Want More Guns? Keep Talking Gun Control!

[klaus54]

An [sic] military unit regulated by the US government. I would even be all for the government forming militant [sic] just for the sake of gun owners just to improve regulations. The only reason this is a conversation is because there is an issue with gun violence. If we did not have so many people dying unnecessarily this would not be as big of an issue in my book.

Shouldn't militias be separate from the U.S. government? What would be the point? Why would a 2nd Amendment be necessary then?

And, "I would even be all for the government forming militant [sic] just for the sake of gun owners just to improve regulations" is confusing. Are you saying that private guns owners should be in a militia? How would that work?

BTW, this proposal does nothing to address illegally-possessed weapons -- which are the major source of gun violence in da Hood.

[Starlight]

I don't think the best people to interpret the constitution are a New Zealander liberal

Generally third parties are the preferred way to mediate disputes, as they are inherently neutral due to not having a horse in the game.

What your constitution says or doesn't say has no effect on me, and personally (as I have made clear in the past) I don't particularly like constitutions and am glad NZ doesn't have one, as I observe the effects of constitutions in other countries around the world they appear to undemocratically gift huge amounts of power to unelected judges and take it away from the democratically elected representatives, allowing judges to overthrow democratically passed laws and creatively find present in the constitution all sorts of 'rights' that the original framers may well never have thought they were putting in there (eg rights to make unlimited political monetary donations, to abortion, to euthanasia (in Canada), to same-sex marriage etc). So, while I think the very existence of a constitution is dumb, and that the US constitution in particular says plenty of specifically dumb things, the actual things it says do not affect me, and I am thus about as unbiased a 3rd-party interpreter of the US constitution as it's possible to ever get.

[RumTumTugger]

It's still a cool saying. Very true and to the point.

Yep and Starlight still needs to deal with the valid quotes and admit he knows nothing about America her Constitution and the rights(not all of them to be sure) that are enumerated in the Constitution and since he doesn't stop trying to tell those of us who do know and understand what the Constitution as written with 18th century english words and phrases means. in other words he needs to stop trying to teach his grandmother how to suck eggs.

[rogue06]

In the slave-States, it was necessary for them to do regular patrols with their state militias to prevent the slaves escaping. It was a constant fear that the federal government would use legal loopholes in order to abolish slavery, and one of the loopholes they thought of was the idea that the federal government might ban the States from operating militias. This part of the 2nd amendment was thus written in order to guarantee the rights of individual states to operate military forces, and prevent the federal government from banning them from doing so. That was consistently how courts interpreted the amendment.

The Founding Fathers loathed the concept of a standing army in the control of the federal government. They considered it a threat to freedom.

For instant during the Constitutional Convention back in 1787 James Madison, long considered the "Father of the Constitution," warned against the dangers of a permanent army stating that, "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty." He added that, "Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people."

Madison's Vice President, Elbridge Gerry (one of only three attendees to the Constitutional convention who refused to sign the U. S. Constitution because it did not then include a Bill of Rights) described standing armies as "the bane of liberty" and that the purpose of state militias was to make them unnecessary.

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Paper no. 8 described a standing army as being an institution that was "unfriendly to liberty."

Samuel Adams wrote in 1776 that a standing army was, "always dangerous to the Liberties of the People." He argued that professional soldiers were likely to consider themselves separate from the populace, to become more attached to their officers than their government, and to be conditioned to obey commands unthinkingly.

The fact of the matter is that standing armies terrified them. Thomas Jefferson called them "engines of tyranny" and considered them to be "dangerous to our liberties."

These men were influenced not only by their experiences with the British army who many of them saw as being comprised of ruffians and drunken thugs and thus predisposed toward a citizen army, but also by the writings of folks like the Scottish writer Thomas Gordon who wrote under the pseudonym "Cato" in the 1720s and was an adamant opponent of standing armies, viewing them as a key method of undermining ancient English liberties as can be seen his Discourse of 1722:



So your claims that militias were somehow snuck into the Bill of Rights by slaveholding states desperate to keep the federal government out of their affairs is utter nonsense.

