In June, I put up a short post about a blog I had come across--one authored by what I think I might fairly call a gun enthusiast. It generated more comments than any post since this rag first hit the 'net. Let's see what happens with this one:
The Supreme Court has announced that it will consider an appeal from a decision of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that struck down a D.C. gun-control ordinance. The ordinance is one of the strongest gun-control laws in the country, and the Supreme Court is widely expected to offer a definitive interpretation of the Second Amendment, something it has ducked for many decades.
(A word here on definitive interpretations by the Supreme Court: As Justice Jackson put it, "We are not final because we are infallible. We are infallible, because we are final.")
The Second Amendment is a model of brevity that manages also to be opaque. It reads:
The Supreme Court has announced that it will consider an appeal from a decision of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that struck down a D.C. gun-control ordinance. The ordinance is one of the strongest gun-control laws in the country, and the Supreme Court is widely expected to offer a definitive interpretation of the Second Amendment, something it has ducked for many decades.
(A word here on definitive interpretations by the Supreme Court: As Justice Jackson put it, "We are not final because we are infallible. We are infallible, because we are final.")
The Second Amendment is a model of brevity that manages also to be opaque. It reads:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a
Leaving aside the questionable punctuation--Eighteenth Century writers did not follow what we would consider rules of grammar--it seems clear that the right to keep and bear arms was bound up in the maintenance of a militia. If it were not, the initial phrase--that a militia is essential to a free nation--would be irrelevant. Rules of interpretation hold that no word in a constitutional or statutory provision should be considered surplus where a reasonable meaning can be gleaned from the text, so that phrase should not be construed as a mere prefix. (From what we read of Eighteenth Century militias--the Minutemen being the most famous example--the term "well-regulated" may have been either a sop to the states or an admonition; it seems not to have been a description.)
A little history here: The colonists had hated and feared the British Army, which they regarded as the principal arm of kingly oppression. They resolved to avoid that evil in the new nation, and at one point the entire United States Army consisted of fewer than 100 officers and enlisted men. The primary defense against foreign invasion or Indian attacks (the Indians were always seen as the attackers, not as defending their homes, but that's another story) was the militia, organized by the states and called into national service in time of war. This system, such as it was, persisted until the Civil War.
The militias were not standing armies in state clothes; they consisted of virtually all able-bodied men, who were liable to call-up in times of emergency, and who brought their own weapons from home; not until much later did states provide arms. The Swiss army is somewhat like that even today. The ideal of the citizen-soldier was deeply embedded in the new republic; it was both a symbol and a concrete expression of how different the United States was from the British monarchy, with its standing army ready to trample the rights of the free-born.
It is also important that the Bill of Rights protected citizens against the federal government, not the states. Despite the establishment clause of the First Amendment, for instance, many states had established churches for decades after the Constitution was adopted.
From this, I deduce that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right to bear arms against intrusion by the federal government, and indirectly to protect the states and their militias, as a guard both against foreign invasion and against overbearing forces from the federal government. The people's right to bear arms, as set out in the Amendment, was, then, not intended to keep states from making at least reasonable restrictions on what weapons civilians might possess.
(If one believes that the Second Amendment protects the individual's right to possess weapons, then it becomes necessary to ask if my neighbor can own a tank or a fighter plane. No one--at least no rational person so far as I am aware--believes in that much freedom to own weapons, but if the Second Amendment does not allow Congress, or at least the states, to enact controls, where does the line lie, and where is it found in the Constitution?)
A little history here: The colonists had hated and feared the British Army, which they regarded as the principal arm of kingly oppression. They resolved to avoid that evil in the new nation, and at one point the entire United States Army consisted of fewer than 100 officers and enlisted men. The primary defense against foreign invasion or Indian attacks (the Indians were always seen as the attackers, not as defending their homes, but that's another story) was the militia, organized by the states and called into national service in time of war. This system, such as it was, persisted until the Civil War.
The militias were not standing armies in state clothes; they consisted of virtually all able-bodied men, who were liable to call-up in times of emergency, and who brought their own weapons from home; not until much later did states provide arms. The Swiss army is somewhat like that even today. The ideal of the citizen-soldier was deeply embedded in the new republic; it was both a symbol and a concrete expression of how different the United States was from the British monarchy, with its standing army ready to trample the rights of the free-born.
It is also important that the Bill of Rights protected citizens against the federal government, not the states. Despite the establishment clause of the First Amendment, for instance, many states had established churches for decades after the Constitution was adopted.
From this, I deduce that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right to bear arms against intrusion by the federal government, and indirectly to protect the states and their militias, as a guard both against foreign invasion and against overbearing forces from the federal government. The people's right to bear arms, as set out in the Amendment, was, then, not intended to keep states from making at least reasonable restrictions on what weapons civilians might possess.
(If one believes that the Second Amendment protects the individual's right to possess weapons, then it becomes necessary to ask if my neighbor can own a tank or a fighter plane. No one--at least no rational person so far as I am aware--believes in that much freedom to own weapons, but if the Second Amendment does not allow Congress, or at least the states, to enact controls, where does the line lie, and where is it found in the Constitution?)
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