The Second Amendment reads as follows: 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.
From these words it should be clear that the original intent of the Second Amendment was to ensure that no State passed a law to prohibit the people from owning guns, because that would impede the ability of states to form and maintain militias for the purpose of defending the new country that the Constitution was creating. Because the United States didn’t have, and didn’t want at the time, a standing army (or navy) , militias - that is, well regulated militias, were needed to provide a defense against attack, invasion, and civil unrest. You’ll recall that President George Washington requested and led the militias sent by several states to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.
The 2A was never about an individual right to own firearms for self defense or to defend against a tyrannical federal government. That idea was created out of thin air by the Supreme Court in the 2008 DC v. Heller decision. This decision was very ironic coming from the strict constructionist and textualist wing of the court.
The 2A as written is firmly obsolete, much like the third amendment prohibiting the quartering of troops in peoples’ houses. The reason of course is that we don’t have well regulated militias anymore. We have standing armies (and a Navy and Air Force) that makes militias a thing of the past. To make matters worse, guns have become a scourge in America with their numbers exceeding the number of citizens, and were used in the death of nearly 50,000 Americans annually. That is according to the most recent data from the Center for Disease Control, which tracks the number of gun related deaths including suicides, which accounts for approximately half of all gun deaths in the country.
Perhaps even worse than the number of gun deaths in this country is the fact that guns are the leading cause of death for children in this country. More than car accidents, or drownings, illness or disease. That is a pretty high price to pay for a right that fundamentally doesn’t exist or offer much of a benefit to society. The ownership of weapons of war makes no sense even in the context of the recently invented right to self defense from the Heller decision. Nobody needs an assault weapon with a 30 round magazine to defend themselves or their homes. But the proliferation of these kinds of firearms has resulted in mass shootings becoming a common event in the United States in this century and resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people each year in completely random acts of violence.
The 2A needs to be amended, spelling out exactly what should be allowed and for what purpose.
