no evidence of individual right to a gun, when our nation was founded, except through implication

Author: n8nrgim

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The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: "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."

that could be read as a collective right, or an individual right. depends on how it's read. so look to history...

all the talk during the early days was about the need for a militia, there's no talk about how everyone has a right to a gun. i challenge anyone to find such evidence. the only thing one can find in those days, is that some people thought it was smart for people to have guns, but this talk is never tied to the second amendment, and it's a different point to make than everyone has a right to a gun. the only way you can find a right to a gun in the early history, is to say it's implied that given most people were in the militia, then they all had a right to a gun including those who werent in the milita too, i guess?
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You're making the mistake of thinking conservatives give a shit if it is constitutional. We want the right to self defense. That's all. I want my grandmother to be able to shoot and kill an invader, because at 89 I doubt she could physically fight them off
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Look at the second part of the sentence. It gives the declaration

the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The first part of the sentence gives the why. The why the right is secured doesn't matter. What matters is that it is secured. 

The constitution is on our side, but it wouldn't matter if it wasn't TBH


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Nobody is going to give a shit what anyone says about gun rights when they already possess the guns. 

You have no plan besides a civil war to change that reality.
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@n8nrgim
The founders existed in a world of privately owned cannons and warships, and with the vast majority of the population living in rural areas gun ownership was almost universal. The idea of a militia back then definitely included the people themselves furnishing their arms. It's true that it isn't totally explicit about gun ownership being an individual right, but they would've seen no need to. The assumption was almost universal weapons ownership, and they wanted to make sure that the individual states would be able to muster their armed citizens if they chose.  To discard the right of an individual to own a gun is obviously discarding what the founders wanted/assumed 

Also " the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." sounds pretty clearly like a right to keep and bear arms to me
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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness could never be safeguarded without self defense.
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you guys must not be aware, that in the founding days the phrase "bear arms" almost always meant to use a gun in a militia. so "keep and bear arms" could mean those two things are taken together, not separate ideas. i have a right to have a gun for a milita, basically. 
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"To discard the right of an individual to own a gun is obviously discarding what the founders wanted/assumed "

one of the founders said that a militia consists of most people, but even he acknowledged that future militias might not include everyone. if everyone isn't in a militia, i dont see how we can say they have a right to a gun, based on what evidence we know from founding days. i think the silence is deafening that there isn't any talk that people have a right to a gun... if that's what they thought, it would have been talked about. i think u r admitting that the right to a gun can only be inferred, and that's a big leap of a conclusion to make a constitutional right out of it. 
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see above 
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i have a cockamamie idea that the right to a gun is implied in the ninth amendment, an implied right. but since there's no explicit right to a gun as how it's supposedly laid out in the second amendment, the legislature should have more power to regulate it as they see fit. that's how how the legislative history of our country has always been regarding guns, lots of regulation. 
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i have no express legislative evidence of my constitutional right, but it's implied = super weak 
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lol, people owned cannons on their private ships and were never a part of the military or militia.
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@n8nrgim
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. Provisions of the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 infringe an individual's right to bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment. United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed.
District of Columbia vs Heller

The initial prefatory clause announces a purpose that doesn't affect the scope of the operative clause that says our right to bear arms shall not be infringed.
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I really want to know exactly how a Marxist plans on confiscating 150+ million guns.
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I really want to know exactly how a Marxist plans on confiscating 150+ million guns.

Probably by slowly boiling the frog and feckless "conservatives" allowing them.
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yes there are some recent judicial decisions that thought people have a right to a gun, through the second amendment. but this thread is about legislative history during the founding days, so i dont know what point you are trying to make.  scalia is an originalist, but for some reason he decided to make a big leap of logic by implying the right based on what evidence is available. originalists should be like conservative chief justice Burger from the Reagan era, who called what scalia thought a "fraud" on the american people... it has no real historical basis to it. 
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@n8nrgim
Exactly what evidence are you looking for here? A relative lack of gun control legislation in the early years of the country?
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@bmdrocks21
there's no express evidence that the founding fathers  thought that everyone had a right to a gun. there's only evidence that they thought militias were necessary. every argument i've seen that the second amendment protects an individual right to a gun, is always based on implication, implying it through history. though i dont think hardly any of the people making that argument realize they are actually implying it, and how weak that sort of argument is. 
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i also dont know why you brought up the gun control point. that's only tangent related. 
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@n8nrgim
I don't see how gun control isn't directly related. If the founding fathers were big advocates of gun control on non-militia citizens, then that would disprove their intention of the individual right. While a lack of such legislation doesn't definitively prove anything, it at the very least highly suggests that they had a belief in an individual right.
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@n8nrgim
Do you really believe that it isn't possible that the sentiment of an individual right to a gun was so ubiquitous that this could explain a lack of discussion about how people should own guns for self defense?
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so you are saying that the purpose for a constitutional amendment was so obvious that nobody talked about it?  riiiiight. they talked about the purpose for all the other amendments, but for some reason everyone is so quick to just imply it for the second amendment. 
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@n8nrgim
"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
- Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788

