BGutzman said:
...Do you feel we are as free as the founders intended concerning the 2A? Do you think George Washington would have agreed with where we are on this issue?...
I don't know. I won't presume to speak for the Founding Fathers, and they're not here to speak for themselves.
And sometimes we speak about the "intent of the Founding Fathers" as if they all agreed. But they did not. Fifty-five delegates attended the Constitutional Convention in 1786-87. Thirty-nine signed the proposed Constitution. Thirteen left without signing, and three refused to sign.
There was then a bitter fight over ratification by the States. And it indeed looked like the Constitution would fail ratification until the Massachusetts Compromise was hashed out -- giving us the Bill of Rights after the Constitution was ratified without the Bill of Rights.
And while the Founders aren't here to fully explain the depth and breadth of their intentions and expectations, they did leave us an amazing legacy -- The Constitution of the United States of America. And from the Constitution, we can infer that they intended us to have, among other things:
- A system of checks and balances achieved through a separation of powers among the Congress (legislative), the President (executive) and the Courts (judicial);
- Of these three branches of government, the legislative was most directly subject to the influence of the body politic, and the judicial was the least subject to the direct influence of the body politic;
- Judicial power vested in a Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress might establish, and this judicial power would extend to all cases arising under, among other things, the Constitution and the laws of the United States;
- A Constitution that could be changed, albeit with difficulty.
Do I think that Congress has always enacted wise laws, and that decisions of the courts have always been wise and just, and that our public policy is always wise? Of course I don't.
I personally favor more freedom and less government (both federal and state) intrusion. But does everyone who has a voice in how things work and who gets elected to office agree with me? Of course not?
Our Founders also left us a system that allows us to try to hash out those differences. But the reality is that nobody is going to be completely happy all the time about the way things are.
The fact is that we live in a pluralistic, political society. As a result, and just looking at the question of gun control, in the real world there is going to be some "gun control."
There are a bunch of people out there who don't like guns (for whatever reason). There are also a lot of people who are scared of guns or of people who want to have guns. Some think guns should be banned and private citizens shouldn't have them at all. Some may be willing to go a long with private citizens being able to own guns as long as they were regulated. And these people vote.
We may think these people are wrong and that they have no valid reason to believe the way they do. We might think that many of them are crazy (and maybe some of them are). Of course some of them think that we have no valid reasons to think the way we do, and some of them think that we're crazy. But they still vote.
Of course we vote too, but there are enough of them to have an impact. They may be more powerful some places than others. But the bottom line is there would always be some level of gun control.
Of course there's the Second Amendment. But there is also a long line of judicial precedent for the proposition that Constitutionally protected rights may be subject to limited governmental regulation, subject to certain standards. How much regulation will pass muster remains to be seen. But the bottom line, again, is that we are unlikely to see all gun control thrown out by the courts; and we will therefore always have to live with some level of gun control.
How much or how little control we are saddled with will depend. It will depend in part on how well we can win the hearts and minds of the fence sitters. It will depend on how well we can acquire and maintain political and economic power and how adroitly we wield it. It will depend on how skillfully we handle post
Heller litigation.
So whether or not we like it, whether or not we think the Second Amendment allows it and notwithstanding what we think the Founding Fathers would have thought about it, we will have to live with some forms of gun control.
BGutzman said:
fiddletown .....
I understand what you said is in reality is apparently true...
Does that make it correct? Does that make it what the founders intended?...
It makes it reality.
If we are to protect what we can, and further our interests, we need to understand this reality. "Shall issue" concealed weapons permitting processes were enacted in a majority of States by understanding reality. The AWB included a sunset provision because our advocates and political allies understood reality.
Heller and
McDonald were won by understanding reality.
