Posted on 09/23/2006 11:02:00 AM PDT by cryptical
History lesson: Second Amendment requires regulation
First, a calming caveat: Saul Cornell doesn't want to take away your guns. He's neither antigun nor progun. He really isn't a gun guy at all. His thing is history.
Cornell, a professor at Ohio State University, passed through town the other day with much to say about regulating guns. Yet his aim isn't to take sides in the modern gun-control debate -- a squabble he thinks has strayed rather off-topic. It's far more interesting, he thinks, to look back to learn what this country's founders actually thought about gun regulation.
They couldn't imagine life without it, says Cornell. That's the point of his new book, "A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America." In it, Cornell excavates the foundations of the Second Amendment and offers some startling conclusions.
"As long as we've had guns in America," says Cornell, "we've had gun regulation." In fact, the Second Amendment's chief purpose is to assure such regulation. Without it, the founders feared, anarchy might take hold.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
The editorial seems to conflate all sorts of leftist fantasies about 2nd amendment supporters beliefs, setting them up as a nice strawman to knock down. Par for the course from the 'Star and Sickle', our very own Prairie Pravda.
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
My reading is that the right of the poeople to keep and bear arms was NECESSARY since a free state depends on the people to form regulated militias. It does not say arms should be regulated but that the people have a right to their arms.
It's what's written down that matters. Not what someone THINKS they wanted to write.
I read it as the militia's being regulated, and the citizens having the right to bear arms.
He's the current Joyce Foundation sock puppet. Heads up the "Second Amendment Research Center" at Ohio state.
Link here:
http://www.secondamendmentcenter.org/about_us.asp
Rust never sleeps.
Nowhere does the author address the "shall not be infringed" thingy.
Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.
They do that already.
I wish the "well-regulated militia" clause wasn't there, but it is.
I assume, at a minimum, that this clause means that the purpose of the "RKBA" is related, in some way, to the necessity of well-reguated militias to the security of a free state.
"regulated" at that time meant "trained".
That first, SUBORDINATE clause wasn't about controlling firearms, it was about a trained militia.
And if he feels really strongly about it, he's welcome to check my tagline and "Come and take em."
Saul Cornell is just another lying liberal.
My guess is he's trying to sell his book. This myth has been debunked over and over. On anything for gun controls, link to http://www.i2i.org and read what David Kopel has on it.
It's a subordinate clause that every scholar of the English language has agreed means nothing to the rest of the Amendment. It places no requirements nor any restrictions upon "the right of the people to keep and bear arms".
This bears repeating.
"Regulated" means conforming to a standard, and in the context of the 2A has nothing to do with restrictions on firearms ownership. If anything, it was a requirement that the militia own firearms that were well maintained and up to the task.
The fact that this line was in the article indicates that the opposite is probably true. Kind of like a used-car dealership called "Honest John's".
But, remember, that first clause REQUIRES NOTHING.
It's a statement, nothing more.
He's actually almost correct here.
The Supreme Court, in US vs. Miller, basically decided that a moonshiner has the right to carry any arms suitable for use by a militia. This case was not about the right of the people to keep and bear arms, but rather that there might be some arms which are not protected because they are not suitable for use by a militia.
Unfortunately, the lower courts have lied about the meaning of this decision, with silent support from later Supreme Courts, resulting in having some of our federal appeals courts in direct contradiction to others. The author's contention that the Second Amendment is "settled law" is quite mistaken.
The key decisions from the Ninth Circus and the Fifth Circuit courts are completely opposite readings of the Second Amendment.
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