A question on the 2nd amendment?

First, let's look at this sentence: "Robust commerce, being necessary for a thriving economy, the right of the people to access roads and waterways shall not be infringed."

Now, looking at that sentence grammatically, linguistically, logically and legally...would you honestly say that it specifies, without question, that roads and waterways are only intended for commercial use and that there is no individual access right to them? Or would you say that the main subject of the sentence is to identify a right and a reason why the defense of that right is in the national interest?

Second, your understanding that "the 2nd amendment permits the establishing and maintaining of a regulated (as in controlled and trained) paramilitary force (militia)" is incorrect as the subject of forming militias was already spelled out in Article 1.... which brings us to..

Third, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution clearly places the power to call militias for service in the hands of Congress... so again from a logical standpoint, if the 2nd Amendment was only about militias, why would it grant a "natural right" to something that could only exist by Congressional approval?

The answer is fairly clear and goes back to my first point. The 2nd Amendment is not about arming militias, it is about "the right of the People to keep and bear arms" and why defense of that right in important to our founding principles.

Yeah, you're right.

It says the "right of the people" not the right of the militia.

The short version: in the case District of Columbia vs Heller, the US Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd Amendment protects the individual right to own firearms.

It's kind of a complicated subject. Are you sitting comfortably?

When delegates from every state met in Philadelphia after the Revolutionary War to craft a Constitution for the new nation, they found they had many issues of disagreement. They managed to settle all of these though compromise. (I doubt our contemporary 'statesmen' could do that!)

Anyway, one issue was whether our new nation should have a 'standing army', as most big nations did at that time. A standing army was a permanent, full time force of professional soldiers. Those who didn't want a standing army pointed out that we'd won our freedom with part-time 'citizen soldiers' who were under control of the states. These were called 'militias'.

The trouble with a standing army was first that it was expensive. Secondly countries with standing armies seemed to always be fighting a war, perhaps to justify the expense. Finally, even in those days, generals of standing armies had taken over nations!

In the end, there was a compromise. The nation would have a standing army, but states would be allowed to keep their militias to protect against small local insurgencies (like Shaw's Rebellion) and Indian attacks

THAT is what the 2nd Amendment was originally about. It wasn't about EVERYONE'S undisputed right to own a firearm or ten or 100, and carry them around to school and church and work. It was about allowing states to keep their militias. Some years later the militias were renamed The National Guard.

Our Supreme Court (whose job it is to interpret the Constitution) decided that the 2nd Amendment didn't ban gun control, so states and even cities have the right to keep guns out of the hands of felons, mental patients, etc. Or to limit the size of guns a person can own. We've banned machine guns federally (except for legitimate 'collectors'), and ammunition above 50 caliber. Stores like Walmart and restaurants like McDonalds and Starbucks have 'no guns' policies, which is also legal.

The Republican Party has developed gun rights into a huge political issue, which it shouldn't have been. THEY say that the purpose of teh 2nd Amendment is to allow citizens to fight their govt. when it goes rogue, to facilitate another revolution, which is the dumbest idea you ever heard. Militias are a TOOL of the government! They also insist that the other party wants to just ban guns and take them away, which is also false.

The fighting in the American Revolution began when British soldiers went to Lexington and Concord looking to find and confiscate a cache of weapons the colonists had stashed. In my opinion that's why the founders adopted the Second Amendment, making it a legal for Americans to keep weapons caches (armories) for use by the militia when needed.

Which would mean the Second Amendment is obsolete today because we have a large Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, etc., a militia is no longer necessary.

(That was the ATF and the FBI at Waco, not the Army.)

The problem I have is that many Americans don't understand that their constitution and 2nd amendment rights are only valid in the USA. When they leave the USA they have absolutely none of those rights.

The Supreme Court has held that the Second Amendment is an individual right intimately tied to the natural right of self-defense. The prefatory clause is an exercise of that individual right, but it's not the only legitimate use.

The problem with the debate is that there are people on both extreme ends who don't have a well-formed opinion and rather just operate from falsified info handed to them from whatever media they suck on. Conservative gun nuts have no clue what 2A says, and they have no idea what most of the gun control advocates are even asking for - but they've been told by Fox News that 2A says machine guns for everyone and that "libruls want to take every one of yer guns". Which is of course not true on the whole but still there is a small number of extremists on the left who do indeed want to ban all manner of guns, which FNN points at & claims they represent the whole group (and of course, generalization being a core tenet of conservatism, they swallow that lie whole).

It was the Supreme Court that said the term “well-regulated militia” means any nutcase can buy assault rifles and handheld nuclear weapons.

Antonin Scalia said his interpretation of it is that anybody can have any weapon that can be held, or “beared.” So assault rifles are ok, but cannons are not.