The Second Amendment Hoax
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/06/how_the_nra_perverted_the_meaning_of_the_2nd_amendment.htmlThe Second Amendment Hoax
How the NRA and conservatives have perverted the meaning of the right to bear arms.
By Dahlia Lithwick
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This is where I tell you that the current interpretation of the Second Amendment—the one held onto by Carson, and Donald Trump, and practically the entire Republican Party—is a hoax. Outside of the GOP, this is widely understood. But what we fail to comprehend, as we bury more of our dead in the name of freedom, is that it is a triple-decker hoax: A lie wrapped in a fabrication, lacquered over with a falsehood. That we chose to wrap it around our necks as a symbol of our own liberty is our own fault and shame.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution says this: “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.” For most of U.S. history, that was understood to mean that the freedom guaranteed by the Second Amendment was precisely what it said: the right of the people of each state to maintain a well-regulated militia.
So clearly and unequivocally held was this worldview that no less a liberal squish than Richard Nixon Supreme Court appointee Warren Burger said after his retirement in 1991 that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” This reading was based on precedent. The Supreme Court had clearly agreed with Burger’s interpretation and not that of the special interest groups he chastised, perhaps most famously in a 1939 case called U.S. v. Miller. That ruling said that since the possession or use of a “shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length” had no reasonable relationship to the “preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” the court simply could not find that the Second Amendment guaranteed “the right to keep and bear such an instrument.” Period, full stop. And that was the viewpoint adopted by the courts for years.
What changed? As Cass Sunstein and others have explained, what changed things was a decades-long effort by exceptionally well-organized, well-funded interest groups that included the National Rifle Association—all of whom “embarked on an extraordinary campaign to convince the public, and eventually the courts, to understand the Second Amendment in their preferred way.” It’s rather miraculous, if you stop to think about it: In a few short decades the NRA’s view of the Second Amendment became the law of the land. By 2008, writing the majority opinion for the Supreme Court in District of Columbia et al. v. Heller, Antonin Scalia enshrined this view for first time that: “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.”
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= new reply since forum marked as read
to have a gun, so...
So all these assault weapon bans and handgun restrictions ARE unconstitutional?
Those arms being exactly the arms (other then select-fire) related to the efficiency of the militias. Huh.
The states were mandated to maintain well-armed and well-regulated militias by the Articles of Confederation, and those entities were to continue under the Constitution. (...president is CinC "of the militias of the several states"
. Yes states had the right, and duty, to maintain effective militias. And so the people had the right, and duty, to provide themselves appropriate arms to serve in them.
Of course the 2nd restricted the central govt from disarming the people - they were the militias. And just as the central govt couldn't disarm the people, neither could the states, as the state militias were absolutely vital to the federal govt role as laid out in the constitution...the militias were "necessary".