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by Maursault
1778 days ago
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Your comment is a Straw Man. My intention was not to summarize the case. Changing the Founders intended meaning of the 2nd to include self-defense was really outrageously skew to the case itself, and entirely unnecessary and irrelevant to the case and the 2nd. It is brazenly false NRA propaganda from the early 20th Century come to fruition and provably not the Founders' intention. The case is incidental, because its effect on the 2nd that is relevant --because the subject was the "difficulty" in changing the US Constitution: it does not take 2/3rds majority of both houses of Congress and a majority of the States legislatures. All it takes is a senile gunnutter on the bench to go beyond the mandate of the highest court and the judicial branch of government: Judges do not legislate. Yet Scalia did, and that part of the decision came out of left field (the idiom would have worked better if it was right field, but that isn't the idiom). The 2nd had a purpose, the purpose was militias, whom the Founders were devoted to, to make a standing army unnecessary, to prevent the consolidation of executive power. But now as an individual right to be armed for the purposes of self-defense it leaves the nation with less and no protection against tyranny. But at least pride has been elevated from an indulgence to a virtue. The last proper exercise of the 2nd will be the Black Panthers at the Alameda County courthouse. That was how the Founders intended the 2nd to work, not as a way to say "don't touch my stuff," not as a source of paranoid mass-delusion. |
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By the way, one thing that's often forgotten is that 2A itself was merely an adaptation of similar clauses in state constitutions at the time (many of which explicitly spelled out self-defense as a motivation). At the same time, the original Bill of Rights was all about limiting what the federal government can do, and didn't originally limit the states at all; it was assumed that the respective state constitutions would take care of that, presumably, by expressing the will of their citizens through their own democratic mechanisms. So it's no surprise that the discussion focused mostly on militia - that was the primary concern of the states wrt potential federal government overreach.
When 14A was ratified, and then BoR amendments gradually incorporated against the states, the courts had to reinterpret them accordingly. For example, 1A says that "Congress shall make no law ...", for the same exact reason: the people who wrote it were originally concerned specifically about the power of the federal government. But today, we interpret it as applying to state governments as well, and rather more expansively - and I would hope you'll agree that it's a good thing!
BTW, you seem to be unaware that pro-gun sentiment is alive and well outside of the radical right today - it didn't end with Black Panthers. Some prominent examples include John Brown Gun Club and Huey P. Newton Gun Club.