Do you think our forefathers had current guns in mind when writing the 2nd Amendment?

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It was and is a tug of war between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, Every single line of the constitution and bill of rights was argued over incessantly by men locked in a hot stuffy meeting room in the heat of summer while wearing wool clothing and every single word is a compromise. The rights given to the Federal government was powerful but limited and to the states broad and far reaching and it was deliberately done that way. Since then the Federal government has encroached on states rights and we let them get away with it but the line stops at the bill of rights. Those rights were rights all citizens have when they are born or become citizens and to encroach on them by Federal or State government is wrong.

Do not infringe on the second because when it's gone the first is gone and then we are subjects not citizens.
 
It is funny that the writers of the constituion distrusted the government, which was in large part made up of themselves. There just has to be a little irony in there somewhere. In any case, I still haven't the slightest idea how anyone here would do things any differently. Some even wanted to make Washington a king. Were we the first country to have a president? Do you suppose the government would be any more trustworthy were the members of this forum, myself naturally excluded (because I am not your friend), a part of the government, aside from those who already are?
 
Do things differently?

I'd do things differently by doing them the way they were intended to be done.

The COTUS is a fine document just as it's written. The interpretation and re-interpretation is the problem.

Many, many issues that are not appropriate for national level control or influence are under national control today. Incorporation against the states is a disaster. Finding ideas that aren't there is a disaster.

Start with the basis of the Revolution. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Now, the founders weren't perfect, they were a product of their times to a certain extent, after all, but they had this line right, if not the application.

"Men" is "HUman". We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all mankind is created equal.

Start there and apply the COTUS as it was meant to be applied, against the National government and not where it wasn't, the states.

Get rid of "reading between the lines" nonsense. It says what it says and doesn't say what it doesn't. Everything not there is left to the people and to the states.

The National government is an out of control monster. Far too big, far too powerful, far too influential, far too involved.

The entire COTUS is something like 8 (rather large) pages. What would it be on standard size paper? 20? 25 pages? How do we have a National government that passes laws of such breadth and force that they constitute THOUSANDS of pages?

How do we have like a dozen National level agencies that regulate salmon fishing? TSA, anyone? The Patriot Act? The Lacey Act? National laws against farmers selling "raw" milk to their neighbors? Federal investigators sent to investigate decedents of Hemingway's cats?

How would we do things differently? We'd start by NOT DOING a whole darn lot and by taking the document for what it SAYS!
 
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Brian you are right, however, we need to look forward. We need to figure out how we reduce the size and power of the federal govt and restore power to the states. That is no easy path, the legislature empowers themselves and virtually everyone we send to dc becomes tainted with their own self interest. I believe we to provide incentives for our reps to do what is in OUR best interest, those incentives are term limits. We need a strong grass roots group to educate people on why its important for the states to gain power back.
 
I second the notion of the constitution as a literal document. Each of the founding fathers may have intentions influenced by differing opinions. The final document, I'm sure, is a product of compromises. I agree with Brian that there's way too much reading between the lines.

The second amendment is 27 words, yet we have page after page of debate on what the founders may have had in mind. In the end, it really matters not what they were thinking, what matters is what was put in the final document.

About my earlier posts about defense against tyranny... I made a poor attempt at demonstrating the fact that John Q. Public isn't receptive of that argument. It very well seems to be what the founders had in mind, it is not looked upon favorably by the populace.
If a sworn officer of the law wants to disarm me, I will comply. If members of the military are under orders to disarm me, I will comply. Tyranny it may be, I'll have to sort it out later.
 
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Catch-22

How would we do things differently? We'd start by NOT DOING a whole darn lot and by taking the document for what it SAYS!
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"Not doing a whole darn lot" would be maintaining the staus quo, and taking the document for what it says would involve undoing much.

The country will not survive either course, I fear: far too many people (something like 50% of the housholds in the country) DEPEND upon a direct payment from the .gov for their standard of living..... many of those would starve w/o the payments they recieve. That will not happen ......

Neither can we afford to keep paying for that ..... catch 22.

I do know this: What can not continue, will not. If you depend upon the Fed.gov for your supper (or anything else you need), I suggest you make alternative plans.

....and BT, you may not want to be my friend, but you are my Brother. ;)
 
Naw, you're still getting it wrong: the purpose of the 2nd amendment is to put down rebellion, certainly not to enable rebellion.
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???

On the contrary, the primary purpose of the 2nd amendment was to ensure that the American people would always have the power to violently overthrow any government that descended into tyranny. I would say this is specifically defined as rebellion. A justified rebellion, but still rebellion. Having that power prevents the American people from being required to use it, so we tend not to think that an armed overthrow of our government would begin as an illegal act. The intent of the 2nd amendment was to safeguard the functioning of our Republic, the best way the Founders knew how. We can talk about the many erosions of freedom that have taken place since the writing of the Constitution, corruption of the electoral process, how much you hate your elected representatives, etc until the end of time, but we still elect our Representatives as laid out in the Constitution. If your elected representative fails to serve the needs of the majority of voters, he is replaced by his constituents with a newly elected official. So long as this system remains in effect, we do not have tyranny. The moment the government decides that popular elections will be “suspended”, we do have tyranny. And the American people have the duty to restore our Republic by force.


What difference does it make what the original meaning of the 2nd amendment was, or what the militia was. I for one do not care to be bound by what they decided well over 200 years ago no more than I wish to be bound by things written 3,000 years ago, even though such things were thought to be very, very important. Sacrificied any animals lately?


