the truth of gun rights during the founding era

Author: n8nrgmi

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where is the evidence the fathers wanted to protect rights to self defense and hunting? 
where is all the evidence that the fathers were generally against gun restrictions?

here are some highlights about gun laws during the founding era: 
-stand your ground laws were not the law. colonists had the duty to retreat if possible.
-public and concealed carry in populated areas was banned 
-anyone who didn't swear loyalty to the state couldn't have a gun. it's far fetched to say as today's conservatives do that guns were protected to protect against the state when back then the state was disarming people they thought were disloyal
-the state disarmed people for the purposes of furthering the government. one of washington's first acts was to disarm the people of queens new york.
-all guns had to be registered and inspected 
-some states regulated the use of gun powder
-some cities prohibited firing guns in the city limit
-some cities prohibited loaded firearms in houses
-only one state protected gun rights outside of the militia 
-several states rejected the idea of gun rights for self defense or hunting, even though conservatives today claim it was already protected by the second amendmnet
-indians and blacks were barred from having guns 


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@n8nrgmi
-stand your ground laws were not the law. colonists had the duty to retreat if possible.
some states require you to retreat if possible, what's your point?
-public and concealed carry in populated areas was banned
supreme court ruled, I believe, you can ban one or the other but not both.
-some cities prohibited firing guns in the city limit
um ok, that's still a thing, has been....


Thus, in the minds of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, to "bear" agun meant to carry it about in one's hands or on one's person, as for instancea deer hunter would do. "Bearing arms" is not associated with militia dutyonly, for the language above addresses the "bearing of a gun" by any personwhen not "performing military duty."
Further, while the bill would haverestricted the carrying of scatterguns and other long guns for hunting, itwould not have prohibited carrying pistols for self-defense. At that time, "one species of fire-arms, the pistol[,] [was] never called a gun."' 16
Just months before writing the Declaration of Independence, Jeffersonkept a Commonplace Book where he copied his favorite passages from legalwriters. This book "may well be considered as the source-book and repertoryof Jefferson's ideas on government." 20 Among the passages Jefferson copiedword-for-word was Beccaria's denunciation of laws which forbid di portar learmi, which may be translated as to "bear," "carry," or "wear arms."
The wisdom of Beccaria was a source of Jefferson's proposed VirginiaConstitution of 1776 which provided: "No freeman shall ever be debarredthe use of arms." 2 2 An avid hunter and gun collector, Jefferson carried pocketpistols which may be seen today at Monticello.2 3

well you can read the rest.





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@TheDredPriateRoberts
i'll wait, i guess forever, for you to explain why there's no evidence that the founders cared at all about self defense or hunting when they wrote the second amendment. 
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this is all incorrect
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i mean evidence outside the text of the amendment 

also that article you mentioned only shows that sometimes 'bear' was used to mean carry only if it was specified someone in the context.

ive cited the research that shows 'bear arms' almost always meant use for the militia.

also, when the amendment was written they almost wrote the people have the right to bear arms unless their conscience tells them not to, a concientious objector clause.... which means they were using the phrase to mean militia. 
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-the phrase "bear arms" historically meant to use a gun in a militia. the preface of the amendment says the purpose regards militias.
-“The people”: The founders used this phrase to mean not individual persons, but rather the body politic, the people as a whole. During the ratification debate in Virginia, speakers used the phrase “the people” 50 times when discussing the militia. Every single mention referred to Virginians as a group, not as individuals.

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The phrase “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms” shows up in a draft of a proposed Virginia constitution in 1776. Subsequent drafts included the bracketed qualifier that “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements].” Although this sentence did not find its way into the final version of the Virginia state constitution, it is documented in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
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TheDredPriateRoberts
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@n8nrgmi
well what I quoted of what is claimed to be their very words....pistols weren't considered guns for starters, Jefferson himself carried pistols in his pockets, perhaps carrying pistols in that manner was so common and readily accepted it needed not to be mentioned?

if your "research" has letters supporting your argument please post them rather than someone's opinions as they are biased, but let's rather look at what was actually said, written on paper, that seems to be the best evidence.
was it common practice for people to carry pistols generally?  the fact that Jefferson did would seem to indicate this was a common practice.


Every single mention referred to Virginians as a group, not as individuals.
LOL aren't groups made up of individuals?  wow that is really absurd.


