Supreme Court Upholds That The 2nd Amendment Is An Individual Right.

[dairygirl4u2c]

or else.. what's the point of including militia etc? why didn't they just say the right to bear arms shall not be infringed? i guess if you think they were just being incidenal, and providing a way for more advanced weoponry in the future. but that's reading in to it it seems. statutory constuction doesn't look at words as surplusage, and the weoponry thing is something that is necessarily imputed, even if it's not something they'd disagree with as framers and should be read into, it's still imputed cause they would have said it if they intended it explicitly... a matter of reading into the purpose of hte law. but my point is that it'd not say what it did if yeah.

[CatherineM]

The militia thing originally had more to do with state's rights. Today, without a very clear definition of militia as being National Guard or similar, it would be hard to separate it from individual rights anyway. The argument could be made that a militia could include the armory of single shot 22's at the local Boy Scout Camp, the ladies at the skeet club, or the ceremonial honor guard at the VFW that do veteran's funerals. In the old days when Oklahoma was a dry state, only "clubs" could serve liquor. You had to belong to the club in order to drink there. If they tried to take out individual rights, people would join militias so that they could own their weapons legally. It is too ingrained in our culture to seriously try to limit lawful gun ownership. It's like how much fight comes up when cities try to ban fireworks during the Fourth of July. There are some things that we just won't stand for.

[dairygirl4u2c]

yeah i don't really know what militias were used for back then.
if it's something for random up springs like deb mentioned, then sure that's what it meant, and all need guns for that.
if it's simply to deter the fed gov or bad foreignors, then i stand by what i said.
i still stand by as i always have that it's not obviously clear. the whole structure of the sentence itself, if anyone is to read it, cannot seriously said to be clear unless there's an agenda involved.
[quote]or else.. what's the point of including militia etc? why didn't they just say the right to bear arms shall not be infringed? i guess if you think they were just being incidenal, and providing a way for more advanced weoponry in the future. but that's reading in to it it seems. statutory constuction doesn't look at words as surplusage, and the weoponry thing is something that is necessarily imputed, even if it's not something they'd disagree with as framers and should be read into, it's still imputed cause they would have said it if they intended it explicitly... a matter of reading into the purpose of hte law. but my point is that it'd not say what it did if yeah.[/quote]

a point of mine in that rambling... is that we shouldn't think they intended to allow future advanced weoponry by their insertion of the word militia, in that.... yes, it's a valid argument to say advanced guns are needed (tho not the only argument) but that wasn't why they inserted the word. they inserted the word to ensure militias exist. and so if it's not their purpose that they're looking for advanced weopons in the future per se, and it's not surplusage, then they should have just said "right to bear arms". and that they didn't, lends itself to the idea that as long as militias exist, then we can ban some gun rights.

plus it talks passively about a well regulated militia. i don't know what the historical arguments are,,, but that could lend itself to gov regulation, to a degree.

Edited June 27, 2008 by dairygirl4u2c

[CatherineM]

The constitution is a bit like reading the bible. You have to educate yourself on when it was written, by whom, and for whom.

[Winchester]

The most basic understanding of grammar will show that the people's right shall not be infringed. Militias are made up of citizens who bring their personal weapons to the fight. The rifles used by the American Revolutionaries were privately owned firearms. The morons who think of this as a collective right dependent upon a militia, as opposed to keep possible a militia, know neither grammar nor history. Nor do they understand the "right to life," which implies the right to defend that life and thus the means to defend it.

Even if we read it as a collective right, a militia functions because its members are armed. Each person in a militia (which could be reasonably defined as two members minimum) could have a personal armory. A collective right indicates a right to artillery and other modern apparatus, including armored cavalry, jets, missiles, mines, rocket launchers...etcetera.

The same people using the "militia" argument seem to frown upon militias. The fact is, those who oppose private ownership of weapons are motivated byt elitism and socialism. They do not believe in individual rights.

[rkwright]

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Edited June 29, 2008 by rkwright