Did you miss my post to you where I told you that I'm not an American or gun owner? Anyway, perhaps you can direct me to a source which specifies just exactly how close to the regular military a militia must be.
so your comment about God was not an attempt to undermine the fact that the second amendment was intended to ratify or recognize a right the founders believed men were endowed with from the start of time?
No I hadn't until now. Give him time though. He may be wrong, but he's pretty good at replying and arguing his position. And regarding post 603, I notice that you didn't tag him or quote him, so he may not see it.
What always seems obvious is that words are human constructs totally relative to how humans use them. What they mean is what humans decide, when they decide.
Does such mean that what was intended by the words used at the time of the drafting of a piece of legislation, is no longer of any importance as time passes and the usage of the words by society changes?
In what way would they be outdated? The available database was smaller than it is today, but it was quite large. BYU has since updated the database and put it online. So anybody can do the search. Some linguists recently did a new search that confirmed the findings described in the Amicus Brief. "But Scalia was wrong. Two new databases of English writing from the founding era confirm that “bear arms” is a military term. Non-military uses of “bear arms” are not just rare — they’re almost nonexistent. A search of Brigham Young University’s new online Corpus of Founding Era American English, with more than 95,000 texts and 138 million words, yields 281 instances of the phrase “bear arms.” BYU’s Corpus of Early Modern English, with 40,000 texts and close to 1.3 billion words, shows 1,572 instances of the phrase. Subtracting about 350 duplicate matches, that leaves about 1,500 separate occurrences of “bear arms” in the 17th and 18th centuries, and only a handful don’t refer to war, soldiering or organized, armed action. These databases confirm that the natural meaning of “bear arms” in the framers’ day was military."https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...38d9dbd6_story.html?__twitter_impression=true It was not considered. That was an argument submitted by the Heller side during the hearings. The Amicus Brief indicates that in all instances in which the phrase was used as a non-military idiom a qualifier was needed. It's the difference between somebody saying to you "I'm going to hit the road, now" vs "I'm going to hit the road with a sledgehammer, now" The underlined qualifier is necessary to change the meaning of the idiom. This is why linguists don't do law without consulting a legal expert. And why legal experts shouldn't do linguistics without consulting a linguist. In the mind of the everyday citizen, there is no doubt the phrase referred to a military. use of weapons. Scalia screwed up. But he is too intelligent to have done it on purpose.
You didn't read my posts or the link I gave. Your three professors only considered what they could find - a more recent and advanced search did find more non-qualified examples. Your evidence is simply incomplete.
That's the best proof - without a specific granting of power to the federal government, none is given. Additionally, the only reason for the creation of the Bill of Rights was to satisfy the Anti-federalist concerns about federal overreach.
The right to defend "the security of a free state". At least that's what it says... But more than what the founders "thought", it matters much more what it meant in the mind of a typical citizen of the era.
Regardless of amendments or rights, congress was never given any legislative power to restrict the acquisition or possession of firearms by the people of the several states.
Right. "Keep" as it refers to "bear arms". As in "keep the arms in good working order" Just like in "house-keeper" the "keeper' part doesn't refer to the owner, but the person who "keeps" the house. What follows in your message is irrelevant. We have already established that the courts have ruled for an individual "right" to own weapons. And it's now the Law of the Land. But ithat decision cannot be logically upheld as a consequence of the text in the 2nd Amendment. Exactly! Because no qualifiers are necessary when "bear arms" refer to military activity.
So, as I said, congress was never given any legislative power to restrict the acquisition or possession of firearms by the people of the several states.
