The militia argument was settled by the courts; kind of a nonstarter.
It was settled legally, but it was hardly settled definitionally or interpretively. The court decision was split 5-4.
I wasn't mad; I was just on a weekend getaway with the wife and friends, and didn't want to spend it talking to you.
Riddle me this, Ein: Why would an amendment have the following in the same sentence:
1) Regulation of the right to bear arms (via a National Guard which didn't exist at the time)
2) The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed
Surely the word 'people' extends beyond just the National Guard that didn't exist at the time of the Constitution or does that particular definition stay the same solely to fit your narrative?
But in what sense does it extend to the people? Militias are comprised of individuals; so in that sense, it must extend beyond the abstract notion of a militia and to concrete persons. This doesn't necessarily translate, however, into individual rights often associated with gun ownership and distilled from the language of the second amendment.
You might look at Saul Cornell's book
A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America, published by Oxford UP. Cornell argues that gun ownership is neither a collective right (i.e. of states to maintain armed militias) nor an individual one (i.e. of individual citizens to own guns for any reason they deem appropriate), but a civic right--an obligation citizens owed to the state to arm themselves in order to participate in a militia. The second amendment contains no provision of ownership for personal reasons.
I'd also point to this paragraph from the blog for UIllinois, which discusses the weird grammar of the second amendment (a major source of uncertainty when diagnosing its meaning, much less what the authors intended):
https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/3721
In the case of the Second Amendment, the absolute also shows a clear cause-and-effect relationship: because a well-regulated militia is necessary, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. Add to this the fact that the expression “to bear arms” overwhelmingly occurs in military contexts, not civilian ones, both in the 18th century and today: as the historian
Garry Wills (1995) has put it, one does not bear arms against a rabbit. It would thus be hard to discount the militia when interpreting the Second Amendment.
The comment about the phrase "bear arms" refers to how this terminology was commonly used in the eighteenth century. The problem with simply looking up words in dictionaries is that while that might tell you what "bear" and "arms" could mean, it won't tell you what they mean when combined. See here:
https://blog.harvardlawreview.org/corpus-linguistics-and-the-second-amendment/
In
Heller, three Linguistics Professors submitted an
amicus brief, which attempted to answer this charge. They surveyed “115 texts,” including “books, pamphlets, broadsides and newspapers from the period between” 1776 and 1791 that used the phrase “bear arms.” Of those sources, 110 usages were “in clearly military context.” Of the five sources they located that used the phrase “bear arms” in a non-military context, only one was not “qualified by further language indicating a different meaning.” However, the Professors recognized the limits of their own research: “We otherwise have been unable to find” any usages of “bear arms” that did not have a military-related meaning. In response to this evidence, Justice Scalia wrote “the fact that the phrase was commonly used in a particular context does not show that it is limited to that context, and, in any event, we have given many sources where the phrase was used in nonmilitary contexts.”
also:
This sort of research may have been the state of the art in 2008. However, modern technology allows us to dive deeper. Professor Dennis Baron, who joined the Linguistics brief in
Heller a decade ago, searched the COFEA for the term “bear arms.” He also performed the same search on the
Corpus of Early Modern English, which includes nearly 1.3 billion words from over 40,000 texts from 1475-1800.
He found “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.” From this evidence, Professor Baron concluded that the “[t]hese databases confirm that the natural meaning of ‘bear arms’ in the framers’ day was military.” Likewise,
Professors Alison LaCroix and Jason Merchant used
Google Books to search for the phase “bear arms” in sources published between 1760-1795. They found that in 67.4% of the sample size, “bear arms” was used in its collective sense, whereas in 18.2% of the sample, the phase was used in an individual sense.
These arguments/essays are much longer and contain more interesting nuances than these excerpts reflect, but that's why I linked them.
tl;dr, most interpretations acknowledge the right of individuals to own firearms, but they state that ownership cannot be extricated from military duties. There's nothing in the second amendment that legalizes or even permits the use of firearms for unspecified individual purposes.
For what it's worth, I'm not a constitutionalist, and I think individuals should be able to use guns for personal reasons (i.e. hunting, target shooting, home protection, etc.). My concerns with gun control are with what kind of firearms people are allowed to "keep," and I currently believe that many semi-automatic weapons with high-round capacities are unnecessary for personal use.
Libs are just fascists who don't know it yet. They'd be happy with a military coup if the military wasn't full of people who like guns.
How was what I said fascist in any way?
