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Some thoughts about the 2nd Amendment

Moot said:
But the 14th doesn't prevent the government from regulating guns...or speech for that matter. Most of the states still have the same second amendment provisions in their state constitutions that they had before the 14th amendment. And the courts are still referencing State constitutions in second amendment cases. So what changed? I can see how the 14th protects civil rights but I'm still not seeing how it changed all the BoR into an individual right.

Abridging rights isn't the same as abridging privileges and immunities, is it?
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How can you claim to understand the Constitution if you don't get the concept of Incorporation?
 
OpportunityCost said:
How can you claim to understand the Constitution if you don't get the concept of Incorporation?
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Obviously, I understand the concept better than you do.
 
JMR said:
I do not take credit for the following statement, but I did find it thought provoking when I read it:

"Repealing the Second Amendment is a pipe dream but enforcing a strict interpretation of it might be attainable. By that, I mean requiring all gun owners to belong to a well regulated militia that requires strict training and that bears financial and legal responsibility for the actions of its members."
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I'm all for bringing back the militia. Militiamen have the right to have machine guns (real ones, not bump stocks), grenades and grenade launchers, anti-tank bazookas, and Stinger missiles. They also have the right to take their weapons home with them.


JMR said:
I believe the second amendment provides citizens the right to bear arms because a well regulated militia is necessary for the protection of a free state.
Random people carrying whatever they want for whatever purpose they may desire is not the intent of the 2nd amendment.
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The Second Amendment merely protects a preexisting right. That preexisting right has a long legal history of ensuring that civilians not in the militia have the right to have guns appropriate for self defense.
 
Pozessed said:
So, why do we have the 2nd amendment in the USA,
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Because the Founding Fathers wanted to ensure that our civil rights were protected.


Pozessed said:
and does our current legislation for firearms fulfill the intention the framers of the 2nd amendment had in mind?
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Bans on pistol grips are clearly unconstitutional. So is needlessly making someone wait for no reason after their background checks have already fully cleared.


Pozessed said:
If the answer to the second part of the question is no, we need to make our firearm laws more in tune with the framers of the amendment or accept that firearms are no longer protected by the constitution for the reasons that the framers had in mind, and therefore shouldn't even be constitutionally protected without a new amendment.
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Guns are very much protected by the Constitution for the reasons the Framers had in mind.
 
Vadinho said:
The South needed militias to keep the slaves from revolting. The North needed guns to kill Indians and keep the French and British at bay should they attack us. We had no standing army.
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That was a deliberate choice, not economic necessity. The Founding Fathers could have created a permanent standing army had they wanted to.

They chose to rely on the militia instead because they feared that a permanent standing army would lead to tyranny.


Vadinho said:
States had militias that could be called up to form an army if needed and men had to be prepared to fight at any time. They were also asked to own a gun or blade to bring to that fight.
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That was because the Founding Fathers chose to have a militia rather than a standing army.


Vadinho said:
Guns at the time were very inefficient and poorly made, very expensive.
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Not really.
 
Moot said:
It didn't take an amendment to change the second amendment from a collective right into an individual right, so why it would it take one to change it back?
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There was no such change. It has always been an individual right to have guns for self defense.
 
Moot said:
But I'm still of the opinion that Heller redefined the 2nd into an individual right.
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There is a long history of case law establishing the right as covering individual self defense even before the Second Amendment started protecting the right.
 
Toggle Almendro said:
There is a long history of case law establishing the right as covering individual self defense even before the Second Amendment started protecting the right.
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There are no Individual rights in our Second Amendment. The People are the Militia. There is no appeal to ignorance.
 
danielpalos said:
There are no Individual rights in our Second Amendment.
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The legal history of the right shows that that is completely untrue. It was an individual self defense right long before the Second Amendment even started protecting it from infringement.
 
Vadinho said:
The 2nd amendment was not about fighting tyranny from your own government, this is preposterous. The South needed militias to keep the slaves from revolting. The North needed guns to kill Indians and keep the French and British at bay should they attack us. We had no standing army. States had militias that could be called up to form an army if needed and men had to be prepared to fight at any time. They were also asked to own a gun or blade to bring to that fight. Guns at the time were very inefficient and poorly made, very expensive.
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Do you have any evidence those were the reasons for the second amendment?
 