[Adrift]

I don't tend to think of there as being much continuity between the hippies of 40 years ago and liberals today. The significant difference you see on nuclear power is probably just a symptom of quite large underlying differences between the two groups.

I'm not necessarily talking about hippies from 40 years ago. I'm also thinking of the neo-hippies and peace-punks from my own generation X. It's a change I've seen mostly in liberal Millennials (which I'm assuming you're a product of / one of).

[rogue06]

Since 1980 there has arisen a creative reinterpretation, promulgated by the NRA, that this sentence in the amendment should be chopped in half and then taken out of context and the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" should be taken on its own in isolation. The idea being that this sentence-fragment guarantees a new right to the individual, giving them a personal constitutional right to weapons, as opposed to the historic idea that the amendment was a limit on the federal government's power to disband State armies.

Another example of ignorance based historical revisionism that is in the words of the famous theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch! ("That is not only not right, it is not even wrong"). Or as put in what is sometimes called "Asimov's axiom": "Not even wrong."

In his 400-page The Bill of Rights: Creation & ReconstructionwasCommentaries became nearly universally regarded as being the leading American authority on both Blackstone and American law.

Tucker addressed the Second Amendment at several points, clearly stating that it protected the individual, natural right of self-defense. After quoting the amendment he wrote:
View of the Constitution of the United States of AmericaCommentaries on the Constitution of the United States by Supreme Court Justice and law professor Joseph Story, as well as in his later Familiar Exposition of the Constitutionnot of States or members of a militia -- Story left no doubt that he meant the right to belong to individuals. He unequivocally stated that "the right of the citizens to keep, and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic."

Story was even more direct in his [i]Familiar Exposition[/u]purchased by state or local legislatures, or supplied by the King^[1]1.

[Jaecp]

I'm not necessarily talking about hippies from 40 years ago. I'm also thinking of the neo-hippies and peace-punks from my own generation X. It's a change I've seen mostly in liberal Millennials (which I'm assuming you're a product of / one of).

That's not my experience as a young (ish, I guess, I turned 30 last sunday) liberal progressive. Everyone I know active in the local political scene is pretty much in line with groups like the Brady campaign and others.

What kind of forums are these? Internet tends to skew things.

[Adrift]

That's not my experience as a young (ish, I guess, I turned 30 last sunday) liberal progressive. Everyone I know active in the local political scene is pretty much in line with groups like the Brady campaign and others.

What kind of forums are these? Internet tends to skew things.

Brady campaign? Are we still talking about nuclear energy?

[Jaecp]

http://www.bradycampaign.org/

It's the biggest, or most prominent anyway, gun regulation group. You had been talking about all these young liberals who are ant gun regulation and i was wondering where they were

[Starlight]

I'm not necessarily talking about hippies from 40 years ago. I'm also thinking of the neo-hippies and peace-punks from my own generation X. It's a change I've seen mostly in liberal Millennials (which I'm assuming you're a product of / one of).

Sure. I think there have been some very significant generational changes between the previous generations and millennials. I've discussed it at length in other threads in the past. One of the consequences of this is some significant differences in viewpoints between liberal millennials (of which I am one, yes) and liberals of earlier generations. The biggest difference I've notice is on gay-rights topics.

That's not my experience as a young (ish, I guess, I turned 30 last sunday) liberal progressive. Everyone I know active in the local political scene is pretty much in line with groups like the Brady campaign and others.

Happy birthday!

Your observations agree with mine. Adrift's comments on millennial liberals and gun control are inconsistent with my observations.



