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The reason why my questions are relevant is that the quotes you have of people arguing a certain perspective, that private ownership is a God-given right, is not representative of the debate that occurred.
People often cite a few prominent people they learned in civics class and tack on an "etc." when entering these discussions as proof or evidence that the "founding fathers" or "framers" of our nation thought a paritcular way.
You haven't answered my question because, frankly, you can't.
The_Jazz didn't answer my question, and in fact, appeared to me to be pontification.
At no point did I suggest that common persons had any say in the legistlative process, a strawman he "rebutted." It's obvious that ratification of the Bill of Rights would follow the same process as other amendments, but that's not what I asked.
I asked what your view of the process was.
Not to mention, he's wrong, which is why I initiated this trajectory in the discussion. The Bill of Rights was ratified 4 years after the Constitution was completed, and 2 years after it was already in action. That's hardly the same time and a problem for those of you conflating the "framers" and the "ratifiers"
What of the "founders?" Are you referring to the people who drafted the Constitution or the people who wrote our nation's first document 10 years before (after a year and a half of debate)? So now you've got a good 15 years between the "founding" of this nation and the hallowed Bill of Rights presenting a serious problem for those of you conflating the founders with the framers with the ratifiers.
and you haven't even bothered to address the people who didn't sign any of these documents. Or even the representatives who refused to ratify them.
a problem in these kinds of debates occurs when people refer back to a homogenous group of hallowed men, fuzzy as the details surrounding their relations to one another are, and speculate as to what "they" might or might not have intended when they set out to write political documents.
without bothering to scrape the factoids or the social and political climate surrounding these various men people will continue to make broad inductive leaps of logic that fail undre scrutiny. I already brought up the poin that God didn't give anyone the right to bear arms,; in so far as God is mentioned in our nation's early documents it's not in reference to specific rights, but rather to the natural right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Where exactly in your numerous studies of this subject have you seen people arguing for a God-given right to bear arms? The Declaration of Independence, btw, has no legal bearing on anything legal or social in this nation--it's merely a polemic against the English colonialists. The debates on the inclusion of the right to bear arms centered around the importance of securing the existence of a budding nation-state, weighed against the dangers of a standing national army. Where are you deriving the notion that the people who ratified the Constitution had the standpoint that the document they were signing derived its legitimacy from God rather than themselves? In fact, you might wonder to yourself why one would need to codify "natural rights?" Surely God-given, readily apparent rights wouldn't need to be written out, debated upon, and voted into existence?
Your explanation about slaves and women not being conceived of as imbued with these same rights was appreciated, but unfortunately fell flat on the basis that they weren't, as you put it, not conceived of but rather explicitly written out from possessing such rights. If one were to be consistent in one's argument about "original intent" one would need to adhere to the original intent that slaves and women not possess the same rights as propertied men. Or one would have to acknowledge that the passage of more amendments loosens this concept of original intent and allows for changing sentiment and social values of a particular nation-state.
Let's say, oh what, 39 people signed the Constitution...how many quotes do you have that our rights are bestowed from God?
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