doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com 2.14 mile shot.

Jack or John M, whichever suits, on your resurrected Second, from The New Yorker, first paras:

So You Think You Know the Second Amendment?

By Jeffrey Toobin
December 17, 2012


"Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: �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.� The courts had found that the first part, the �militia clause,� trumped the second part, the �bear arms� clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms�but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d��tat at the group�s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power�as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as �a fraud.�

But the N.R.A. kept pushing�and there�s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace �originalism,� the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a �living� constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)"

I'll say again that I don't recall anti-gun sentiments on this board. Disagreements plenty of regulations pros and cons but no outright anti-gun. Tens of thousands of Second interpretations by myriad US jurisdictions are expressions of how communities want to live, "constitutionally" or otherwise. It's America's enduring debate. It's not one side can only be right.

guess no body here has the balls to answer my question:


disarm...seems to work for the rest of the civilized world...

why not us?