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@TheDredPriateRoberts
the article you cited and the words you wrote are convoluted and hard to follow. id turn it on you to show if you have good evidence, a clear statement that shows 'bear arms' means just 'hold a gun' or something like that.

in both my articles i showed, if you bothered to read them, they are clear eyed and easy to follow. and, they use a systematic approach. here is a highlight...
"A search of Brigham Young University’s new online Corpus of Founding Era American English, with more than 95,000 texts and 138 million words, yields 281 instances of the phrase “bear arms.” BYU’s Corpus of Early Modern English, with 40,000 texts and close to 1.3 billion words, shows 1,572 instances of the phrase. Subtracting about 350 duplicate matches, that leaves about 1,500 separate occurrences of “bear arms” in the 17th and 18th centuries, and only a handful don’t refer to war, soldiering or organized, armed action. These databases confirm that the natural meaning of “bear arms” in the framers’ day was military."

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@TheDredPriateRoberts
every amendment has a clear history to it, outside the text. the founders stated what they wanted in the text and why, the purpose. why would it be just implied that they meant to protect self defense and hunting? why wasn't that part explicitly mentioned any where? all their focus was on the need for a militia. 
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In the United States, which has an English common law tradition, the concept of a right to keep and bear arms was recognized prior to the creation of a written national constitution.[7] When colonists in the Thirteen Colonies rebelled against British control during the American Revolution they cited the 1689 English Bill of Rights as an example.

The American understanding of the right to keep and bear arms was influenced by the 1689 English Bill of Rights, an Act of Parliament, which also dealt with personal defence by Protestant English subjects.

n United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the right to arms preexisted the Constitution and in that case and in Presser v. Illinois (1886) recognized that the Second Amendment protected the right from being infringed by Congress. 


Bill of Rights 1689
reestablished the right of Protestants to have arms for their defence within the rule of law.

the court rulings go way back but people keep wanting to reinvent the wheel


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@TheDredPriateRoberts
so do you just ignore the database search that i quoted? where is your systematic approach? what you quoted just shows there were some gun rights prior to the united states forming, and you just assume it's tied to the phrase 'bear arms'. 

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@TheDredPriateRoberts
the court cases you cited only show that congress was limited from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms. the case doesn't say what it means to keep and bear arms, and doesn't show it protects the right to self defense with a gun, or anything like that. also, that case allowed states to regulate arms as they saw fit. if it wasn't a right then, why should states be restricted now? 
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@n8nrgmi
so is that what your whole argument hinges on is the wording?  Since it's obvious people carried I guess that's the only argument you are left with.  I'll address it when I have more time but the cases, rulings, precedence and laws even before the ratification of the constitution makes that kind of argument a sad pedantic attempt.
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@n8nrgmi
if they can control or limit how you can defend your life, you don't have a right to life.  Rights are not granted by government they are recognized.

here's some of the oldest self defense cases with a gun http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/Self-Defense-Cases.htm

The Jury and the English Law of Homicide,1200-1600

self defense 428
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
i'm not left with just a technicality, if that's what you think. there's no evidence outside the text the founders meant to protect anything other than a milita. if they meant to protect self defense or hunting or any of that, they would have mentioned it. plus, it is pretty strong that the only times 'bear arms' was used, was for the militia. i'm looking at the whole picture here. you just have a bunch of disjointed and irrelevant factoids. 
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@n8nrgmi
nope you don't understand the constitution or bill of rights then, it was never meant to be all inclusive.

Do you agree we have the "right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness"?

you haven't proven all the court rulings and cases were wrong so there's that.

can you find one person successfully charged using a firearm in a legal self defense situation?
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
i agree we have the right to live. and that means self defense. and that means a gun, generally. but that doesn't mean it was meant to be included in the second amendment, if you look at the situation as a whole, and you have not shown one iota of evidence that i'm wrong. all you have is a cockamamie possible interpretation that overly relies on the word 'keep' in the amendment, but ignores all the rest of the amendment and the historical context. 

i dont know what you mean i haven't shown all the court cases wrong. you've shown none that prove your point. the long tradition of the court before heller just a few years ago, was that the amendment only protected militia rights. even the conservatives on the court back in Reagan's day thought the same thing. 

i dont know why it's relevant that i show someone being charged for using a gun in self defense. 
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@n8nrgmi
the Bill of Rights is what? and whom does it apply to?  people or government entities?
the Bill of Rights amendments add to the Constitution specific guarantees of personal freedoms and rights, clear limitations on the government's power in judicial and other proceedings, and explicit declarations that all powers not specifically granted to the U.S. Congress by the Constitution are reserved for the states or the people.

why wasn't that part explicitly mentioned any where?
if they meant to protect self defense or hunting or any of that, they would have mentioned it. 
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.




