I disagree! This is not about the 2nd Amendment but more about a topic devolved into another entirely different one. There is already a thread created discussing this very issue
You know as well as I do that it exemplifies the metaphor ‘lions led by donkeys’. But as Doc says, it’s off topic, so I’ll stop there.
The primary purpose of the 2nd was to ensure we’d be able to pull of the same kind of fight against our own gov’t should it ever turn against us.
A reminder to all.
In 1962, you could order guns from mail order catalogs by simply sending in a check. There where no “Back Ground Checks”, No License Required, and No Restrictions. There were also Zero mass shootings. So it’s not about the guns, It’s about the people.
Warriors are killers by trade not peace makers and cannot be made to function as anything but highly trained and equipped weapons of destruction .
President Trump is right in saying that to win in Afghanistan would take a effort and the civilian death toll would reflect the that of the second world not Korea or Vietnam .
Well that’s certainly not true, hundreds of millions of us have returned to civilian life and gotten along just fine.
True that may have served and returned to civilian life !!
But while we served we were trained and equipped to kill or destroy anything that interfered with our mission .
Only those of us in combat arms. We’re the best in the world at it when the politicians let us loose too.
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The militia is all of us. Just because we don’t meet doesn’t mean we can’t quickly organize. The point is that we are armed so when government stars that direction, we organize and resist.
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No sir. Read the 14th Amendment.
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Uh oh, somebody understands the plain text of the 2nd amendment to the constitution. What a threat are you…
The republican Chief Justice appointed by Nixon…
The late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said, in 1991, that the idea that the Second Amendment conferred a right for individuals to bear arms was “a fraud on the American public.”
Which was never supported by any historical documents form the founders who stated plainly that it was an individual right.
'Right of The People" not “Right of The Militia” or “Right of the State or States”.
“The People”.
Operative Clause.
a. “Right of the People.” The first salient feature of the operative clause is that it codifies a “right of the people.” The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase “right of the people” two other times, in the First Amendment ’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment ’s Search-and-Seizure Clause. The Ninth Amendment uses very similar terminology (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”). All three of these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not “collective” rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body. 5
Three provisions of the Constitution refer to “the people” in a context other than “rights”—the famous preamble (“We the people”), §2 of Article I (providing that “the people” will choose members of the House), and the Tenth Amendment(providing that those powers not given the Federal Government remain with “the States” or “the people”). Those provisions arguably refer to “the people” acting collectively—but they deal with the exercise or reservation of powers, not rights. Nowhere else in the Constitution does a “right” attributed to “the people” refer to anything other than an individual right. 6
What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention “the people,” the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset. As we said in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez , 494 U. S. 259, 265 (1990) :
“ ‘[T]he people’ seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution… . [Its uses] sugges[t] that ‘the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment , and by the First and Second Amendment s, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendment s, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.”
This contrasts markedly with the phrase “the militia” in the prefatory clause. As we will describe below, the “militia” in colonial America consisted of a subset of “the people”—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to “keep and bear Arms” in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as “the people.”
We start therefore with a strong presumption that the [Second Amendment](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct-cgi/get-const?amendmentii) right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZO.html
Learn to read, think, and quit regurgitating spoon fed talking points from the left.
If you don’t mind my saying so, your unhealthy interest in the means of killing seems to be lingering on? How many more are there like you I wonder?
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Nothing unhealthy about it at all. Shooting is a lot of fun, training people to be prepared to act lawfully in their own defense is a public service and lots of fun.
Most of our time is spent on knowing the laws of self defense and the use of deadly force once we get past the basics of gun safety which is hammered through their heads continually throughout all levels of training.
Much of the rest is spent on learning how to avoid conflict where possible and how to diffuse heated situations with deescalation techniques.
We also spend a good bit of time on criminal psychology.
We have around 30 million civilians lawfully carrying, about 10 million “daily carriers” here in the US and licensed handgun carriers are the most law abiding demographic outside of a nunnery.
We don’t even focus on how to kill, what we focus on is how to avoid deadly force situations whenever possible, to use force only when necessary and deadly force only when there is no other choice available.
We teach that when it must be used, the object is not to kill, only to stop the immediate threat. In fact if we spend a lot of time training on when you must stop. If you go beyond that point you can easily end up on trial for murder so we’re very careful about explaining where that line is.
When it comes to the hunting side we concentrate on safety first, and knowing the law relating to hunting reg’s.
The obsession with precision shooting for hunting is to ensure we can take animals cleanly and humanely and to recover everything that is edible to be responsible.\
Scary thought. I find the obsession with guns so disturbing. Guns have only one purpose and are designed to be most efficient at killing. Sure, knives, cars, chainsaws, rounders’ bats, baths, pillows can all kill too, and the argument that if guns are banned, so should they is beyond ludicrous. Even a slice of cheese can kill!
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That is completely untrue. Fewer than 10% of the firearms produced will ever be used to kill anything but steel, paper, or clay targets.
Target shooting of various types with everything from handguns to long range rifles is a huge sport in the US and in much of the world.
If one is ever gong to need a gun in self defense it will usually be no more than one time in their lives and when that time comes you want to ensure that the defender’s skills, knowledge, and understanding are all at at expert level or you as the defender are likely to end up a victim and you may well kill or injure an innocent third party.
Becoming proficient to such a level takes years or even decades of hard work, study, and range time.
Here’s a question for you TWR. Supposing it were possible to eliminate every gun (and firearm lol) in the USA - would you be in favour of doing it or not? A yes or no will be sufficient.
No. If you come at me with fists I want a knife or club. If you come at me with a knife or club I want to be able to defend myself with a gun.
Parity is for fools and cowards. A sensible person always wants an advantage in a fight or to at least be equally well armed.