Never has the militia been called out to overthrow a tyrannical government and I'm not sure one ever has been anywhere. After all, the only thing that will happen is that one government will be replaced by another, perhaps by two others, maybe even more. I cannot imagine that a government that comes to power by force of arms, by revolution, will be any better than the previous one. What the militia was used for was to put down rebellion, which it did fairly well, fight the Indians and repell invasion, the latter two which it did poorly.
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What you “care to be bound by” does not matter, even in the slightest. The US Constitution binds you regardless of your cares. No idea why you bring up “what was written 3000 years ago”, it isn’t relevant in any way to the government of our country—the Constitution and its amendments are. If public opinion is so swayed that there is enough support to amend the Constitution to repeal the 2nd Amendment, this is in fact lawful, and we will all be made criminals when we refuse to disarm ourselves. Keep that in mind when you scoff at the idea of “original intent”. Original intent is always central to the argument in Constitutional law. Tying the right to bear arms to a militia is absurd, as has already been clearly pointed out in this thread, as well as by numerous scholars far smarter than me. Of course the government, who controls the modern “militia” (National Guard) would never “call them up” to overthrow…themselves. This doesn’t seem to be a serious argument. However, the government of the United States came to power through revolution, by force of arms. Ditto France, and many other countries. Our government may not be perfect, but I doubt anyone would argue that they would prefer to be a subject to a limited monarch than a citizen of a representative democracy. Just thought you might be interested in a few examples, since you couldn’t think of any, lol.
 
What you “care to be bound by” does not matter, even in the slightest. The US Constitution binds you regardless of your cares.
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Actually, it does not: It binds the Federal Government, and to some extent, the States. The 1A says "Congress shall make no law....." That the COTUS limits the power of the Fed.gov sorely vexes some of the Statist bent ..... but it does not bind them..... just the Fed.gov. Laws made up by Congress on the other hand......
 
Did the Founders have in mind the Internet, cable TV, talk radio, smart phones, 3-D motion pictures, 24-hour news programs, etc. when they wrote the First Amendment? Answer: doesn't matter. But it's worth noting that many of the same who want to curb the 2nd amendment also want to do the same to the First Amendment. Consider the movement to abridge the First Amendment in the wake of the Citizens United decision. When the Lefties win control of who has "too much speech" and who "not enough" everything else will be easy.
 
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
--Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment (1764).
I would say yes.
 
You'll have to give me some time to think about federal powers that I do not like. Of course, I might throw in some state and local powers, too, just to keep it interesting.

What I keep trying to imply here, which you may have missed, is to get people away from the idea of an armed rebellion. Keep in mind that you won't get anywhere without the support of either the armed forces or the national guard (the militia). Also, I'm trying to dissuade people from thinking that government is a necessary evil. The only time in the past when there was a temporarily successful rebellion, all that happened, government-wise, was the formation of yet another government that was hardly any different from the other one.

On the other hand, Mae West is quoted as saying that when she had to choose between two evils, she liked to pick the one she hadn't tried before. That's about all it would amount to.
 
Where in the 2nd amendment does it say anything about "guns"?
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Haven't read the whole thread, but this is a really ignorant statement.

1) Where in the 1st Amendment does it say anything about radio, TV, Internet or Twitter? I suppose free speech shouldn't be extended to these outlets?

2) Definition of Arms, as defined by Merriam-Webster:

a means (as a weapon) of offense or defense; especially : firearm

3) Go read Heller vs. DC, and MacDonald vs. Chicago majority opinions. They both clearly state that arms refer to guns.

4) I implore you to find the word "Privacy" in the Constitution. You won't find it, yet the Government invading privacy is considered Un-Constitutional (well, less so since the Patriot Act, anyway). It's because we can look at the obvious intent, and implied intent of certain phrases and clauses...the 3rd Amendment being a biggie in this instance.

5) The obvious intent of the 2nd Amendment referred to weapons, specifically firearms. Reading what the authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights had to say on this issue makes it abundantly clear that the 2nd Amendment is about guns.
 
My thought, and I'll pose it this way, do you think they had any thought as to what the continental congress would do to this country along with the presidents, and judicial branch with the changes that have been made from where we started, or what the founders originally place on paper???
 
That is why the gun grabbers' assault on firearms is not only, not even primarily an attack merely on the means of self-defense but more fundamentally, the gun grabbers are engaged in a blatant attack on the very legitimacy of self-defense itself. It's not really about the guns; it is about the government's ability to demand submission of the people. Gun control is part and parcel of the ongoing collectivist effort to eviscerate individual sovereignty and replace it with dependence upon and allegiance to the state.

That is why the most egregious of the fallacious arguments used to justify gun control are designed to short-arm the citizenry (e.g., banning so-called "assault rifles") by restricting the application of the Second Amendment to apply only to arms that do not pose a threat to the government's self-proclaimed monopoly on the use of force.
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posted today:

While the Obama administration sets out to eviscerate the gun rights of American citizens in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, earlier this week it was announced that the Department of Homeland Security has awarded a company a contract worth over $45,000 dollars to provide the DHS with 200,000 more rounds of bullets.

This new purchase adds to the staggering figure of 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition already secured by the DHS over the last 9 months alone.

The contradiction of the Obama administration preaching gun control while simultaneously the federal government arms itself to the teeth with an arsenal that would be enough to wage a full scale 7 year ground war is jaw-dropping.
 
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It's like the cliche, Gun control isn't about guns, it's about control. The 2nd Amendment is the only real check and balance the people have against the government. When the people are disarmed, the government is free to do whatever they want.
 
Whether armed revolution would be feasible isn't even the point. The point is that the possibility exists, remote and ill-fated as it might be, and that in itself forms some check against the political elite.

I am not advocating armed revolution. I am advocating that its possibility does serve a potentially useful part in a detente of sorts.
 
I would be interested in a link on the homeland security news.

I would be interested in why homeland security needs that much ammo. I never liked the name of that organization.
 
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