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Here's another example of people who are more than happy to give up their own rights and force others to do the same.
There's a reason why things like a guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms, were put into the Constitution instead of being left for Congress to make a law about.
The Framers didn't trust Congress and the President, to keep their word on things like that. And, we know now, they had good reason for their distrust.
So they put in into the Constitution, where the only way it can be changed is by the STATES ratifying the change. Congress can only propose such change... and if it doesn't want to, the states can force Congress to convene a Constitutional Convention to proposes the changes.
They deliberately made sure that any final change authority, was kept as far away from the seat of central government (now Washington DC), as possible.
The second amendment is a based upon a clause (premise) that is no longer true. A well regulated militia is not necessary or useful in modern society. The Amendment is therefore invalid.
"Remember that it is GOVERNMENT that is being forbidden from taking away people's weapons. And the foremost reason it's forbidden, is so that the people can use them against government itself, if/when the government becomes tyrannical."
You have a right to use firearms against the government if you've decided that said government is tyrannical? Show me one court case where that argument has worked. Hell, show me one court case we're it's even been tried (It probably has been tried seeing how we have lawyers like Orley Taits)
None of the rights listed in the bill of rights say except as provided by law. Should it be legal to sell hard core porn to minors?
None of the rights are absolute. The First Amendment does not guarantee the right to slander or defame. Likewise, the right to bear arms does not guarantee that a madman, who is protected by the constitution too, has a right to firearms. It also doesn't guarantee one can own a machine gun. Congress is well within its right to enforce reasonable regulations.
Because that's already taken care of in the prefatory clause regarding a "well regulated militia."
You do know what "regulated" means, right?
It means "equipped" or "functioning". A well regulated larder, was a well-stoked larder. a well-regulated clock was one that kept good time.
Youre problem, well, ONE of your problems, is you attempt to use language as it is used today, to determine what was meant.
One Founder, however, opined that the malita was everyone save a few public officials. Another opined that the RKBA was "as a last resort, to deter tyranny in govt". Educate yourself.
None of the rights are absolute. The First Amendment does not guarantee the right to slander or defame. Likewise, the right to bear arms does not guarantee that a madman, who is protected by the constitution too, has a right to firearms. It also doesn't guarantee one can own a machine gun. Congress is well within its right to enforce reasonable regulations.
Where does it say that within the confines of Article 1, Section 8 with gives Congress its authority? Take all the time you need (will take decades of searching, an still no authority will be found).
I just finished Jon Meacham's "Thomas Jefferson - The Art of Power" (I highly recommend by the way). This quote by Jefferson jumped out at me:
“He (Jefferson) kept guns and traveled armed ... He was a man of his time on the question of guns, writing in 1822 that, ‘every American who wishes to protect his farm from the ravages of quadrupeds (four-footed animals) and his country from those of biped (two-footed) invaders should be a ‘gun-man,’ adding, ‘I am a great friend to the manly and healthy exercise of the gun.’ ”
Clearly, this was not meant that he keeps guns as a member of the militia. This is for hunting and home protection.
A cursory look at the history of the Second Amendment shows that regulation was a central part of its rationale—putting “well regulated” at the very start of the amendment was no accident. For instance, starting in the colonial period, states enacted a variety of “safe-storage” measures to deal with the danger posed by stored gunpowder. A 1786 law went as far as prohibiting the storage of a loaded gun in any building in Boston.
This ideology claims to rely heavily on the Second Amendment, and yet it is rooted not in the Founders’ vision, but in the insurrectionary ideas of Daniel Shays and those who rose up against the government of Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787. Indeed, there are gun-rights advocates today who think the Second Amendment actually gives them the right to take up arms against the government—but if that were true the Second Amendment would have repealed the Constitution’s treason clause, which defines treason as taking up arms against the government!
This is all so deeply twisted: after all, the Founders framed the Constitution in part as a response to the danger posed by Shays’ Rebellion.
As a result, our modern debate over gun rights has virtually nothing to with the Founders’ Second Amendment; that debate actually started about 30 years after the Amendment was adopted. What emerged was the notion that reasonable regulation was not inconsistent with the right to bear arms. In fact it was the only option in a heavily armed society.
Up until the 1980s, there was no “individual-rights” theory of the Second Amendment. Many states had adopted provisions protecting an individual right to own guns, but this tradition was distinct from the Amendment. All that changed when right-wing think tanks undertook a conscious effort to fund new scholarship to rewrite the amendment’s history. At first that effort was not well received, even in conservative circles. As late as 1991, former Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger famously called the idea of an individual right to bear arms “one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Just a few excerpts...
Read the entire article and educate yourself gun nuts and revisionists of history advocates.
Last edited by sickofnyc; 02-05-2013 at 04:11 PM..
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