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Originally Posted by shakran
You quote this in the same thread that you're telling me the 2nd amendment gives you the right to a gun?
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Again, this bears my reasoning out. The 2nd does NOT give you the right to have a gun, but neither does it take that right away.
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It's too late to bother looking up later case law but I'm pretty confident that some judge somewhere has reversed this section. The 2nd goes farther than that, as distinguished from the 1st, which says "CONGRESS shall make no law. . . " The 2nd does not say anything about congress, merely that the right shall not be infringed. Since this is distinct from the 1st's mention of congress, it should be interpreted to mean the right shall not be infringed by anyone, not just congress.
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Your entire post pretty much proved what I've been saying, and failed to address the fact that the 2nd amendment is one sentence, with a conditional clause preceeding the right that it defines. You still haven't gotten away from that pesky militia bit. . .
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Shakran, it really appears that you're reading dksuddeth's posts in twisted ways solely to be argumentative. His statements that you've quoted, "The right. . . of bearing arms for a lawful purpose. . . is not a right granted by the Constitution", and "Neither is it in any manner dependent on that instrument for its existence" aren't so unclear to me. He's saying that the rights mentioned in the Bill of Rights (existing as amendments to the Consitution) aren't granted by those amendments that mention them. They ENSURED by those amendments, as they were rights that people naturally had - and a state of being ruled by a government shouldn't be able to change them. This view makes total sense in light of the idea that rights and poweres are assumed to be retained by the people unless the government is given the power to curtail them.
Also, your comment about the brevity and clarity of the 2nd Amendment doesn't help much - it merely shows that the thing can be read in more than one way. The amendment says "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." [According to wikipedia, a copy made by the scribe who prepared the BOR carries different punctuation: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."] I read that to mean "The right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, because a well regulated militia is necessary to have a free state." I don't see the beginning as a conditional clause at all - it's a justification. And reading it that way plays all kind of havoc with the argument that the militia is the National Guard. Incidentally,
the wikipedia article reads it in a third way (see the very first sentence at the top): "Amendment II (the Second Amendment) of the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, declares the necessity for "a well regulated militia", and prohibits infringement of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms"." Please excuse my quotation mark madness.
All of that stuff I typed above is incidental to my main point, which is the same that I made in post 27. I now quote my self, for repetitive goodness:
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Originally Posted by ME
Can we concentrate less on "scoring points" on each other and more on being articulate and understanding others? The whole "gotcha" mentality tends to send things south pretty quickly.
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