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Yes. Assholes that want to restrict the rights of citizens have come into power. That does not mean we should buckle under. This is NOT a democracy!
Yes. Assholes that want to restrict the rights of citizens have come into power. That does not mean we should buckle under. This is NOT a democracy!
There's also a thing called common sense and Americans shouldn't oversimplify. In a democracy, people shouldn't have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want like drink and drive, commit murder, etc. There is also no need for citizens to stockpile assault rifles in the modern United States due to an outdated amendment. It's extremely dangerous and unnecessary, and needs to be changed.
Chief Justice Burger was a smart man. He clearly articulated why the 2nd Amendment is obsolete.
Yes. Assholes that want to restrict the rights of citizens have come into power. That does not mean we should buckle under. This is NOT a democracy!
There's also a thing called common sense and Americans shouldn't oversimplify. In a democracy, people shouldn't have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want like drink and drive, commit murder, etc. There is also no need for citizens to stockpile assault rifles in the modern United States due to an outdated amendment. It's extremely dangerous and unnecessary, and needs to be changed.
For the confused, the first clause is simple a justification clause and the second clause is the inalienable right.
8th grade material.
And, for the morons who were confused about that simple 8th grade concept, the SCOTUS clarified with District of Columbia v Heller: the 2nd protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms and no clause can disarm individuals because it is an inherent right to preservation of life and property.
With respect to balance of power, Hamilton explained that both military AND political power should be balanced by having an armed citizenry: "if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens
8th grade level material.
From another thread:
Thom Hartmann: The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery | Alternet
why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the Slave Patrol Militias in the Southern States, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that ... and we all should be too.
interesting take... plausible that it might have been a minor part of the reason behind the Second Amendment... but the background writings of the Framers make it clear that the primary reason for the Second Amendment is to guarantee a free state by way of lawful citizens having access to arms...
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered Whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.
Civil Liberties
AlterNet / By Thom Hartmann
comments_image 32 COMMENTS
Thom Hartmann: The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that ... and we all should be too.
Continued from previous page
This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. Liberty to Slaves was stitched onto their jackets pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washingtons army.
Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.
At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out:
Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States
By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory.
George Mason expressed a similar fear:
The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution]
Patrick Henry even argued that southerners property (slaves) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be less than peaceful or tranquil: In this situation, Henry said to Madison, I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone.
So Madison, who had (at Jeffersons insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft of one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the Southern states could maintain their Slave Patrol Militias.
His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.
But Henry, Mason, and others wanted Southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word country to the word state, and redrafted the Second Amendment into todays form:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Little did Madison realize that one day in the future weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as persons by a dysfunctional Supreme Court, would use his Slave Patrol Militia Amendment to protect their right to manufacture and sell assault weapons used to murder schoolchildren.
I think Chief Justice Burger made it very clear what the original intent of the 2nd Amendment was and why it's obsolete today.
I think Chief Justice Burger made it very clear what the original intent of the 2nd Amendment was and why it's obsolete today.
Chief Justice Burger was a smart man. He clearly articulated why the 2nd Amendment is obsolete.
A distinguished citizen takes a stand on one of the most controversial issues in the nation
By Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States (1969-86)
Parade Magazine, January 14, 1990, page 4
Let's look at the history.
First, many of the 3.5 million people living in the 13 original Colonies depended on wild game for food, and a good many of them required firearms for their defense from marauding Indians -- and later from the French and English. Underlying all these needs was an important concept that each able-bodied man in each of the 133 independent states had to help or defend his state.
The early opposition to the idea of national or standing armies was maintained under the Articles of Confederation; that confederation had no standing army and wanted none. The state militia -- essentially a part-time citizen army, as in Switzerland today -- was the only kind of "army" they wanted. From the time of the Declaration of Independence through the victory at Yorktown in 1781, George Washington, as the commander-in-chief of these volunteer-militia armies, had to depend upon the states to send those volunteers.
When a company of New Jersey militia volunteers reported for duty to Washington at Valley Forge, the men initially declined to take an oath to "the United States," maintaining, "Our country is New Jersey." Massachusetts Bay men, Virginians and others felt the same way. To the American of the 18th century, his state was his country, and his freedom was defended by his militia.
The victory at Yorktown -- and the ratification of the Bill of Rights a decade later -- did not change people's attitudes about a national army. They had lived for years under the notion that each state would maintain its own military establishment, and the seaboard states had their own navies as well. These people, and their fathers and grandfathers before them, remembered how monarchs had used standing armies to oppress their ancestors in Europe. Americans wanted no part of this. A state militia, like a rifle and powder horn, was as much a part of life as the automobile is today; pistols were largely for officers, aristocrats -- and dueling.
Against this background, it was not surprising that the provision concerning firearms emerged in very simple terms with the significant predicate -- basing the right on the necessity for a "well regulated militia," a state army.
In the two centuries since then -- with two world wars and some lesser ones -- it has become clear, sadly, that we have no choice but to maintain a standing national army while still maintaining a "militia" by way of the National Guard, which can be swiftly integrated into the national defense forces.
Americans also have a right to defend their homes, and we need not challenge that. Nor does anyone seriously question that the Constitution protects the right of hunters to own and keep sporting guns for hunting game any more than anyone would challenge the right to own and keep fishing rods and other equipment for fishing -- or to own automobiles. To "keep and bear arms" for hunting today is essentially a recreational activity and not an imperative of survival, as it was 200 years ago; "Saturday night specials" and machine guns are not recreational weapons and surely are as much in need of regulation as motor vehicles.
Americans should ask themselves a few questions. The Constitution does not mention automobiles or motorboats, but the right to keep and own an automobile is beyond question; equally beyond question is the power of the state to regulate the purchase or the transfer of such a vehicle and the right to license the vehicle and the driver with reasonable standards. In some places, even a bicycle must be registered, as must some household dogs.
If we are to stop this mindless homicidal carnage, is it unreasonable:
1. to provide that, to acquire a firearm, an application be made reciting age, residence, employment and any prior criminal convictions?These are the kind of questions the American people must answer if we are to preserve the "domestic tranquillity" promised in the Constitution.
2. to required that this application lie on the table for 10 days (absent a showing for urgent need) before the license would be issued?
3. that the transfer of a firearm be made essentially as with that of a motor vehicle?
4. to have a "ballistic fingerprint" of the firearm made by the manufacturer and filed with the license record so that, if a bullet is found in a victim's body, law enforcement might be helped in finding the culprit?
More: Ex-Chief Justice Warren Burger in Parade Magazine
I think Chief Justice Burger made it very clear what the original intent of the 2nd Amendment was and why it's obsolete today.
are we suppose to care?
my gawd
