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iknowaguy, "what the constitution clearly states.", is dead wrong.. .. one other who agrees with many judges and many lawyers ..

There Is No Right to Bear Arms
by Amitai Etzioni
Tuesday, May 16, 2000

Amitai Etzioni is the author among others of The Spirit of Community. He can be reached at [e-mail]. No bombs please.

Whatever side you take in the current debate about gun ownership, one point should be clear: there is no constitutional protected right to bear arms, of the kind so often cited in the press and by National Rifle Association (NRA) supporters. This is the reason the NRA almost never claims in court of law that state and federal regulations controlling guns are illegal. The NRA instead wisely prefers to deal with legislators, especially with those that need campaign contributions.

The legal precedents

There are several ways of determining what is constitutional in these United States. One is to carefully read the original text.

The second amendment, far from referring to "a right to bear arms," as it is so often quoted, reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the rights of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The reference is obvious to the militia, the National Guard of the days the founding fathers were composing this document by which we live.

The 2nd amendment doesn't guarantee a right to bear arms
Another way is to examine cases that came before the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court. These were reviewed by no less an authority than Erwin N. Griswold, former solicitor general in the Nixon administration and former dean of Harvard Law School. He concluded: "Never in history has a federal court invalidated a law regulating the private ownership of fire-arms on Second Amendment grounds. Indeed, that the Second Amendment poses no barrier to strong gun [control] laws is perhaps the most well settled proposition in American constitutional law. Yet the incantation of this phantom right continues to pervade congressional debate."

The Supreme Court first addressed the issue to the right to bear arms in the United States v. Cruikshank. In that case, Ku Klux Klan members were charged with infringing the constitutional rights of black citizens to bear arms. The Supreme Court ruled that the right of the people to keep and bear arms "is not a right granted by the Constitution."

The Supreme Court reaffirmed Cruikshank's rule in Pressner v. Illinois. The issue in this case an Illinois statute which prohibited private organizations from parading with firearms in any Illinois city without license from the governor. The Court allowed the ban to stand and reiterated its position that the Second Amendment did not apply to individuals.

In Miller v. Texas, Franklin Miller was convicted for murder. He appealed, challenging a Texas statute prohibiting the carrying of dangerous weapons. The Court ruled that "a state law forbidding the carrying of dangerous weapons on the person ... does not abridge the privileges of immunities of the citizens of the United States."

The most often-cited case regarding gun control is U.S. v. Miller. Here, Jack Miller was charged with transporting a sawed-off shotgun in interstate commerce in violation of the national Firearms Act of 1934. In addition, Miller had failed to register the shotgun, in violation of the act. The lower court ruled dismissed the charge against Miller, but the Supreme Court unanimously reversed this ruling. Most important it stated that in the absence of showing that the sawed-off shotgun had any "reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument."

More recently, the Supreme Court maintained its strong stance against interpreting the Second Amendment as a protection of an individual citizen's right to possess weapons in three other cases: Lewis v. United States, Quilici v. The Village of Morton Grove and Farmer v. Higgins.

An academic dispute

Outside of the courtroom several Supreme Court justices have expressed their staunch personal support for the idea that the Second Amendment does not prevent the regulation of firearms. For example, former Justice Warren Berger, referring to the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment, stated that "This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud ... on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

Former Justice Lewis Powell agreed in a speech to the American Bar Association stated that "With respect to handguns ... it is not easy to understand why the Second Amendment, or the notion of liberty, should be viewed as creating a right to own and carry a weapon that contributed to the shocking number of murders in the United States."

Only a small portion of legal academic writing has been devoted to an inquiry into the Second Amendment implications of the gun-control argument. A few academics argue that there is an individual right to bear arms. This group maintains that the Second Amendment should be read to apply to the states, therefore limiting the state regulation of private gun ownership.

Their rationale is that Cruikshank and Pressner were decided before any of the amendments comprising the Bill of Rights were incorporated to apply to the states. These "individual right to bear arms" proponents argue that the two cases should be treated in the same way as the other cases decides at the same time which refused to incorporate the amendments in the Bill of Rights and which are not relied on as precedent. This group also advocates a more "colloquial" reading of the amendment's phrase, "right of the people," which would thus create a right that individuals can assert.

The larger picture

However, communitarians and majority of legal academics hold that the Second Amendment confers no individual right to bear arms. The rationale behind this position is that the Second Amendment was motivated by states' apprehension that Congress might demand disarmament of state militias. A close look at the history surrounding the Second Amendment shows that the Framers of the Constitution were concerned with ensuring that the states would always be well-equipped to "nullify federal imposition on their rights and to resist by arms if necessary." The Framers' concern at that time has now, with the evolution of American history and the role of the federal government, been largely resolved. In addition, an examination of the Second Amendment in the context of the entire Constitution reveals the Framers' efforts to create a society that nurtures communitarian ideas of responsibility balances with, and not eclipsed by, individual rights.
http://www.speakout.com/activism/opinions/5237-1.html

That link is from an excellent resource for the right to bear arms debate .. http://find-myworld.com/catalog/cat.php?q=right-to-bear-arms-debate