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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
If the framers/founders/ratifiers/anyone else submitted that the individual man did NOT have an individual and god given right to keep and bear arms, i've not ever seen the quote or statement in any of the historical documents. Not the virginia bill of rights debates, the federalist papers, or the constitution convention. In fact, in the entire time I have studied/read/debated about the original intent of the founders concerning the constitution and the bill of rights, nowhere have I ever even heard of someone declaring that there is no individual god given right to bear arms and that it only applies to state sponsored/organized/maintained militias. If there is, it's a secret thats been very well kept.
If, as you infer, that throughout the years of debate that the second amendment was referred to as an individual right but the 'ratifiers' considered it otherwise, I've seen no proof of that either and without any proof of that specific belief, it would be beyond extremely difficult to accept that the representatives of the people played that kind of a joke upon them.
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I see your response as an elaborate way of not answering my questions.
You've moved from acceptance of the premises to your argument, immediately, without positioning ourselves at a meeting point.
For example, I am going to describe to you a different framework of understanding of how the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, came to be decided upon but only after we can make sure we have the same vision of how the process itself works.
How many people do you think "framed" the Bill of Rights, or just specifically the 2nd amendment?
How many people ratified it?
What connections do you know of that explicitly link the thoughts and motivations of the "framers" to the "ratifiers"?
See, none of what I'm about to lay out is going to make much sense, or make any difference to your perspective, if you think that 2, 3, 7, or even 20 people "framed" the Bill of Rights around a table. Or that, when you read excerpts from a larger discussion, such as the "federalist papers," that you would have the entire spectrum of viewpoints or the intent of the people writing out their arguments.
In your response, and it doesn't seem like you're going to give me much more of your same argument, albeit in a slightly different worded version that you've been using this entire discussion, you melded the "founders" into the "framers" into the "ratifiers", as if they were a homogenous group of people with similar interests.
Regardless of the historical accuracy of how you view these old men sitting around talking and writing, I would still argue that you have no basis to judge their "intent." For example, while one may write of a God-given right to bear arms, where in history would one come up with such an idea? They certainly had no right in other nation-states. Yet, the heartthrob of such a sentiment would have come from Continental Europe. And I suggest that philosophers like Locke would have been the seedling of such a notion. Or, more accurately, that man had a God-given right to certain modes of interaction, and the people arguing for individual ownership of weapons would see their mode of relation as a means of securing individual liberties. But certainly not that each and every person on the planet was bestowed by a deity with a right and obligation to be armed with a weapon, despite what they wrote.
And this notion of political expediency, of saying things to constituents that make sense to them, is not a modern invention. So your idea that the ratifiers were playing a joke on their constituency or else your proposition must be held true, that they believed in the arguments layed out on Congress' floor, is flawed at its inception as an either-or logical fallacy. Other options exist, namely that the ratifiers were reacting to a particular political and social climate.
So you tell me what version of men sitting around debating you envision, and I'll state mine, and we can consult a history book, and then move from there. Only after we agree on an accurate version of the process of drafting and ratifying can we move to discussions/debates of who thought what at a precise moment (and discuss the difficulties of doing so). But perhaps this is a good opportunity to interject and remind you what was mentioned earlier, about women and slaves, and why using their notions of how the world worked as a basis for ours can be flawed and perhaps disasterous. First and foremost is the contradiction between the belief that all humans have an inalieable right to exist in a particular mode, yet the limitation of such rights to certain classes of people in society. That very question is a huge hurdle you have to address if you are to continue hinging your basis of support for our rights as a process stemming from a natural birthright, from somewhere external to society. For, as much as I respect the people who founded this nation, nothing could be further from the truth that the notions of rights and what rights humans obtain, are not socially constructed. I would suspect above all else that they would suspect such a thing and so that must be addressed as well when constructing a theory of how our rights were initially codified.