Maccabee said:
Do you have any evidence those were the reasons for the second amendment?
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this idiotic theory was created by a minor league "legal scholar" named Carl Bogus Jr and further given life by a left wing gun hating talk show host named Thom Hartmann. It is bogus and as Sterling Professor of Constitutional Law Akhil Reed Amar of Yale noted, while the 3/5 provision in the constitution was clearly designed to get the slave states on board, the second amendment was not because some of its biggest proponents were anti slave founders and states. He also noted that the people who ignore the obvious context of the Second Amendment ignore the fact that the founders had just thrown off the yoke of English Colonial rule by force of arms and certainly saw arms as a tool by which free men could defeat tyranny
 
Vadinho said:
The 2nd amendment was not about fighting tyranny from your own government, this is preposterous. The South needed militias to keep the slaves from revolting. The North needed guns to kill Indians and keep the French and British at bay should they attack us. We had no standing army. States had militias that could be called up to form an army if needed and men had to be prepared to fight at any time. They were also asked to own a gun or blade to bring to that fight. Guns at the time were very inefficient and poorly made, very expensive.
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horsecrap. rejection of tyranny is the environment that the founders were writing in
 
TurtleDude said:
horsecrap. rejection of tyranny is the environment that the founders were writing in
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Then why was there nothing similar to the second amendment in early state constitutions, and why were there constitutional provisions allowing for conscientious objectors to refuse serving in the millita on the basis of religious beliefs?
 
Pozessed said:
I am not an advocate for or against the 2A. I do have thoughts on the subject tho. I think we need people to agree why we need or don't need the 2A so that when tragedies like a mass school shooting happens the argument of whether people should have guns or not is concluded. Right now we should be discussing how to improve the safety of our children at school and instead most of the conversation is about whether people should have access to firearms.

So, why do we have the 2nd amendment in the USA, and does our current legislation for firearms fulfill the intention the framers of the 2nd amendment had in mind?
If the answer to the second part of the question is no, we need to make our firearm laws more in tune with the framers of the amendment or accept that firearms are no longer protected by the constitution for the reasons that the framers had in mind, and therefore shouldn't even be constitutionally protected without a new amendment.
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Tyranny still exists now......just as it did in the days of the writers of the Constitution.

We must protect the rights of the people to be armed and WELL armed......just in case.
 
Unitedwestand13 said:
Then why was there nothing similar to the second amendment in early state constitutions, and why were there constitutional provisions allowing for conscientious objectors to refuse serving in the millita on the basis of religious beliefs?
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what's that got to do with anything? you do know that the founders believed that they were merely recognizing a right that existed from the beginning of mankind? How do you pretend such a right requires membership in a government controlled body to vest?
 
Vox said:
Wasn't needed. We had the Second Amendment.
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I think the overwhelming view back then was that the right of free men to be armed was assumed to be true and there was no dispute about that.
 
TurtleDude said:
what's that got to do with anything? you do know that the founders believed that they were merely recognizing a right that existed from the beginning of mankind? How do you pretend such a right requires membership in a government controlled body to vest?
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I assume you know about the Quakers and their vow of pacifism. That was a major issue for the colonial governments who created special conscientious objector clauses into their state constitutions that exempted the quakers from serving in the milita.

During the drafting of the constitution, James Maddison proposed adding a conscientious objector clause to the second amendment protecting the individual rights of religious minority’s. That proposed clause was not included because it conflicted with one of the priorities national security: the necessity of calling into service the militia in order to defend the country from foreign threats.
 
Unitedwestand13 said:
I assume you know about the Quakers and their vow of pacifism. That was a major issue for the colonial governments who created special conscientious objector clauses into their state constitutions that exempted the quakers from serving in the milita.

During the drafting of the constitution, James Maddison proposed adding a conscientious objector clause to the second amendment protecting the individual rights of religious minority’s. That proposed clause was not included because it conflicted with one of the priorities national security: the necessity of calling into service the militia in order to defend the country from foreign threats.
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again, that does not detract from the fact that the second was recognition of an individual right
 
TurtleDude said:
again, that does not detract from the fact that the second was recognition of an individual right
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The founders believed that the government could call upon the services of the militia, to order that people collectively take up arms in order to protect the constitutional government. They omitted the individual right of conscientious objectors who refused to serve in the militia according to their religious beliefs. In other words, the founders believed that the government could override one’s individual right to be a conscientious objector and force that person to bear arms in defense of the country.


If the 2nd amendment was crafted to protect an individual right, the founders would have included a conscientious objector clause to the second amendment. The absence of one indicates that the government intended the second amendment to be a collective right.
 
Unitedwestand13 said:
The founders believed that the government could call upon the services of the militia, to order that people collectively take up arms in order to protect the constitutional government. They omitted the individual right of conscientious objectors who refused to serve in the militia according to their religious beliefs. In other words, the founders believed that the government could override one’s individual right to be a conscientious objector and force that person to bear arms in defense of the country.


If the 2nd amendment was crafted to protect an individual right, the founders would have included a conscientious objector clause to the second amendment. The absence of one indicates that the government intended the second amendment to be a collective right.
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you cannot find any mainstream legal scholar nor any commentary from a founder that supports this nonsense.
 
Unitedwestand13 said:
Then why was there nothing similar to the second amendment in early state constitutions, and why were there constitutional provisions allowing for conscientious objectors to refuse serving in the millita on the basis of religious beliefs?
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"That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."--Article XIII of Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Constitution of September 28, 1776

Looks similar to the 2nd Amendment to me.
 
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