Rogue06/RumTumTugger,
The amount of funding that the NRA has poured into think-tanks and scholarly papers trying to promote their reading of the 2nd amendment over the last 30 years has been huge. I can't refute the combined propaganda production of a dozen different think-tanks and bought scholars. Yes, there have indeed been, as you cite, a few prominent scholars recently who have come out with historical reinterpretations of the 2nd amendment that see in it the individual right to guns that the NRA would like to read into it. And it is, of course, possible for them to carefully select the most favorable extracts from the founding fathers, while ignoring parts of their views not so favorable to their positions.

But, let's be clear, at the end of the day, what they are trying to have you believe is that a sentence in the constitution which begins "A well regulated militia" was intended to ban the ability of the state to actually regulate that very thing. The 2nd amendment self-evidently presupposes gun regulation, because it literally says that it expects the militia to be well-regulated.

[Kristian Joensen]

[Roy]

The Obama Administration has proven to be a boon for gun manufactures and the stores that sell them. But there is another equally interesting statistic.

Liberal clamor for more laws that they are not inclined to enforce.

Logic failure. You've assumed that there is no change in the number of firearms violations.

[Sparko]

Says he guy who ignores the entire first part of an amendment because it does not help your views.

Do some studying
Well regulated doesn't mean by the government which the second half makes clear by saying the government shall not infringe on the right to keep and bear arms by the people

You should really stop posting high
You seem like you would be a smart person if you were sober

[Sparko]

Generally third parties are the pref
erred way to mediate disputes, as they are inherently neutral due to not having a horse in the game.

What your constitution says or doesn't say has no effect on me, and personally (as I have made clear in the past) I don't particularly like constitutions and am glad NZ doesn't have one, as I observe the effects of constitutions in other countries around the world they appear to undemocratically gift huge amounts of power to unelected judges and take it away from the democratically elected representatives, allowing judges to overthrow democratically passed laws and creatively find present in the constitution all sorts of 'rights' that the original framers may well never have thought they were putting in there (eg rights to make unlimited political monetary donations, to abortion, to euthanasia (in Canada), to same-sex marriage etc). So, while I think the very existence of a constitution is dumb, and that the US constitution in particular says plenty of specifically dumb things, the actual things it says do not affect me, and I am thus about as unbiased a 3rd-party interpreter of the US constitution as it's possible to ever get.

All that just to admit you don't know anything about our constitution except what you google from liberal sites

[RumTumTugger]

Rogue06/RumTumTugger,
The amount of funding that the NRA has poured into think-tanks and scholarly papers trying to promote their reading of the 2nd amendment over the last 30 years has been huge. I can't refute the combined propaganda production of a dozen different think-tanks and bought scholars. Yes, there have indeed been, as you cite, a few prominent scholars recently who have come out with historical reinterpretations of the 2nd amendment that see in it the individual right to guns that the NRA would like to read into it. And it is, of course, possible for them to carefully select the most favorable extracts from the founding fathers, while ignoring parts of their views not so favorable to their positions.

just because they did not show all of the vast evidence that it is the PEOPLE that is meant doesn't mean they ignored anything Starlight we leave that to you liberals who think the Government cannot be corrupted our founding fathers understood that which is why they wrote the Constitution to limit the powers of the government not the People. you have it all backwards here.

But, let's be clear, at the end of the day, what they are trying to have you believe is that a sentence in the constitution which begins "A well regulated militia" was intended to ban the ability of the state to actually regulate that very thing. The 2nd amendment self-evidently presupposes gun regulation, because it literally says that it expects the militia to be well-regulated.

The operative clause in that sentence is not the one about "a well regulated militia" which is the qualifier not the subject of the sentence the subject of the sentence is "The People" who's rights shall not be infringed including the right to bear arms. YOU do not understand the Constitution Starlight it was not written to put limits on the People it was written to put limits on what the Government can and cannot do which is why we have the 9 and 10th amendments.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.


Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

but the 2nd amendment did make it clear that the PEOPLE have a Right to bear arms and there is a reason for it Starlight the same reason our founders gave when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. stop trying to say you know American history you've shown you don't.