The Dangers of Gun Control

[Kal'Stang]

No there isn't. The modern rules regarding the usage of commas was not very well developed back then. In fact, there are two different versions of the second amendment, one with three commas and one with a single comma.

So you are wrong, nobody needs to study up on grammar. But you need to study up on history.

Not very well developed back then? Are you KIDDING ME? You do realize that writing was not new when the Constitution was written right? My god I cannot believe that you just tried to claim that the usage of comma's was "not very well developed back then".

Here, I'd suggest reading this since you apparently are ignorant of this subject....it will at least give you a baseline to start your education.

Wiki ~ Comma

 

[Guy Incognito]

Not very well developed back then? Are you KIDDING ME? You do realize that writing was not new when the Constitution was written right? My god I cannot believe that you just tried to claim that the usage of comma's was "not very well developed back then".

Here, I'd suggest reading this since you apparently are ignorant of this subject....it will at least give you a baseline to start your education.

Wiki ~ Comma

You betray your ignorance of history. No, the English language was not standardized at the time. Spelling and punctuation were haphazard and there were no hard an fast rules.

Moreover, you betray your ignorance of contemporary English punctuation. If you understood how the comma was properly used, you would see that the use of the comma in the three-comma version of the second amendment are incorrect. Clearly, the writer was using a different method of punctuation than we use today.

 

[TurtleDude]

You betray your ignorance of history. No, the English language was not standardized at the time. Spelling and punctuation were haphazard and there were no hard an fast rules.

Moreover, you betray your ignorance of contemporary English punctuation. If you understood how the comma was properly used, you would see that the use of the comma in the three-comma version of the second amendment are incorrect. Clearly, the writer was using a different method of punctuation than we use today.

Major laugh here. this is more made up nonsense. Kal is correct, as usual on constitutional interpretations, your post has no factual support

 

[Buck Ewer]

Its really does not suprise me, my previous post was spot on, and at the very least you at least figured out the militia was ANY white man between 18-45 but you added the "and" not the founders. That is how the leftists like you roll - adding your fascist belief structure to the reality that already is because it doesn't fit you little mold of utopia with your total control over others. That militia referred to in 1791 is the PEOPLE not your gorups they joined, not the national guard, not the state guards the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms not just select groups as you want to believe.

I dare say when the time comes that you leftist annoit a supreme court that changes that definition and designation is the day a new revolution begins - a very sad day for a once great nation.

The every 18 to 45 white male is merely the group from which a militia can and must be formed.
The individuals are not a militia unless they are organized and REGULATED...WELL REGULATED as the amendment calls for.
A guy between the correct ages with a gun is not a militia unto himself until he organizes with others and is regulated...not just regulated ... WELL regulated.
You guys hate that WELL REGULATED part don't you?
Without the "well regulated militia" phrase we are talking about every eligible guy shall not be infringed from keeping and bearing arms.
...But that's not what it says. Read the whole amendment and the intention is clear, If you are a member of a WELL REGULATED militia then your right to bear shall not be infringed.
If you are ready and willing to make war against your country if your weaponry is well regulated you weren't much of an American to start with, IMHO. Most Americans hold the greatness of our nation at a higher plane of magnitude than a childish need to make bang bang.

 

[Buck Ewer]

There is a reason that those comma's are there. Study up on your grammar.

The current grammatical interpretation is new to only the last few decades. Here is a little history about how the current interpretation was pushed by the gun manufacturers lobby ...the NRA.

Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “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.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”

But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)

The re-interpretation of the Second Amendment was an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation, inside and outside of government. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a gun-rights enthusiast to the White House. At the same time, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of an important subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he commissioned a report that claimed to find “clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The N.R.A. began commissioning academic studies aimed at proving the same conclusion. An outré constitutional theory, rejected even by the establishment of the Republican Party, evolved, through brute political force, into the conservative conventional wisdom.

And so, eventually, this theory became the law of the land. In District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court embraced the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment. It was a triumph above all for Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of the opinion, but it required him to craft a thoroughly political compromise. In the eighteenth century, militias were proto-military operations, and their members had to obtain the best military hardware of the day. But Scalia could not create, in the twenty-first century, an individual right to contemporary military weapons—like tanks and Stinger missiles. In light of this, Scalia conjured a rule that said D.C. could not ban handguns because “handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”

So the government cannot ban handguns, but it can ban other weapons—like, say, an assault rifle—or so it appears. The full meaning of the court’s Heller opinion is still up for grabs. But it is clear that the scope of the Second Amendment will be determined as much by politics as by the law. The courts will respond to public pressure—as they did by moving to the right on gun control in the last thirty years. And if legislators, responding to their constituents, sense a mandate for new restrictions on guns, the courts will find a way to uphold them. The battle over gun control is not just one of individual votes in Congress, but of a continuing clash of ideas, backed by political power. In other words, the law of the Second Amendment is not settled; no law, not even the Constitution, ever is

Law , like anything else it seems, can be bought and paid for in the USA ... but such, law arrived at in the interest of monetary gain for corporate interests alone, is not a law of, for or by the people.
It happens to fit the definition of Fascism.