Scholars, politicians, and the courtssearch through history and the lawto find the meaning of the SecondAmendment. Three issues lead thedebate over guns today. They involvethe origin of the right to bear arms, themeaning of the word “militia,” and themeaning of “people.”Where does the right to bear armscome from? The English Bill of Rights(1689) clearly spoke of an individual’sright to bear arms.

George Mason, author of Virginia’sDeclaration of Rights, said in 1788,“what is the militia? It is the wholepeople, except for a few publicofficers.”Finally, does the Second Amendmentmean “individuals” when it refersto “the people”? In United States v.Verdugo-Urquidez (1990), the SupremeCourt said it does. The term, “‘thepeople’…refers to a class of personswho are part of a national community.”

Whether the Second Amendmentwas meant to protect militias orindividuals is not perfectly clear. But onething is certain: without the right to beararms, the colonists would never havewon the Revolutionary War.


as I have already stated owning and carrying guns was done and a well known practice.  I have not seen any calls for confiscation or a law prohibiting owning and carrying until much later after the B.O.R.
Timeline of Gun Control in the United States

from 1791 until......
1934
The first piece of national gun control legislation was passed on June 26, 1934. The National Firearms Act (NFA) — part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal for Crime“— was meant to curtail “gangland crimes of that era such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

there was no issue or problem with owning and carrying for 143 years and then it was only a reaction to gangland crimes.

this militia argument just doesn't make sense given the lack of laws and inaction for 143 years.  again as I said people owned and carried before and after the 2a
as exampled in Amendment X the states and the people are separated so to make a claim that it doesn't apply to individuals is preposterous. 
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Imabench
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@n8nrgmi
why would it be just implied that they meant to protect self defense and hunting? why wasn't that part explicitly mentioned any where?
For the most part, certain powers and rights detailed in articles of the Constitution were intentionally left vague and brief to try to maintain a balance of rights of the people vs power of the government...... The Founding fathers knew they didnt have the foresight to design a government that could handle issues 100, 200, 300 years after its creation, and also wanted to create a national government too weak to tyrannicaly abuse its own people, so a failsafe they built in to the Constitution repeatedly was making things fairly vague so that courts could evaluate issues such as gun rights in the future.....

For the most direct proof: The 9th Amendment itself specifies that the Constitution doesn't cover all rights that are guaranteed to the people, and that the people have freedoms and liberties that are protected by the Constitution, even if its not explicitly stated within the Constitution itself.... "oh its not in the Constitution so it can't be a right of the people", <- that line of reasoning is exactly what the 9th Amendment prevents, meaning that the Constitution was never meant to be an all-inclusive, perfectly clear list of the rights and freedoms people have. 

 

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@n8nrgmi
i'll wait, i guess forever, for you to explain why there's no evidence that the founders cared at all about self defense or hunting when they wrote the second amendment. 
So what? they probably didn't care at all about crazy people from broken homes blowing a school up either since most kids were raised by 2 parents back then.

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@Imabench
 "oh its not in the Constitution so it can't be a right of the people", <- that line of reasoning is exactly what the 9th Amendment prevents, meaning that the Constitution was never meant to be an all-inclusive, perfectly clear list of the rights and freedoms people have. 

The part about reserving rights not found in the Constitution to the states is an important part of the Constitution.

Everything you said is 100% true.
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@Imabench
dam that was a top rate post, respect.
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I gave a thumbs up.
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@Imabench
i can see using the ninth amendment to protect gun rights. but if that's the case, it's much more open for legislative and judicial interpretation what specifically should be someone's rights. it's not based on the second amendment. that whole line of argument in this thread about the second amendment protecting the right to self defense and such, was pathetic. 
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
Its such a critically important Amendment in the grand scheme of things too, its a shame more people don't know what it means or does..... The 1st and 2nd Amendments get tons of love but god knows how many freedoms and liberties have been preserved thanks to the 9th Amendment. 
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@n8nrgmi
 if that's the case, it's much more open for legislative and judicial interpretation what specifically should be someone's rights
Oh it absolutely is, which is how the Founding Fathers intended it to be..... Give a basic outline of the right (that people should be able to own guns), let future courts and lawmakers sort out the finer details later. 

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@n8nrgmi
All 50 states have laws that allow you to defend yourself. What state are you thinking of that does not preserve the right to defend your life?
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@Dr.Franklin
I started a debate on this very topic if any of you are interesting in seeing my opinion on guns. https://www.debateart.com/debates/1373/gun-control