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To: robertpaulsen
If the Founding Fathers wanted to protect the right of citizens to keep and bear arms (as you're suggesting), they would have said so in the second amendment.

They did.

Apparently you have difficulty with standard English.

So here is the 2nd in toto:

A well regulated militia being a necessity to a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Therefore the Fathers didn't intend to enumerate the right to bear arms merely for citizens. They could have easily written that word into the Amendment.

Instead they said "the people". They didn't say "the States" or "Free white landowning males" they said "the people".

They said that because that's what they meant.

Your lies, distortions, and obfuscations of this simple, clearly worded Amendment are tiresome.

L

274 posted on 11/21/2007 4:56:57 PM PST by Lurker ( Comparing moderate islam to extremist islam is like comparing smallpox to ebola.)
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To: Lurker
Instead they said "the people". They didn't say "the States" or "Free white landowning males" they said "the people".

Exactly, that meant everyone who was a citizen, including women although granted they were often treated as second class citizens or even arrested at times for attempting to exercise their rights. Still if "the people" only applied to free white landowning males you think they would have said so directly. At the very least you know they intended the 2nd Amendment to include all males, whether property owners or not simply by the passage of the Militia Act.

285 posted on 11/21/2007 6:42:10 PM PST by Reaganwuzthebest
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To: Lurker
When the second amendment was written, "the people" were a select group of individuals -- they were sometimes referred to as "the whole people", "the people at large", "Freemen", or "Freeholders".

These were the individuals connected to the country, those who voted, those who participated, those with the most to lose. They had full rights, unlike the slaves, women, children, the propertyless, or non-citizens.

They had their right to keep and bear arms protected because they were the Militia. The U.S. Supreme Court in Parker confirms this definition:

"In sum, the phrase “the right of the people,” when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual. This proposition is true even though “the people” at the time of the founding was not as inclusive a concept as “the people” today .... To the extent that non-whites, women, and the propertyless were excluded from the protections afforded to “the people,” the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is understood to have corrected that initial constitutional shortcoming."

295 posted on 11/22/2007 5:50:55 AM PST by robertpaulsen
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