2nd amendment challenge. Help me out.

[Baba Louie]

Colubrid,
Check out the "Library" link at the top of each page. Plenty of good reading and links to follow. The citizens of the first 150 years of this nation would have been amazed to hear or consider the "collective" theory now widely bandied about. Back when individuality was the norm and communism or socialism (read collective) was... unheard of. When the citizens knew the world they lived in was not a safe place and they remembered the British taking the colonist's arms not so long ago.

But here's Sanford Levinson's "The Embarrassing Second Amendment" article... love this small extract

...is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even "winning," interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.

http://www.constitution.org/mil/embar2nd.htm
(don't know if anyone else linked the above)

 

[Hugh Damright]

Back when individuality was the norm and communism or socialism (read collective) was... unheard of.

But the Second Amendment regards the security of a free State, and in a free State sovereignty resides in the collective. It is not communism or socialism, it is free government.

 

[Baba Louie]

Yes Hugh, yer Damright, and the collective is made up of individuals who come together as they need, for what they need because they choose to, and they come armed if need be because they each have that right... and as such Congess shall not infringe upon that right (or so I read somewhere), but I guess the States may or could until Federal power overcame State's rights circa 1860's (no matter what that pesky 10th Amendment says).

At any rate, a group (collective) of free individuals acting in consort is one thing. A government mandate forced collective of proles is yet another.
Maybe