Who believes the claim that the intent of the 2nd Amendment was to arm militias

Exactly. The Second Amendment does not start with "Self defense against intruders being important to personal security...." It does start with a clause about a well regulated militia. Furthermore, it uses the military term "bear arms" in the second clause. The Founding Fathers must have been terrible communicators if they had really been meaning to make it clear that the Second Amendment protects a right unconnected to the militia.

 

can you find any document from any founder that suggests they though the federal government should have any power to restrict private citizens owning arms? there is no doubt in my mind that your erroneous interpretation of the second amendment came about based on you first deciding you don't like honest citizens owning firearms

can you also find in Article One Section 8 any evidence the founders wanted the federal government to have any such power?

 

A law professor explains the role that preambles played in the interpretation of the law at the time the Second Amendment was written.

"Preambles had long existed in English lawmaking.... A preamble was supposed to narrow and clarify, not widen, a law....

"The language of preambles was necessary to restrain the operative clauses....

"It was in response to this understanding of the effect of preambles that Jefferson worked to oppose the insertion of 'Jesus Christ' into the preamble of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Such language, he knew, would narrow the protections of the bill to Christians alone."
http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/56-5-7.pdf

The preamble of the Second Amendment is about the importance of a well regulated militia.

 

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What does the Second Amendment protect?

 

"The principal powers available to Congress to regulate firearms are the 'commerce power,' arising from the Commerce Clause, and the 'taxing power,' arising from the Taxing and Spending Clause.2"
http://smartgunlaws.org/gun-laws/federal-law/background-resources/federal-powers/

 

Neither do you. A shotgun is just fine for home defense.

 

that isn't an answer

 

I don't need amateurs telling me what is just fine. You really aren't qualified to speak to this issue

 

Your shotgun is fine for home defense. You aren't going to get much spread inside usually so you can use a slug as well.

 

Overpenetrate much?

 

I know a shotgun works, a pair of men were trying to break in, I pumped the weapon and they ran off and I had solid slugs so they breaking in would have gone badly, for them. And I hunted a bear with it this was a good weapon for that but I prefer a modern crossbow or sling to hunt with.

 

That's it. Don't worry if you only have slugs, you wouldn't get a lot of spread with shot.

 

The fact that you don't like an answer doesn't mean that it isn't an answer. Congress can regulate guns under the Commerce and Taxation clauses. Additionally, Congress can exercise authority over personally owned guns under section 8 of Article I. Congress can mandate that you purchase a gun for militia service. If the federal government made it mandatory to attend a certain church many people would think that was a violation of the freedom of religion. But the government can make it mandatory for you to own a certain type of firearm. It can also order you to use your gun against an invading foreign military thus possibly putting your own life at risk. Does this show us that the the RKBA is different from the other more personal rights protected by the Bill of Rights? It seems the Founding Fathers were comfortable with the federal government exercising substantial control over this right- a kind of control that would be unacceptable in the case of other rights. Guns were expensive in those days- each one cost about 2 month's salary according to one estimate. So the government mandating that you buy a certain type of firearm for militia service could literally make it very difficult for you to purchase another one.

 

if you're worried about going through drywall and killing your neighbors, an AR or AK is a horrible idea for home defense.

stick with birdshot.

 

if the 2nd Amendment had NOTHING to do with the Militia, it would have never mentioned the militia.

come on folks, common sense isn't that out of fashion is it?

 

An AR loaded with varmint rounds like Hornady V-max will penetrate less than buckshot or pistol JHP.

I don't know where you live, but I live in a state that gets cold. Birdshot doesn't penetrate sufficently against heavy winter clothing.

 

there is no one right solution for every possible problem.

 

In order to have a militia, you need individuals competent is using firearms.

What does the 2nd Amendment protect?

 

can you find a single document from any founder that suggested that the federal government was supposed to have the power to ban private citizens owning certain arms? any whatsoever

 

When you're agenda driven commonsense has a tendency to take a back seat.

 

complete nonsense-no gun control bill has ever tried to use the militia clause to regulate firearms

I am asking you if the commerce clause was intended to do that.
you are not being truthful when you claim that the founders were comfortable in allowing federal regulation in fact what you say is completely contrary to all the writings we still have

 

i guess the answer is no-you cannot find a single document from a founder that even hints that the federal government was to have the power to ban private citizens from owning arms. . your professor is also wrong because the second amendment was not a "law " in the sense of restricting the rights of citizens and thus the preamble would limit it. It was a blanket restriction on the power of the federal government

nice try but you fail to understand that the second amendment was not even seen as needed by many. The federalists believed that since the federal government was given NO POWER to restrict firearms, an amendment was not needed

 

What Did the Framers Really Mean?

