[benj111]

So when people talk about the founding fathers and what they had in mind when they wrote the constitution, typically in relation to gun laws, it should also be pointed out that the constitution should have run out after 19 years?

I actually quite like this. The US constitution has been elevated to some quasi religious document where everyone interprets it how they want to interpret it. A bi decadal debate on what it should actually say would be useful. Although it would take politicians longer than that to actually agree.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

I feel you are commingling negative rights with regulations .

The constitution provided "negative" rights to the people and individual states. Negative rights are rights that exist unless someone acts to negate them. This means the constitution affirms that people and states get to keep all priviledges, unless specifically enumerated as priviledges of the federal government.

So, if the Federal government starts with nothing, the right end state for the for the government to end with nothing.

This is quite different from the inertia you see today in Federal government regulatory growth.

Going back to the current discussion, negative rights dont lapse since they define the starting point. It is only regulations (I.e. anything that comes outside of the constitution) which is subject to reset.

[benj111]

Negative rights, are rights to be free from something. Eg cruel and unusual punishment.

Also the quote started "It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution"

So I don't see what's wrong talking about the constitution.

[harshreality]

Jefferson is speaking there of a political-philosophical hypothesis. It's not a statement of fact that laws do, or that the Constitution does, expire after 19 years. Clearly they don't by default.

By all means, let's hold a constitutional convention periodically. Whether it's every 20 years or every 100, we're overdue. The founders even foresaw the potential need for that, and provided a procedure utilizing constitutional conventions to bypass state legislatures, a procedure which the country has not once utilized.

Failure to go through the amendment procedure doesn't grant us the right to ignore the Constitution as written. It's very easy to say you don't like some part of the Constitution. It's very difficult to propose and pass an alternative.

[galangalalgol]

In addition, we could really use a mechanism for the judiciary to declare a law or amendment ambiguous. The legislature gets locked in and catered meals from a random local public school until the judiciary is happy that the new law isn't ambiguous. Apart from DC having the best school lunches in the country, we would also see less vitriolic polarizing arguments. The federal legislature should decide at what point a developing fetus or child gets what rights, and how those should be weighed against the rights of the mother to be free. Because human rights both to life and liberty are a federal thing. And the whether the 2nd amendment is ambiguous due to changes in language or intentional due to disagreement even back then, the judiciary could say "clean this thing up and come back when you have a supermajority, hope you like canned green beans".

[tekknik]

How is the second amendment ambiguous? It’s one of the more clear written rights we have.

[jjk166]

What counts as a militia, what does it mean to be well regulated, to what degree does the security of a free state matter, what counts as an arm, what actions counts as bearing them, and what infringes the right to do so?

The amendment is clearly written, but ambiguously worded.

[jfengel]

It's not at all clearly written. As written it's simply ungrammatical: the comma after "militia" is a syntax error.

Such nitpicking would ordinarily be unimportant, but given that the purpose of the entire prefatory clause is unclear, it completely undercuts any notion that the entire thing is "one of the more clear written" (as the GP said). It makes it impossible to tell whether it's intended to be a limitation or an explanation (which none of the other amendments have or require).

As you say, many of the words are also ambiguous. But for a piece of law whose interpretation is a matter of tens of thousands of deaths per year, one would expect it to at least be grammatically valid.

[tekknik]

How does one person think they know more than the group of people involved in writing it? Your ego is quite strong.

There are no gramatical errors in 2A or any right. None of the terms used are ambiguously defined, try using a legal dictionary instead of saying they’re ambiguous because you don’t understand them.

[tekknik]

Militia has a legal definition, as does arms. Bearing them seems clear to me, ability to use them.

Free states are not free to ignore any right enumerated, so that’s a no brainer, same with the loss of rights.

If 2A is ambiguously worded because we want it to define it’s own terms instead of using the standard legal definitions, then what does this make every other right? It seems to me that it’s being defined ambiguous as an attempt to pick it apart.

[jjk166]

There's no such thing as the standard legal definition, most terms, including these, have multiple definitions. Does a militia refer to the organization that is the militia, or does it refer to its members, or to its potential members. At the time of the ratification of the second amendment, the militia was limited to able bodied males over 17, were we supposed to update this to include women as our cultural values shifted or stick with the original definition? For arms, were they going with the definition of any item useable for offense or defense, or were they using the definition of an item a person arms themselves with? Did they mean every weapon of the era, or every weapon that could ever be invented? Is a machine gun an arm? A grenade launcher? A cruise missile? A pipe bomb? A nuke? Does bearing mean the ability to use weapons, or is it the ability to possess weapons, or is it to carry the weapons physically on your person, or is it the more general state of taking up arms, or is it the right to serve in the military? If you are free to use guns but there are restrictions on transferring ownership, has your right to bear arms been infringed? How about if there are no restrictions on gun purchases but there areas where you're not allowed to bring guns, like public buildings? If a school is built in such a way that it is impractical for me to wheel a black powder canon into it, has that infringed my right? Is a noise ordinance that effectively means I can't fire my gun for target practice in my backyard at 2am an infringement?

It's turtles all the way down.

It doesn't matter that you think it means one thing, it's ambiguous because someone else can find a different meaning which to them is equally clear, using different but equally sensible definitions, and there is no way to determine objectively which interpretation is correct.

Most clauses in the constitution are ambiguously worded. This is intentional. The constitution was supposed to be the foundation of America's legal system, not its capstone. The founders easily could have made every amendment a 500 page document detailing exactly and unambiguously what they meant. They instead went with short and concise clauses that would guide future legislation while leaving plenty of room for future leaders to make decisions.

[baryphonic]

Keep in mind that Thomas Jefferson had no part in writing the Constitution (he was in France) and was a significant opponent of it. People like Alexander Hamilton thought that not only should the Constitution be permanent, but that it should also provide for an elected king.

[hasbot]

Some interesting discussion here: https://www.quora.com/What-did-Thomas-Jefferson-oppose-about...

[ballenf]

As a sibling explains, it's important to understand the ground state. The ground state assumption is that citizens have all these rights (speech, arms, religion, etc). Narrowing or abrogating these rights is where laws come in.

The opposition at the time to the Bill of Rights was that it would confuse people into thinking the rights came out of the constitution instead of from nature.

[bena]

Jefferson was certainly of the mind that documents like the Constitution needed to be overhauled about once or twice a generation.

People like to talk about "the founding fathers" as if they were of a singular mind about things. But they were very much not. They were so much not that the Vice President of the United States literally shot the former Secretary of Treasury over various disagreements.

So, you know, they weren't exactly 100% with each other.

[tekknik]

Why does this control discussion lead to guns more often than not? Why can the anti-gunners not accept that guns are not going anywhere anytime soon?

You will not get 2/3’s of the states to listen to you inferring gun owners are criminals.

[kashunstva]

> inferring gun owners are criminals.

The comment to which you’re responding made no such inference.

[tekknik]

Oh sure they did. If the assumption that gun owners weren’t doing something wrong then the subject wouldn’t come up.