Replies to post #321927 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[DrHarleyboy]

Well the great news is it that will NEVER change :)

You left-wing nut jobs have assured that everyone needs to be on the defense from the likes your murderous ilk; Thank You for solidifying the argument for the common citizen to be armed to defend themselves against the progressive loonies like Connor Betts.

I think I'll go buy another gun today to celebrate.

[SoxFan]

Madison inserted the 2nd Amendment. I'll talk more about this later tonight but Wikipedia? Really?

[blackhawks]

Nowhere does it state that in the link you posted. In order to give pivotal weight to MA you have to underweight the concerns of the slave holding States.

Anti-Federalists were the drivers for the Bill of Rights and most of them lived in the slave States.

[SoxFan]

What the Founding Fathers Really Meant When They Wrote the Second Amendment


Has the Second Amendment been twisted by conservatives? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Richard Potter, on Quora.




The Second Amendment was created so that the states could form militias or armies to destroy insurrections or slave rebellions because the federal government had no standing military for a long time. The Founding Fathers were frightened by a standing army, because they feared coups. Without a standing army, the only protection the people and the government had were militias.

The U. S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, states:

“The Congress shall have Power ... To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy; To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces; To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;”

Note that there could be a permanent navy, but not a standing army. Note also the Constitution explicitly states what militias do: they make sure the laws are followed, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions. This was a lesson learned after Shays Rebellion of 1786-1787 and The Whiskey Rebellion 1791-1794. The Militia Act of 1792 also explicitly directs the president’s use of militias; see The Militia Act of 1792.
The Constitution made sure that there was nothing to fear from the Federal government, because there was no standing army. They feared insurrection and invasions of all sorts. The militias were empowered by the Constitution to protect against these in the absence of a U.S. army. Every single speaker in the U.S. House of Representatives who commented on the Second Amendment before its ratification spoke only about militias.

That being said, the Founding Fathers seemed to think that guns and militia service were good for character building. They certainly didn’t want to ban them. On the contrary, gun ownership and militia membership were required. The aforementioned Militia Act of 1792 stated:

“That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accounted and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.”

However, the states had many laws regulating guns from the earliest days of the founding of America until the present day. Not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution were prohibited from owning guns. Even Dodge City, Kansas in the 1870’s prohibited weapons from being carried. That law wasn’t very effective.

The U.S. Constitution and subsequent laws provided for militias to protect the government, while regulating guns. Guns were integral to the American experience, as every white male between 18 and 45 was required to own a gun and serve in the militia. Guns could be and were regulated. It is difficult to know with certainty how the Founding Fathers would react to a number of things as they are today, including the fact that we have an incredibly powerful standing army and that we are awash in handguns and weapons that have no relationship to militias.

For what it’s worth, my opinion is that at this time gun ownership is fully ingrained in our laws and experience. The states should be able to regulate them as they see fit. That is the law as it is now. To change the law will require a Constitutional Amendment, which is not likely any time in the foreseeable future.

[SoxFan]

Here is some more:


The Second Amendment you don't know

By Saul Cornell

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
Dec 19, 2012

In the coming months, as the nation begins a serious discussion about gun regulation, the meaning of the Second Amendment — the statement that "a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" — will be much discussed.

It is vital that Americans separate myths from realities, because what many of us seem to have forgotten is that, in the vision of the founders of the United States of America, the right to bear arms carries with it enormous burdens and responsibilities.

In fact, if we restored the Second Amendment to its original meaning, it would be the NRA's worst nightmare. Invoking the Second Amendment ought to be a more effective argument for increased regulation than it is against it.

In 2008, a closely divided Supreme Court abandoned more than 70 years of precedent and for the first time in American history affirmed that the Second Amendment is about a right to have a handgun in the home for self-defense. Lost in most of the commentary then and now is that this is almost the exactly opposite of what James Madison, the primary architect of the amendment, intended, and is hard to reconcile with the way most ordinary Americans would have read it in 1791.

In 1776, most of the original state constitutions did not even include an arms-bearing provision. The few states that did usually also included a clause protecting the right not to bear arms. Why? Because, in contrast to other cherished rights such as freedom of speech or religion, the state could not compel you to speak or pray. It could force you to bear arms.

The founders had a simple reason for curbing this right: Quakers and other religious pacifists were opposed to bearing arms, and wished to be exempt from an obligation that could be made incumbent on all male citizens at the time.

When the Second Amendment is discussed today, we tend to think of those "militias" as just a bunch of ordinary guys with guns, empowering themselves to resist authority when and if necessary. Nothing could be further from the founders' vision.

Militias were tightly controlled organizations legally defined and regulated by the individual colonies before the Revolution and, after independence, by the individual states. Militia laws ran on for pages and were some of the lengthiest pieces of legislation in the statute books. States kept track of who had guns, had the right to inspect them in private homes and could fine citizens for failing to report to a muster.

These laws also defined what type of guns you had to buy — a form of taxation levied on individual households. Yes, long before Obamacare, the state made you buy something, even if you did not want to purchase it. (The guns required by law were muskets, not pistols. The only exceptions to this general rule were the horsemen's pistols that dragoons and other mounted units needed.)

The founders had a word for a bunch of farmers marching with guns without government sanction: a mob. One of the reasons we have a Constitution is the founders were worried about the danger posed by individuals acting like a militia without legal authority. This was precisely what happened during Shays' Rebellion, an insurrection in western Massachusetts that persuaded many Americans that we needed a stronger central government to avert anarchy.

Many people think that we have the Second Amendment so that we can take up arms against the government if it overreaches its authority. If that interpretation were correct, it would mean that the Second Amendment had repealed the Constitution's treason clause, which defines this crime as taking up arms against the government. In reality, in the first decade after the Constitution, the government put down several rebellions similar to Shays - and nobody claimed that they were merely asserting their Second Amendment rights.

So if the Second Amendment does not have much to do about owning a pistol for self-defense, does that mean the founders did not esteem this right? Obviously the answer to that question is no. Not every right valued by Americans was expressly protected by a constitutional provision. The right of self-defense was part of the common law, a long tradition of rights defined by the English courts over a period of centuries.

But rather than invoke the Second Amendment in the coming months, Americans need to learn something about the historical origins of this part of our constitutional tradition. The bottom line is simple: the Second Amendment requires more gun regulation, not less.

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/amendment-don-article-1.1223900