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Bill Collins
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 10:59am | IP Logged | 1  

The right to bear arms also didn`t anticipate the sort of military grade weaponary we have today.
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Eric Ladd
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 11:24am | IP Logged | 2  

A friend sent to me The Supreme Court's ruling on the interpretation of "a well regulated malitia" in District of Columbia v Heller  --  http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/d cvheller.html

I have not read this in its entirety and was not aware of this at all.
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John Byrne
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 11:26am | IP Logged | 3  

The right to bear arms also didn`t anticipate the sort of military grade weaponary we have today.

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Here's a thought: a STRICT enforcement of the Second Amendment in the context of what it would have meant to the framers. Bear arms, yes. But only single shot flintlocks and blunderbusses!

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Bill Conway
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | 4  

The right to bear arms also didn`t anticipate the sort of military grade weaponary we have today.

Hold that thought for a moment. The purpose of the second amendment is to ensure that citizens should have the rights to possess weapons to protect themselves - foremost from the government. Now, at the time of the writing of the second amendment, I imagine that farmers and townsfolk had, more or less, the same level of weapons that the military had (muskets and the like).

Could it not be the intent of the Founders that ordinary people should have the same grade of weapons that the military/law enforcement have - in order to keep things at a level playing field? 

Granted if you take this concept all the way, there should be no issue with citizens owning anti-tank weapons, missiles, or weapons of mass destruction. Food for thought...

 

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John Byrne
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | 5  

The purpose of the second amendment is to ensure that citizens should have the rights to possess weapons to protect themselves - foremost from the government.

••

No, the purpose of the Second Amendment is so that citizens can PROTECT THE GOVERNMENT.

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Bill Conway
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | 6  

It was Alexander Hamilton who said (in The Federalist Papers):

If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude[,] that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens.
 
This could be interpreted that the authors of the 2nd amendment had not only intended that the goernment have a series of checks and balances for political power, but checks and balances for military power as well - people, state and federal.


Edited by Bill Conway on 18 January 2013 at 1:59pm
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Michael Penn
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | 7  

The purpose of the second amendment is to ensure that citizens should have the rights to possess weapons to protect themselves...

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In Founding-era congressional debates the term “bear arms” was used almost exclusively to denote military activity. Debates over the wording of the Second Amendment included discussion of whether conscientious objectors should be exempted from “bearing arms” or permitted to employ others to bear arms in their place. Those exceptions make little sense except in the military context. Others have argued that the general public shared the Framers' view of the phrase “bear arms” as having a military meaning. An amicus brief filed by a group of linguists and English professors in Heller concluded that, out of 115 texts published between the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Second Amendment, the phrase “bear arms” was used 110 times in a clearly military context, four other times in contexts that were not clearly military but which included qualifying language conveying a different meaning, and only once, unadorned, in a nonmilitary context. 

See Joseph Blocher, THE RIGHT NOT TO KEEP OR BEAR ARMS, Stanford Law Review (January, 2012); accord Michael C. Dorf, What Does the Second Amendment Mean Today?, 76 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 291, 314 (2000) (“Overwhelmingly, the term had a military connotation.... Searching for the phrase ‘bear arms' in the Library of Congress's database of congressional and other documents from the founding era produces a great many references, nearly all of them in a military context.”); Nathan Kozuskanich, Originalism, History, and the Second Amendment: What Did Bearing Arms Really Mean to the Founders?, 10 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 413, 432 (2008) (“Madison reasoned that while ‘t was possible to oppress their sect,’ no one had ever been able ‘to make [the Quakers] bear arms,’ and so Congress would be wise to ‘make a virtue of necessity, and grant them the privilege.”’ (alteration in original) (quoting Sketch of the Debates on Part of the Militia Bill, Gen. Advertiser (Phila.), Dec. 27, 1790, at 2)); Heller, 554 U.S. at 661 (Stevens, J., dissenting) (“There is no plausible argument that the use of ‘bear arms' in those provisions was not unequivocally and exclusively military: The State simply does not compel its citizens to carry arms for the purpose of private ‘confrontation,’ or for self-defense.” (citation omitted)); Brief for Professors of Linguistics & English Dennis E. Baron, Ph.D., Richard W. Bailey, Ph.D. & Jeffrey P. Kaplan, Ph.D. in Support of Petitioners at 23-25, Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (No. 07-290). ... and on and on!
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Stephen Robinson
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | 8  

BILL:
The purpose of the second amendment is to ensure that citizens should have the rights to possess weapons to protect themselves - foremost from the government.