Joe Nocera MAY 26, 2014

Three days after the publication of Michael Waldman’s new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Elliot Rodger, 22, went on a killing spree, stabbing three people and then shooting another eight, killing four of them, including himself. This was only the latest mass shooting in recent memory, going back to Columbine.

In his rigorous, scholarly, but accessible book, Waldman notes such horrific events but doesn’t dwell on them. He is after something else. He wants to understand how it came to be that the Second Amendment, long assumed to mean one thing, has come to mean something else entirely. To put it another way: Why are we, as a society, willing to put up with mass shootings as the price we must pay for the right to carry a gun?

The Second Amendment begins, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” and that’s where Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, begins, too. He has gone back into the framers’ original arguments and made two essential discoveries, one surprising and the other not surprising at all.

The surprising discovery is that of all the amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, the Second was probably the least debated. What we know is that the founders were deeply opposed to a standing army, which they viewed as the first step toward tyranny. Instead, their assumption was that the male citizenry would all belong to local militias. As Waldman writes, “They were not allowed to have a musket; they were required to. More than a right, being armed was a duty.”

Thus the unsurprising discovery: Virtually every reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” — the second part of the Second Amendment — was in reference to military defense. Waldman notes the House debate over the Second Amendment in the summer of 1789: “Twelve congressmen joined the debate. None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting or for any purpose other than joining the militia.”

In time, of course, the militia idea died out, replaced by a professionalized armed service. Most gun regulation took place at the state and city level. The judiciary mostly stayed out of the way. In 1939, the Supreme Court upheld the nation’s first national gun law, the National Firearms Act, which put onerous limits on sawed-off shotguns and machine guns — precisely because the guns had no “reasonable relation” to “a well-regulated militia.”

But then, in 1977, there was a coup at the National Rifle Association, which was taken over by Second Amendment fundamentalists. Over the course of the next 30 years, they set out to do nothing less than change the meaning of the Second Amendment, so that its final phrase — “shall not be infringed” — referred to an individual right to keep and bear arms, rather than a collective right for the common defense.

Waldman is scornful of much of this effort. Time and again, he finds the proponents of this new view taking the founders’ words completely out of context, sometimes laughably so. They embrace Thomas Jefferson because he once wrote to George Washington, “One loves to possess arms.” In fact, says Waldman, Jefferson was referring to some old letter he needed “so he could issue a rebuttal in case he got attacked for a decision he made as secretary of state.”

Still, as Waldman notes, the effort was wildly successful. In 1972, the Republican platform favored gun control. By 1980, the Republican platform opposed gun registration. That year, the N.R.A. gave its first-ever presidential endorsement to Ronald Reagan.

The critical modern event, however, was the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision, which tossed aside two centuries of settled law, and ruled that a gun-control law in Washington, D.C., was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. The author of the majority opinion was Antonin Scalia, who fancies himself the leading “originalist” on the court — meaning he believes, as Waldman puts it, “that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what the framers and their generation intended in 1789.”

Waldman is persuasive that a truly originalist decision would have tied the right to keep and bear arms to a well-regulated militia. But the right to own guns had by then become conservative dogma, and it was inevitable that the five conservative members of the Supreme Court would vote that way.

“When the militias evaporated,” concludes Waldman, “so did the original meaning of the Second Amendment.” But, he adds, “What we did not have was a regime of judicially enforced individual rights, able to trump the public good.”

Sadly, that is what we have now, as we saw over the weekend. Elliot Rodger’s individual right to bear arms trumped the public good. Eight people were shot as a result.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 27, 2014, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: What Did The Framers Really Mean?. Today's Paper|Subscribe

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/opinion/nocera-right-to-bear-arms-means-this.html?mcubz=0

 

Under the militia-only doctrine supposedly favored by the Heller dissent, exactly what circumstances would militia members be allowed to legally be armed? What duties would justify their being armed? What duties would not be prohibited from being armed while performing?

 

Which ultimately does not answer, or amount to, anything of relevance.