If you can't make an argument without the use of exaggeration then why make an argument? Fact: Most private gun owners are better shots than police. Fact: Those that do not put in the training are likely to have only one or two guns at most. They will not have a "whole arsenal". Heller disagrees with the rest of your post. And McDonald.
And yet the SC keeps affirming that the 2A protects precisely that notion. I would of course be inclined to agree with you that the SC is quite 'absurd' (for entirely different reasons I'm sure)... but are you prepared for that can o worms?
It should, if they're no longer incarcerated. A competent, effective justice system wouldn't be releasing un-rehabilitated violent criminals out into the citizenry. An incompetent ineffective justice system that does release un-rehabilitated violent criminals is a great reason for everyone to buy guns for personal protection...
What part of my post is exaggerated? Can anyone and everyone not buy an arsenal if they so choose? Who is Heller? Who is McDonald?
...so lets ignore it some more? Hey, I mean, since we already have indefinite detention for 'terrorists' lets just lock anyone up for whatever, whenever... This logic path can take us wherever we (they) want!
Honest question for you, do you believe the founders our current gun laws were what the founders intended?
No. I think they intended for all able bodied men to be citizen soldiers, trained and equipped to mobilize for battle in a fighting condition from their homes, like the minutemen, instead of having any standing army whatsoever. And I think that warrants some further explanation here. I think if we were to translate what the founders intended from the 17-1800s into modern warfare with modern technology, we would still have a (smaller) professional navy, a (smaller) professional air force and a (smaller) dedicated professional intelligence/information/cyber agency. We would also need some professional trainers, organizers and command staff that would be responsible for overseeing the training, supply and regional/national cohesion of 'the militia'. The militia would comprise of the bulk of the civilian population who lived at home and had normal day jobs but were suitably incentivized to volunteer to take a few days off of work a few times a year to gather with others in their community to train and maintain some sort of standardized competency together in infantry and guerilla-style roles, as well as emergency civil roles like SAR and natural disaster response. Very similar to the National Guard, except vastly more numerous as it would be in place of a standing army, and largely able to mobilize 'from home' instead from a military base. Every community would have an armory that operated similar to a volunteer fire dept, though most likely under the jurisdiction of the local elected Sheriff's dept, where citizen soldiers that have taken on advanced training and demonstrated superior reliability and responsibility would be in charge of the storage, maintenance and security of specialized militia weapons and equipment like armor, explosives and artillery, as well as civil emergency equipment and supplies like food, medicine, sandbags, bulldozers and fuel. Think like instead of having the National Guard or State Guard or State Reserves... every community would have its own 'Community Guard' (or hopefully something more catchy, but I think I've made my point).
The question of criminal behavior as a basis for infringing on rights (especially in the context of the 2A) has no simple answer. It’s very complex and most people’s opinion is based on incomplete information. For example, freemen were considered “the people” in the original Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment did not abolish slavery as most believe. It specifically allows for it in the case of punishment for criminality. So slaves have never been granted the right to arms in either the body of the Constitution or in any subsequent amendment. It follows if a criminal can be enslaved, that allows forfeiture of their right to arms as well. Another right that can be forfeited by criminals under the Constitution is the right to vote. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment allows for removal of voting rights of criminals, As the term “the people” is often interpreted as a body politic, an individual without voting rights would be excluded from “the people”, and again it follows the right to arms would cease to exist as the individual is no longer “the people”. Even expansion of voting rights in the Nineteenth Amendment does not extend to criminals.
Sure they can. The likelihood of of someone untrained doing so however has about as much chance as tits on a boar hog feeding 12 piglets. Which makes your claim exaggerated. If you are so ignorant as to not know what I am referencing with those two names then you should NOT be discussing gun issues.
Nope. 2) Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose:
Build your strawmen somewhere else. We weren't talking about 'any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose'. If ur gonna butt in, read what you're butting into first.
That isn’t what exaggerated means. Someone can do this. That was my claim. Some people do do this. Unlikely is the word you were looking for, perhaps rare. But exaggerated doesn’t fit. If you are so arrogant to not respond with information on a forum meant to discuss thoughts and information then you should NOT be on a discussion forum.
Interesting OP. I found an article by the Atlantic that cites a similar study. I agree with their conclusion which is basically the same as yours. ...But should the justices want to settle the questions of the Second Amendment more finally, now or in the future, they’ll find that corpus linguistics, by itself, cannot definitively resolve whether Heller was right. Neither Scalia’s nor Stevens’s error provides the gotcha moment that people on both sides of the Second Amendment debate had hoped for. This concludes that we don't know exactly what the Founders meant by "keep and bear arms." I agree with this, and perhaps a more pragmatic use of our resources would be to determine what we want it to mean today. Trying to read the minds of dead people, using modern linguistic software or voodoo misses the point. One thing the study found was that the term "keep and bear arms" was novel among legal documents. I'm going to see this as deliberate, like everything else in the document, and infer the Founders' intent was to leave interpretation open to future generations.
