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To: Huck
The 10 amendments to the US Constitution were only supposed to apply to the national gubmint.

Not so in the case of the Second. The language is not the narrow "Congress shall make no law" that would support your reading, but rather the very broad and illimitable "shall not be infringed" (i.e. by anybody).

Otherwise, a local sheriff could deprive you of every one of the freedoms enumerated in the BoR and several not so enumerated (just to violate the 9th and 10th), and under your reading (and the Supreme Court's, in its 1877 Cruikshank opinion, which very significantly was a Klan case involving the Force Acts), he would be absolutely unimpaired in his ability to do so.

Hence the rise of political bossism after the Civil War (or more to the point, after Cruikshank). This in spite of the ratification of 14A.

33 posted on 04/21/2009 7:47:57 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: lentulusgracchus
he would be absolutely unimpaired in his ability to do so.

He would be impaired by the State gubmint in which he works. That state has its own laws and rights, in its own Constitution. The Bill of Rights in the US Constitution was meant to pertain only to the national gubmint.

55 posted on 04/21/2009 10:25:15 AM PDT by Huck ("He that lives on hope will die fasting"- Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac)
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