The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824

"This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty.... The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."
- St. George Tucker, Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1803
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@bmdrocks21
i disagree that whether there was gun control matters that much. if they didn't regulate it, that doesn't suddenly mean they passed a constitutiuonal amendment protecting their use. that's a big leap. but regardless, they did regulate it....

-when the amendment was passed they had all kinds of laws regarding who could have guns for all kinds of reasons, along with gun control
-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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here is some more legislative history that the founders didn't create a right to a gun in the second amendment...

-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.
-when the constitutional convention occurred, they didn't talk about the need for people to have guns or self defense, all the emphasis was on the need for a militia and the militia langauge in the constitution. the following links are for both this factoid and the next one too. 
-From 1888, when law review articles first were indexed, through 1959, every single one on the Second Amendment did not conclude that it guaranteed an individual right to a gun
-when the amendment was passed they had all kinds of laws regarding who could have guns for all kinds of reasons, along with gun control
-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 
-the supreme court historically didn't touch the amendment much, but when they did treated it as pertaining to militias. as recently as the reagan administration, the conservatives said the same thing. it was called a quote unquote "fraud" on the public, to say otherwise, by the conservative chief justice Burger.
-drafts of the amendment included a conscioustious objector clause, if you objected to militia duty for religious reasons you can be exempt from a militia. this reinforces that the amendment pertained to militia stuff.
-half the population from postal workers to priests were exempt from the militia. this reinforces that it wasn't generally understood that the people informally make up an informal militia. a militia is what a state defines it as.
-all the amendments have limits on them. including the first amendment. you can always read into the amendment what exactly it means to infringe on someone's rights, and find other reasonable exceptions

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@n8nrgim
o you are saying that the purpose for a constitutional amendment was so obvious that nobody talked about it?
The whole nation was entrenched in a massive war fought by citizens with guns, whereas the idea of something more abstract such as free speech might not be as readily apparent.

However, do you in any way disagree with the DC v Heller decision's grammatical interpretation of the 2nd Amendment? Because that is that whole discussion about prefatory and operative clauses: it is dissecting the meaning based on the meaning of the words as written.

Is the second clause not operative? Does the prefatory clause impact that clause? Why? That very Amendment is the most convincing evidence of their stance on gun rights. Why the obsession with outside quotes to prove it?
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#27
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@bmdrocks21
"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
- Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788

The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824

"This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty.... The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."
- St. George Tucker, Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1803

your first quote is usually taken out of context. the full quote ends with "keeping their own arms on their own land". 

the third quote basically is just saying keeping and bearing arms is essential. it doesn't define what that means. i never saw that "self defense" point, so that's interesting point in your favor i guess. 

i never saw the second quote. that's somewhat persuasive to your point. except, he's talking about the right to a gun in the context of their duty, which means militia membership. 

also even if i grant the somewhat persuasiveness of these points, there by far is still a deafening silence on people having a right to a gun, in the founding era. 
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@bmdrocks21
i dont think heller even considered the fact that "bear arms" almost always meant to use a gun in a militia. especially when you consider that and the rest of the amendment like the "well regulated militia" part, there's at the very least more than one way to interpret the amendment. thus, they should have looked at the history, but they obviously didn't do it without an agenda. probably a bunch of leaps that implied it, as everyone else does with it. i maintain the originalist conservative chief justice burger got it right. 
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#29
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"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."

"your first quote is usually taken out of context. the full quote ends with "keeping their own arms on their own land". " 

also, no one argues the constitution should prevent people from owning guns. that's not to say that it says they should be able to own guns. 
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well, maybe i'm confusing the quotes.. the 'arms on land' quote i was thinking about was from Jefferson