I think the founders would think it absurd that every household doesn't own a firearm. They come from a time when nobody trusted strong central governments that could freely oppress their citizens. People were expected to be armed to keep the government in its place, hence the phrase "being necessary to the security of a free State" and not just "security of a state". Its just as relevant now as it was back then. The government should always fear the people, not the other way around.
Sure the people who OVERTHREW their own damn government with their own guns and wrote things like this... ...actually meant that only the government shown own the guns. They totally and whole heartedly disagreed with the general population owning guns to keep their government in line. And the earth is flat, men can have vaginas, freedoms come from the government and are not natural rights, the world will end in 10 years due to global warming and reality is not real.
Agreed. This has become so overplayed it's becoming easy to ignore. And it's easy to debunk. "...being necessary to the security of a free State" is the government. The word "free" doesn't change the meaning of State. Individuals are the People. While I'm sure the Founders understood the dynamics of armed insurrection, that's not the purpose of the 2nd Amendment. It would make no sense to establish the rights of individuals to arm themselves against the government in the same clause as it establishes the rights of States to form standing militias.
State militias to oppose a tyrannical federal government, if it came to that. It makes perfect sense. Militias are made of armed individual citizens. Individuals needed to protect themselves from criminals and raids from natives, and also be able to organize into a militia to either fight back against a tyrannical federal government, or aid the federal government if the country is invaded.
Sure, but that's not what the words mean. The main reason someone would own a gun in the 18th century was to feed themselves. Protection from other people and wild animals would be a distant second. Putting horses out of their misery third. War fourth. "2nd Amendment solutions" to domestic political issues is civil war. The Founders did not intend gun ownership to imply a right to civil war. There are plenty of reasons for gun rights. Protection against tyrannical government isn't one of them.
I disagree. I think they were almost expecting civil war. Many who helped write the constitution despised the idea of a strong central government, so the 2nd amendment was insurance that it would not get out of control. And they would not have been thinking about hunting when they were writing the constitution.
From the outside looking in, the whole amendment is badly worded, far too vague and what the hell is a "well organised militia" anyway? Is it that is has to have a captain who gives orders? Does the USA still have a militia? I thought they were part of an informal army and was referred to as the then bunch of neighbours who were not formally wearing a uniform and were called up when needed ... a GROUP of people allowed to defend their neighbourhood from invasion by another country. Nothing to do with acting alone but of just being bezzie mates with your nearest neighbour...but as part of a group of armed "neighbourhood watch" type volunteers. I really do not understand how other countries can live relatively peacefully without having to sleep with a gun under their pillow. Your gun issue looks positively archaic to us outsiders. But now there are so many guns swashing around the USA that you have, I fear, burned your bridges and instead of a foreign power taking over the Capitol building, you now have your own people doing it. and it wasn't a militia which stopped them...it as a proper military force. Now you have no militias left which defend your country from foreign invasion, you have armed nutters in the backwoods of Minnesota or Missouri keeping properly elected American police at bay, you have people who can't spell "militia" killing other people who can't spell "ammunition" killing each other in the street that belongs to everyone. Not a foreigner in sight. and you have a public which considers guns as necessary in order to take the law into their own hands, and laws which allow them to do so. Unfortunately you are in so deep that neither going forward or retreating will solve your death rate. If only those who wrote the second amendment had revised their first draft...
The Constitution itself provides checks against tyranny. Our tradition, until now, has been a peaceful transfer of power. This was the Founders' intent, and it has worked fairly well. The remedy for a government you feel is tyrannical is the voting booth, not the 2nd Amendment. Whether they expected civil war is irrelevant. The right of a "well regulated militia" is already established. War is fought with armies, not individuals. The point is that the notion of a 2nd Amendment solution is a call to civil war. We tried that. Some people thought abolishing slavery was tyrannical. Cliven Bundy and the Oath Keepers think grazing fees are tyrannical. I don't think the Founders envisioned this when debating the 2nd: I don't know whether they thought about hunting with regard to the 2nd; I was listing the main reasons every household would be expected to own a gun in the 18th century.
No. I'm defining what "bear arms" means. Everybody has a right to "bear arms". But the 2nd A refers to a military scenario. So the 2nd A protects the right to bear arms in a military scenario. The 2nd A mentions a well regulated militia, but I can see how it could be modernized to mean any military force that is necessary to the defense of a free state . So it could be argued that Trump infringed it by not allowing transgender Americans in the military. I don't know if it has ever been invoked for anything like that, but it's clear that, as written, it's not intended to go further than that.
When small groups like you have listed think something is tyrannical, the federal government can easily combat this. When the federal government does something that the vast majority does not like, then the federal government will have hard power stopping its actions, not soft theoretical power. And of course we don't use militias to fight our wars. Militias are for defending the homeland. If America was ever invaded, which I doubt it will be (because of our armed population), many armed militias would be formed.
