actually my side doesn't have to engage in the disingenuous verbal gymnastics that the gun banners do. We just say "THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. we don't have to play games with what Keep and bear means we don't have to pretend that "the people" in several other amendments means individual citizens but somehow in the second it means something else we dont' have to push for an interpretation that ignores the era in which the bill of rights were enacted or contradicts the rest of the constitution
You can't. You can only have a -privilege- to possess and use something owned by someone else, as that someone else grants you permission to use what they own. As the 2nd specifies a right, rest of your 'rebuttal' fails to this point. Try again, if you like.
In Bizarro world, maybe. The right to free speech includes the right to not speak The right to own property includes the right to not won property. The right to get married includes the right to not get married. The right to go to New Jersey includes the right to not go to New Jersey. Any other obvious, and meaningless, statements you'd like to make?
Who is he, why do I care, and how does this overturn the decades of jurisprudence that says otherwise?
No. He understood "the militia" is a subset of "the people" and that no one has a right to serve in the militia. Thus, "the right to keep and bear arms" must exist outside, and thus unrelated to, service in the militia. Simple, eh?
well since the second says the RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE it obviously includes more than those actively serving or who have the potential to serve
I wonder if only militiamen, while serving in the militia, enjoy the protections of the 1st and 4th Amendment.
well clearly you have to be a member of the "free press" in order to have free speech rights using the logic of the gun banners
Are these quotations in the two Corpus cited in the OP? "As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms." - Tench Coxe, Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789 DEBATES OF THE MASSACHUSETTS CONVENTION February 6, 1789 “And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.” —— MINORITY OF THE PENNSYLVANIA CONVENTION (December 12, 1787) “That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public inquiry from individuals.” The OP is a false premise not based on evidence. /thread.
gun banners never can find a SINGLE STATEMENT from the founders suggesting that the new federal government had any power to prevent citizens from owning firearms. The best they can do is to pretend "keep and bear" doesn't mean 'own' and thus claim the federal government can ban ownership
The best they can do is to pretend that the founders never really saw OWNERSHIP as part of keep and bear. despite dozens of quotes showing that the founders never intended the new government to have any gun control powers. THEY CANNOT FIND A SINGLE SHRED OF EVIDENCE That the founders intended that the new government could interfere with the arms PRIVATE CITIZENS COULD OWN
Such an analysis seems anachronistic. As the founders used the term, "the people" could refer to a representative subset of the people. Interestingly, there was some controversy about the members of the Constitutional Convention calling themselves "the people". The objection was not that they were a subset of the people. The objection was that they were more representative of the states than the people. Regardless, the context of the right of the people in the Second Amendment is literally that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. Thus, "the people" should be interpreted with that context in mind.
That's nice but such quotes don't override what the Second Amendment actually says. That would not be a valid method of interpreting Constitutional text.
I’m not overriding anything. I’m simply pointing out the OP premise is false. Demonstrably and categorically false. The OP is interpreting the Constitution on a false premise that to keep and bear arms meant only military context. That is false. His source is flawed. We can’t interpret the Constitution based on false premises. Of course the OP and you will whole complaining when others point out the entire premise is based on a lie.
Commenting on Scalia's grammatical analysis, Neal Goldfarb explains: "The question arises whether this militia-related context could have influenced how the right of the people was understood. That’s a question that the Supreme Court in Heller chose not to answer, on the theory that under the supposedly-applicable rule of legal interpretation, an introductory clause such as the one here plays no role in the interpretation of the 'operative clause' ('the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed') unless the operative clause is ambiguous. "But that’s a prescriptive rule about how legal interpretation is supposed to proceed, not a descriptive generalization about what the process of language comprehension actually entails. I see no reason to think that the constraint reflected in the legal-interpretive rule plays any role in actual language comprehension. "Among other reasons, such a constraint would be inconsistent with the widely-accepted proposition that language comprehension is generally fast and incremental—when we read something we understand the text or the utterance in real time, with no apparent delay between perception and understanding. The comprehension process doesn’t wait until the end of the sentence to start working. In contrast, the interpretive rule relied on by the court doesn’t kick in until the sentence has been fully read and processed. In order for the rule to be triggered, the comprehender would have to recognize that the preamble is in fact a preamble, and would then have to determine whether the main clause of the sentence is ambiguous. Both of those steps would require conscious deliberation, which isn’t typically part of the normal comprehension process. And because those steps would take place only after the preamble has been read, the reader would need be able to erase their memory of the preamble if the main clause turned out to be unambiguous—an ability that seems rather unlikely." https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43675 Yup, it doesn't seem like a natural way to comprehend a piece of text. When people read a sentence they tend to understand it holistically rather than backtracking and parsing it into a "prefatory clause" and an "operative clause" while not allowing anything in the "prefatory clause" to influence how the "operative clause" is understood unless there is something ambiguous.
more interesting tangled machinations trying to avoid the obvious. How do you have a working militia if all or most of those who might answer the call up do not have weapons? can you find a single comment by any founder, representative, politician etc from that era who thought that citizens should be disarmed or that the federal government should have that power? bet you cannot
You are obviously a bit lost as to what this thread is about. Speech means speech. "Keep and bear arms" does not mean "own guns". You might want to start from the beginning and try to understand what the OP is about before shooting for higher grounds.
IT INCLUDES owning guns, You might want to stop pretending some sort of superior understanding that you constantly throw at those of us who obviously understand this issue far better than what is contained in your posts
And it also includes NOT owning guns. You can keep and bear arms WITHOUT owning guns. Therefore, owning guns or not is irrelevant insofar as the 2nd A. You already know this. So at this point you're just trolling, right? But I've explained it this one last time because there are newer posters like @Mungo Jerry who fail to get the point. Those are who you target by repeating that absurd argument, right? Yeah... I now it is....
that has no relevance to what the government should be prevented from doing. I laugh at how you think that is some sort of winning point. the second amendment is NOT ABOUT WHAT CITIZENS CAN DO but what the federal government is PREVENTED FROM DOING. You also don't have to keep and bear arms so your entire argument FAILS.