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SER: I've stated before that this makes no sense upon examination. The Southern states believed the government had become "tyrannical" and seceded. They had weapons. They had an army. They still lost after a bloody four-year battle. The only thing that has changed since then is that the advance of technology would make it even harder to defeat the federal government. The feds could wipe out all the rebels finances within less than a business day. And the president himself still controls the military. Assembling a militia that could combat that would be almost impossible.

Yet, the Confederacy was at least an "organized" secession. If the individual states want to arm their citizens in the event of another Civil War, that would still be disastrous but it's far better than the reading of the 2nd amendment that so many have. As I've said, who determines whether the government has become tyrannical? Is the the Occupy movement who believes all the country's money is controlled by the 1 percent? Is it the Tea Party who believes the takers are exceeding the makers? Is it gays who can't marry in certain states? There are multiple views in this country and if each of them decides to take on the government, we have nothing but bloodshed. That's chaos. That's not governance. And it would make no sense for the Founders to put something like that in place.

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John Byrne
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | 9  

It was Alexander Hamilton who said (in The Federalist Papers)…

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You DO understand there's nothing "official" about the Federalist Papers, right?

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Bill Conway
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | 10  

Of course. The Federalist Papers give a great insight as to what the Founders were debating up to the time the Constitution was being drafted.
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Robbie Parry
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | 11  

In fact, as I have noted many times before, if, today, we were to really find ourselves in a situation where the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines had been obliterated, and the last line of defense was a bunch of weekend warriors in state "militias", we could consider that war well and truly lost.

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This is a point I try and get across on the rare occasion I debate it.

If the armed forces of the US had been obliterated, it wouldn't take long for the last line of defence to be obliterated.
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Andrew Bitner
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Posted: 18 January 2013 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | 12  

The Federalist Papers are a useful insight into the thinking of some of the Founders. However, they are not in the document itself. A strict constructionist, so to speak, would not avail himself of the Founders' errata and appendices but would stick by the wording of the document itself.

In context, the language of the Second Amendment really translates as "we don't have an army so guys can own guns and we'll call them up in times of trouble." Over time, this has been rendered unnecessary but the amendment itself was never challenged or revised.

The gun lobby would insist that the part of the amendment relating to "well regulated militia" etc is meaningless, and that the real meat of the wording is that it allows people to own guns. Well, they're wrong.

First, no right, Constitutional or otherwise, is unlimited; every right is subject to certain rules and conditions.

Second, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Either the entire wording applies--along with the inherent meaning--or none of it does. With the creation of an army and National Guard, it is debatable that the concern addressed by the Second Amendment is now obsolete.

Third, the Founders *did* allow citizens to own weaponry that was "military grade" for its day. However, also as noted, it is highly unlikely that the goal was for people to arm themselves to fight the authority of the government. The US government was not shy about putting down rebellion up to and including the Civil War. Do not think for a minute that arming yourself to fight "government tyranny" (which is a meaningless term if devoid of context) is a protected right; it is not.

So... gun owners are not going to face the confiscation of their weapons. That is a paranoid fantasy pushed by the NRA-- if even ONE example could be offered, it might have the tiniest shred of plausibility but... it does not.

In the meantime, we're left to consider a wide array of new executive orders and legislation that might abate gun violence and mass shootings. If we allow the NRA to dictate the terms of that discussion, we can be assured that nothing at all will happen. Ever.

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