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Up until modern leftists, the idea that a person would not have a right to bear arms wasn't even considered. To the founding fathers, an individual right to bear arms was unquestioned. They saw no reason to define the equivalent of the water is wet. But they could foresee states trying to restrict rights in the future, and for this reason they did write out the Bill of Rights.

Second, where do leftists get the idea that a government needs written "rights" to do whatever the hell it wants to? The Bill of Rights was not written to give rights to the state, it was written to ensure rights held by people were retained by the people and not taken by the state.

Personally, I do not believe the state can have rights. The state can only have responsibilities, or powers. Sometimes it is given the responsibility or power (Provide for the common defense...) but more often than not, it simply assumes responsibilities whether it should or not. With perhaps one exception (10) the original Bill of Rights deals with explicitly spelling out what rights people have, not the state. Even the 10th amendment recognizes that powers not delegated to the states are retained by the people, in other words, the people retain the right to delegate powers to the state.

Rights are something that only people may possess! They are God-given, and intrinsic to the nature of humanity and being.

Leftists do not believe people should have rights. Leftists believe that we are a society of ants, and each member must be subjugated to the greater good of the state. Even as they bleat support for their favorite "right", the First Amendment, leftists give the state responsibility and power over it under the guise of maintaining fairness, or politically correctness, or by calling it hate speech...and then forbidding it.

Leftists know what rights are, and hate them, because they don't figure into their little conception of the world being run as they see fit.

To be fair, many conservatives misread the Bill of Rights as badly as Leftists when it comes to the 9th amendment, which says that just because the founding fathers didn't enumerate a human right doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I do believe there is a right to privacy, and a right to be left alone.

I believe there is a right to abortion, not because a woman has the right of choice, but because the fetal human has a right to life(another non-enumerated right which falls under the 9th amendment) that trumps that non-enumerated right of choice. So how do I believe in abortion? There are some cases where your right to life trumps another...if someone places you in harm's way, you have a right to self defense, enumerated in the Second Amendment. There are rare, very rare, times when a pregnancy will cause physical harm to a woman, and she has a right to defend herself. I would call a therapeutic abortion justifiable homicide. But I digress.

More interesting question to me than what rights we humans are God-given is whether the order of these rights can be set by man.

Historically, the Second Amendment has been viewed as a right limited to those who served in an organized
[militia] governed by federal or state law. This was the position taken by the Justice Department in the Emerson case and it has been supported by the Supreme Court precedent dating to 1939 when the court ruled in United Sates v. Miller, that there is no constitutional right to own a sawed-off shotgun because it has no “reasonable relationship” to the preservation of a well regulated militia.

I see two problems here:

1. The Justice Department referred to was the Klinton/Reno Justice Department. 'Nuff said?

2. If I'm not mistaken -- I could be -- the Supreme Court didn't "rule" about shotguns and militias in the Miller case but, instead, remanded it to the lower court for a decision about whether a sawed-off shotgun could be used as a weapon for the militia. Miller didn't show and the government got a default judgment. Hence, the matter was never truly settled. (Obviously, a sawed-off shotgun would be a perfect weapon for close quarters fighting or even guard duty by a militiman.)

PS: thanks for the all the work in typing this up for us.

America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
Download 8 Mb zip file here (50 minute video)

"Any mistakes are mine. Comments?"

I must disagree--the article contains LOTS of mistakes, all on the part of the authors, and all concerning historical facts.

To pick just one "First, it is much closer to the ideas of the anti-federalist opponents of the constitution than to the views of the federalists who wrote and ratified it and who also firmly controlled the Congress that drafted the Second Amendment."

Obviously the writer(s) failed to understand that the passage of the Bill of Rights was done EXPRESSLY to address the concerns of the anti-federalist portion of the population, and without it, the Constitution itself would never have been accepted. Thus it is perfectly acceptable to look to anti-federalist thought and writings to correctly understand the BILL OF RIGHTS--which is where the right to keep and bear arms is protected--NOT to the base text of the Constitution and to the promoters thereof.