Facts About The 2nd Amendment

I touched on this in a previous post and will touch some more on it here. As is usually the case in emotionally charged times, we tend to mangle history. We become so engulfed in our beliefs we look back on history with a heinous look when it doesn't support a perspective or position.

So it is with the 2nd amendment.

Given the scope of the issue, it just doesn't make sense to me how "blaming" an object is going to lead to the elusive "meaningful change."

Both sides tend to overstate their position. For example, it blows my mind how pro-gun control advocates point to the fact the 2nd amendment referred to the militia (who made up of private citizens by the way) but deliberately ignore the second part about how individuals had the right to bear arms. Do these fools think we can't read?

For the most part, the pulse and pace of human nature and laws are rather predictable in what is an unpredictable existence; universe.

In reading the framers of the Constitution we clearly see these were men immersed in the great ideas and philosophies of their times and of history.

There's nothing "outdated" in what they wrote and enshrined in the Constitution. It's no more so than a piece of literature written by Dante or Dickens. Or a timeless piece of music by Bach or Debussy. If they be "outdated" so too be the Magna Carta!

"It was written 300 years ago" is equally offensive and patently pathetic and should be scorned by every single free thinking person. It should be refuted at every turn. Our entire heritage in the West is based on great teachings and ideas that stretch well beyond 300 years. We built on Athens. We built on Rome. We built on the High Middle Ages and Renaissance. We further constructed our wealth and health of thought on numerous scientific rediscoveries and revolutions, The Enlightenment and economic principles bestowed upon us not just from Venetians, Florentine, Dutch etc. traders but as far off as Asia as well.

We are but a collection of things written "hundreds of years ago." Can people not see the small, myopic ploy they play on their own minds?

They confess to ignorance of history yet profess to know it in political contemporary times. What folly.

The framers were astute observers of the umwelt; the reality of their times. They were also deliberately vague and exact in their writings.

The 2nd amendment was written "300 years ago." That much is fact.

So what?

The overarching umgebung - big picture - of the point of the exercise was the road to liberty.

The framers, I think, above all, wanted Americans (and by extension humanity) to keep vigilance against tyranny of any kind. That's the point of the exercise we're failing miserably.

The essay by David T. Hardy in the link provided above concludes:

"...The distinction between the second amendment's purposes enables us to avoid the pitfalls of the collective rights view, which would hold that the entire amendment was meant solely to protect a "collective right" to have a militia.The militia component of the second amendment was not meant as a "right", collective or individual, except in the sense that structural provisions (e.g., requirements that money bills originate in the House, or military appropriations not exceed two years) are considered collective "rights." Indeed, the militia component was meant to invoke the exertion of governmental power over the citizen, to inspire it to require citizens to assume the burdens of militia duty. In this respect it differs radically from any other provision of the Bill of Rights. To read what was a recognition of an individual right, the right to arms, as subsumed within the militia recognition is thus not only permitting the tail to wag the dog, but to annihilate what was intended as a right. As the one (p.61)provision of the Bill of Rights which encourages rather than restricts governmental action, the militia component's terms were necessarily vague and its phrasing a reminder rather than a command.

 

The right to arms portion of the second amendment, in contrast, was meant to be a prohibition, as fully binding as those in the remainder of the Bill of Rights. Madison intended that the second amendment be read as incorporating the individual rights proposals put forward by the Pennsylvania minority and by Sam Adams and the New Hampshire convention. Judging from contemporary discussion in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, he succeeded. If either clause can be accorded primacy, it is the right to arms clause; only in Virginia, at the eleventh hour of the ratification process, was a militia clause appended to a federal bill of rights proposal.

 

Reading the entirety of the second amendment as militia-related, based upon some contemporary references to the need for constitutional (p.62)recognition of the militia concept, confuses the purpose of one provision with the text of another. The second amendment, in short, cannot be explained simply as a last avowal of the classical ideal, as "the last act of the Renaissance." Rather, it is a bridge between the decline of that ideal and the rise of the liberal democracy. Part of the second amendment looks backward to the worlds of Polybius and Machiavelli; but part looks forward, to the worlds of Jefferson and Jackson. Only a recognition of the dual nature of the second amendment will enable us to give meaning to the aspirations of Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams as well as those of George Mason."

So outdated.