 

[TurtleDude]

The every 18 to 45 white male is merely the group from which a militia can and must be formed.
The individuals are not a militia unless they are organized and REGULATED...WELL REGULATED as the amendment calls for.
A guy between the correct ages with a gun is not a militia unto himself until he organizes with others and is regulated...not just regulated ... WELL regulated.
You guys hate that WELL REGULATED part don't you?
Without the "well regulated militia" phrase we are talking about every eligible guy shall not be infringed from keeping and bearing arms.
...But that's not what it says. Read the whole amendment and the intention is clear, If you are a member of a WELL REGULATED militia then your right to bear shall not be infringed.
If you are ready and willing to make war against your country if your weaponry is well regulated you weren't much of an American to start with, IMHO. Most Americans hold the greatness of our nation at a higher plane of magnitude than a childish need to make bang bang.

well regulated as used in the second has nothing to do with citizen ownership of firearms being regulated by the federal government.

and your silly interpretation suggests the right doesn't vest until you have answered the call up and your militia has a mission and elected officers. But that interpretation fails because for a militia to be effective, those who join must have been armed and skilled in arms PRIOR to the call up

Just another case of a "progressive" who is upset that people who buy into far left nonsense are able to enjoy a right that far lefties want to infringe on to punish conservatives

 

[Jerry]

Tothian, Speaketh!: The Dangers of Gun Control

In the Constitution of the United States, the 2nd Amendment clearly states:

"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."

Which means, that the United States Government is not allowed to infringe upon that right. In fact, the oath of office for the President of the United States, is:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God."

The oath of office for the Vice President, as well as members of the United States Senate, is:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

Which means that any member of any of the 3 branches of government, be it Executive, Legislative, or Judicial, who actively supports gun control, is in violation of their oath of office.

There are 3 main reasons that the rights of Americans to carry a gun should not be infringed upon. We need guns to protect ourselves from the following 3 things.

1- Tyranny from our government.

2- Invasion from foreign governments.

3- Crime.

Now you gotta look at the statistics. Look at places where there are very strict gun laws. Chicago for example. Some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. And also one of the most dangerous cities. Now look at countries like Sweden. 1 in 2 citizens carries a gun. Lowest crime rate in the world.

If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. Not only is violating those rights of law abiding citizens exactly the kind of thing that our Founding Fathers warned us about, but it also disarms them and gives them no means of self-defense from those who will carry regardless of any such law, and in fact, empowers them against those who won't carry.

If someone with a gun wants to rob a bank, they're going to have a lot more luck in a place with strict gun laws, because you most likely wouldn't find anyone else there with a gun. So therefore it empowers them against everyone else. But, if they want to rob a bank in a place where there aren't any strict gun laws, and everyone else in that bank has a gun, 1 gun won't get them far against 30 other people if all 30 of those people have a gun.

It's sad that after certain tragic shootings, that the government and media wants to use such unfortunate events as an excuse to further push their gun control agendas, which will only make the situation worse. The problem isn't guns themselves. It's what bad people do with them. And the fact that so many potential heroes are disarmed from being able to as effectively defend themselves and others from those who will use them for malicious intentions.

There are some things which could sound good in theory. However, the facts and statistics have proven time and time again that gun control is a dangerous agenda.

Should I ever be killed in the line of duty by an armed gunman, and any politician or who ever tries to push stricter gun laws on my behalf, know that it wasn't the guns that were the problem. It's the fact that I live in a state with strict gun laws, and that I likely didn't have a gun to be able to defend myself as easily without a gun. And we live in a nation where the current President of the United States and the liberal members of the Senate, House of Representatives, and other members of government want to violate our 2nd Amendment rights that have been granted to us by the Founding Fathers of the United States.

No, Americans don't need background checks. While that would sound nice in theory to some, in practice it's unconstitutional. It violates the 4th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which protects "against warantless searches and seizures" due to the need that our Founding Fathers recognized, that people should have the right to privacy. I fail to see how such a concept isn't unconstitutional.

And illegalizing automatic weapons? What about those who aren't as skilled with a hand gun, and only have 10 rounds, but needs to protect against an armed thief who breaks in to their home armed with an AK-47? A handgun wouldn't be as effective.

When you see politicians start to misinterpret the Constitution, violate it, and deceive America about why what they're doing is alright, give bull$#&% lies that they "respect the constitution" while it's clearly evident that they don't respect it at all, you set us back to where we started back before the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. The very reason that the United States of America was formed was so that we could have freedom from such forms of tyranny.

Back to the Gun Control issue. Gun Safety and Gun Control AREN'T the same thing. Gun Safety has nothing to do with the laws. It has to do with common sense. Gun Control is a flawed concept.

Adolph Hitler once said: "If you want to conquer a nation, you must first disarm it's citizens."

Not only would allowing people to access and carry guns more easily decease crime, and thus help the economy and government budget more by reducing the high cost that crime has on society, but having more gun stores open in more places would also help give more jobs to more people and thus help the economy more that way too.

No, gun control doesn't keep police safer, neither. It just makes their jobs more dangerous. And when their communities suffer because of the crime, so does the economy there, and stores begin to close down, which means (high taxes are never good, but since a certain percentage of any business' earnings go to the government, and more businesses would closing down, they have less amounts of businesses there to help out with that, so then the government's budget suffers, and thus they start having to lay off more officers. Which then makes it harder for them to combat crime.

Here's a link with has some facts and statistics about gun control:

Gun Control - Just Facts

7 Gun Control Facts That Are Actually Myths

So why do we let it happen? Why do we let any gun control exist at all? Why aren't we holding these officials accountable?

 

[Jerry]

...But that's not what it says. Read the whole amendment and the intention is clear, If you are a member of a WELL REGULATED militia then your right to bear shall not be infringed.

I'll just leave this right here.....

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA ET AL. v. HELLER

Held:
1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

 

[Jerry]

You cannot compel a felon to self-incriminate, thus absense of a "NO GUN" ID is no guarantee that they are not in the "NO GUN" group. Think of it as starting a good citizen's club, would it be best to confirm membership and then issue them a club member card or to assume hat all are members unless they carry a special non-membership certificate?

The ID is state property. The state can mark what it wants on the card.