[evgen]

> The point of the 2nd amendment was so the people would be more powerful than the government

Sorry to drag this off-tangent, but that statement is not even close to the reality of why the 2nd amendment was proposed or ratified and you should really stop saying it. It makes a nice post-hoc fairy tale for NRA types, but you desperately need to read some history of the colonial period...

[JoeAltmaier]

Denial isn't the same thing as argument. The text of the 2nd Amendment is pretty starkly clear.

[evgen]

The text of the 2nd Amendment is quite clear. Especially the first thirteen words.

Those words are obvious to anyone who understand the history of the period, what those words meant at the time, and the arguments made in favor of the amendment. But for some strange reason everyone seems to forget they exist or claim that they are some rhetorical flourish that is found nowhere else in the first ten amendments.

So please, show off for us and explain them.

[jayjay71]

Enlighten me.

[evgen]

tl;dr:

* 'Yay! We are free from English tyranny'

* 'Hey, this is kind of a shitty neighborhood and the English might be back, we need an army.'

* 'Nah, armies are the tools of tyrants. We need a citizen militia, that will work.'

* 'Yeah, but they need to practice because we have seen how poorly these guys fight and if it weren't for our French friends and these German mercs we would have been toast'

* 'Okay, then we should practice. Now the general rule is that if you run a regulated (aka 'practiced') militia you also provide the cannons, beer and chips for the post-practice party, and you provide everyone with their gun. In case you haven't noticed we have been kiting bad checks for the past couple of years and our finances are somewhat...illiquid.'

* 'New plan. We tell our guys they need to bring their own gun. A lot have them already, so we make these BYOG militias.'

* 'Cool idea, let's write this down and stuff it in to the new amendments.'

[Yes, I am compressing a bit more than a decade of the post-revolutionary period under the articles of confederation and numerous state-level disagreements. Think of this as a simplified road map. The 2A was more about the poverty of colonial state governments than anything else.]