just good food, and just enough to get by until your got back from vacation.
So let’s go back to the original wording.
Did the Founding Fathers mean you could use your arms against whatever YOU deemed to be a threat, even if that meant the neighbor who owned something you wanted, or your elected officials? Of course not. It is not lawful for an individual or group of individuals to determine by themselves what is lawful (that power lies solely with the courts and legislators which citizens elect and indirectly appoint). That would not be “well-regulated,” that would be vigilantism.
Did the Founding Fathers mean you could get any arms and ammo you wanted? Did they really want some rich guy to build his own arsenal, one bigger than that of the US Army (or even local authorities?) Of course not, otherwise, how, then, could a nation (or state, or locality) enforce its own laws?
(Just to clarify at this point, “State”, of course, means a particluar state,.)
They meant of course, that you could bear arms in a militia which is well-regulated (i.e. under the direction of lawfully-constituted elected-and-in-some-cases-appointed authorities) to defend YOUR STATE (e.g. Illinois, Missouri, etc) against what IT (by statute and by the decisions of said authorities) deemed to be internal and external threats to ITS OWN SECURITY (since you elected them in part to have sole authority as to what constituted such threats).
Zeke
Comment by Zeke — March 19, 2008 @ 6:27 pm
“Paul Harvey”‘s facts are made up. Hitler wasn’t a gun control freak for example. Nope not at all – another right wing lie. I don’t feel like even bothering with the others that are not likely to be true either.
You can’t substitute that silly chocolate business in the second amendment and think it still means the same thing. Those words were not accidental or meaningless.
So despite the untruths of the gun nut crowd, I don’t think all guns should be illegal. I do support the bans on handguns in places like DC.
The immediate predecessor source for the US Bikll of Rights was the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The same guy wrote both – George Mason. The Virginia version was way too wordy so they trimmed it up for the US Constitution.
This is the Virginia original matching the Second Ammenedment – some got left out because it was already in the constitution and didn’t need to be added as an ammendment.
“XIII That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and be governed by, the civil power.”
Hmmm… not a whisper of an individual right to bear arms.
ole zenferret…
Comment by zenferret — March 19, 2008 @ 7:55 pm
SIGHHHHHHhhhhhhh!
Thanks Rain for the clarification. Don’t ban the pigboy, he is a great reminder of why this country is in such a catastrophic state! LOL I used Harvey’s list because it was handy and all together and I wouldn’t have
to search each example out individually. Raised 3 kids and had dozens at my home over the years taking them in my Jeep, between 6 and 9 boys and girls at a time to the mountains and teaching them all firearm safety and how to shoot. Never had a gun cabinet, or a trigger lock. Never allowed any destructive shooting of signs, property or glass shattering. Never had an incident and none of the children ever broke my trust. Had some deputies tell me years later they had been watching us on our day long outings in the mountains and that for a woman I was one hell of a father. LOL
The fact is that gun control will in no way affect the criminal ownership of guns or access to weapons by those intent on committing a crime. It will however make it easy for a fascist dictatorship or an invading army to disarm and control a REGISTERED public. Easy as Cheney shooting caged quail and atty. friends.
I like being able to go any place I damned well please without having to fear some nutcase is going to attack me while I am hiking alone with my furkid. I discovered that although I am only 5ft 1in and 118 lbs a weapon makes me equal to several large males. Been there a couple of times. Being at the bitter end of 45 or even a 22 certainly does change one’s mind and libido! There are many examples on the net of armed self defense, I could give several of my own. I live in a rural area and a deputy may be a couple hours away or unable to get here until the next day. Even in town officers may be too far away or busy elsewhere, and there is no 911 to call in the woods. In any event they are not in the business of protecting citizens, but of enforcing the law. THAT’S WHY THEY ARE CALLED LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS! ;o)
Because self-defense is a basic human right… you may find many examples here:
…and people need to know the truth about how many people use firearms to legally defend life, liberty and property.
http://www.keepandbeararms.com/opsd/default.asp
With the present administrations obsession with power grabbing and snooping into your phone, email, bank account, snail mail, internet and library activities and satellite spying one would think you would all have had enough of control freaks. I know I did long ago!
Thank you all for your opinions but history proves the fallacy of gun control diminishing crime.
Z & Z Suggest you read the other writings of the Founding Fathers which will clarifiy their intentions without a doubt on every aspect of the constitution. I have.
Guns are like abortions, IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM, DON’T GET ONE!
Comment by kerry — March 19, 2008 @ 9:48 pm
Zeke, your logic is out of left field. Seriously.
The number of American Indians killed in the 19th century has nothing whatsoever to do with the 2nd Amendment. They were killed off because they were less heavily armed, bottom line. Nothing to do with their right to keep guns – they just couldn’t get them as easily.
Whenever someone uses the phrase “only REPUTABLE study,” I have to wonder, According to whom? What makes your favority study reputable and all others dis-? Or, are you simply cherry-picking?
England cannot be compared to the US. They started out with bans on gun ownership, so they are much harder to come by than they are here. In any American city, I could buy a weapon within 24 hours of being dropped there – legal or not. The genie is OUT OF THE BOTTLE.
The 2nd Amendment does not cover CBN weapons because those didn’t exist when the thing was written. My own opinion is that the Founding Fathers would have argued that no government should posess such things, let alone individuals, but that’s as much speculation on my part as your speculation on their meaning. And then of course we get back to trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It isn’t going to happen.
Good lord, it just keeps on going. And I had a headache before you started.
Bottom line: Your facts are in question, and your logic is twisted.
Comment by Peregrin — March 20, 2008 @ 3:04 am
Thanks Peregrin, I was too tired to deal with those two last night. It was like trying to answer one of those catch 22 questions like “Have you stopped beating your wife yet.”?
Plus I didn’t think they really wanted the truth, only wanted to have a little rant. LOL
I’ve been watching The Winter Soldiers in the wee hours on PBS and being too weepy and sick to my stomach to get any sleep afterward or for several days. I worked at the VA Hospital in San Diego area and saw the results of war first hand. Heartbreaking.
Comment by kerry — March 20, 2008 @ 10:59 am
Kerry-
Great I don’t want an abortion. I also don’t want my neighbor shitfaced in the backyard waving his handgun around because he’s pissed at his wife.
I would say that my individual rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness outweigh the right for my drunk neighbor to own a handgun.
Comment by N — March 20, 2008 @ 12:43 pm
We Native Americans were not granted US citizenship until 1924. The 2nd Amendment did not apply in the 19th century. Plenty of massacres were preceded by attempts at gun confiscation, including in the town where I live. It’s too depressing to go into.
My parents still live in a rural area and my uses his guns to scare wild animals away from his house and pets. If you came home and found a bears paw prints on your kitchen window, you might arm yourself as well. Heres a tip: Don’t actually shoot the bear unless you have to because it really pisses him off. Warning shots are usually enough.
N, your drunk neighbor scenario seems more like an argument against alcohol. If your neighbor got drunk and ran his wife over with his car we wouldn’t call for a ban on automobiles.
Comment by Danger Bear — March 20, 2008 @ 3:39 pm
N, Bet that CAMEL hurt going down!
Comment by kerry — March 21, 2008 @ 11:32 am