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What Does the Second Amendment Really Say?

Here is What I Think:

  • The Second Amendment Does Not Guarantee Private Gun Ownership.

    Votes: 39 38.2%

  • The Second Amendment Does Guarantee Private Gun Ownership.

    Votes: 63 61.8%
  • Total voters
    102
Loss Leader said:
In my opinion, the 2nd Amendment has a sunset clause. It guarantees the right to private gun ownership only so long as a citizen's militia is necessary for the security of a free state.

That condition expired at some point between the end of the Civil War (when a standing army was firmly established) and WWI (when weapons were created that made personal rifles irrelevant to modern warfare).

In my opinion, the 2nd Amendment no longer applies. I am aware that my opinion is not accepted by any actual court or tribunal, let alone the Supreme Court.
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This sounds pretty solid to me. My problem with the Second Amendment is that I don't think you can take the two clauses separately. They're not two separate sentences. Whatever it means is based on both clauses.

The wording is different than other rights. For instance the freedom of speech, it is granted or recognized, there's no qualifier. Nor did the people who wrote the Second Amendment include the words "for self defense" as several states used at the time in state constitutions. I think that was a conscious decision.

As to whether citizens should have a right to carry arms at all times for self defense, I think they were leaving that up to individual states.
 
eeyore1954 said:
And glaciers are retreating now.
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It seems like an interesting hypothesis and could very well have contributed to the 2nd being included, although I'm very skeptical it was a primary reason.

I'm just interested because I'd never heard of it before. I was in college from 2002-2007 and took several course that could have included it, including Rights and Civil Liberties, Early US History, and especially a high level Antebellum US History course.

It's not like we don't ever learn new things and connect things we might not have before. We can always learn something new.
 
tyr_13 said:
It seems like an interesting hypothesis and could very well have contributed to the 2nd being included, although I'm very skeptical it was a primary reason.

I'm just interested because I'd never heard of it before. I was in college from 2002-2007 and took several course that could have included it, including Rights and Civil Liberties, Early US History, and especially a high level Antebellum US History course.

It's not like we don't ever learn new things and connect things we might not have before. We can always learn something new.
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The glacier retreat was mentioned in my "Introduction to Oceanology" class at Purdue in 1994.
 
WildCat said:
Yeah, those pesky human rights. Things run much smoother in North Korea.
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I'm sure the North Koreans are comforted by knowing they were born with human rights, while not actually enjoying any of them. If you don't ever get to exercise your right, can you really be said to have it?
 
WildCat said:
I don't pretend the first part doesn't exist. The first part is a collective right, the second part is an individual right.
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I don't believe that that can be an accurate translation of the text itself; the grammar just doesn't support it. If it were two sentences I would agree, but as it is...
 
Silly Green Monkey said:
I'm sure the North Koreans are comforted by knowing they were born with human rights, while not actually enjoying any of them. If you don't ever get to exercise your right, can you really be said to have it?
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They were born with them, and their government promptly stripped them away. That's why the Constitution is worded the way it is, you are born with the right to free speech, religion, assembly, etc and the government is prohibited from infringing on them.

I'm much more comfortable with that than the idea you're born with no rights except those the government grants you.
 
elbe said:
I don't believe that that can be an accurate translation of the text itself; the grammar just doesn't support it. If it were two sentences I would agree, but as it is...
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So who are "the people"? Are they different than "the people" mentioned in the 1st Amendment, for example?
 
The Second Amendment is a restriction on the federal government only - "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

The Heller case settled (for the time being at least) the question of what the Amendment means in real terms, that a law abiding individual not in the prohibited class has a right to possess firearms in the home for self defense not coupled with militia service, and in the McDonald case the SCOTUS incorporated the Second onto the states through the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment.

That's led to a laundry list of civil actions in jurisdictions where the right to possess firearms has been abridged, and in those venues there is no end in sight so far. IIRC there are something like 12 active cases in California alone, with other cases just waiting to be filed.
 
Suppose another amendment read:

"A well-educated Congress being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed."

Would anybody interpret that as saying that only members of Congress could keep and read books? Would they claim it had a sunset clause, so that if there was no need for Congress any longer, books could be banned?
 
Brainster said:
Suppose another amendment read:

"A well-educated Congress being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed."

Would anybody interpret that as saying that only members of Congress could keep and read books? Would they claim it had a sunset clause, so that if there was no need for Congress any longer, books could be banned?
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By grammar alone? Yes. If you want your intention to be clear you should attempt to write clearly. Now I understand we aren't always successful at that but we should at least try.
That is one of the pluses to having the courts who can make decisions on what the constitution says or means. They've weighed in already. That doesn't make the amemdment LESS poorly written, though.

I would also add that I wouldn't have said sunset clause. I believe that the first part is, as written, the reason for the second. Because the first part is no longer true we should, as a country, reevaluate the necessity or reasons for the second part. Since that is unlikely to happen court cases are the best we are going to get.
 
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Loss Leader said:
The poll doesn't have enough options.

In my opinion, the 2nd Amendment has a sunset clause. It guarantees the right to private gun ownership only so long as a citizen's militia is necessary for the security of a free state.

That condition expired at some point between the end of the Civil War (when a standing army was firmly established) and WWI (when weapons were created that made personal rifles irrelevant to modern warfare).

In my opinion, the 2nd Amendment no longer applies. I am aware that my opinion is not accepted by any actual court or tribunal, let alone the Supreme Court.
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While I like your interpretation, I don't think the sentence as written actually means what you want it to mean. But then I also don't think it means what others want it to mean.

It is a non-grammatical collection of words that has become a Rorschach test in which everyone sees what they are pre-disposed to see. And I'm not sure that is a flaw, in fact it may have been a feature at the time.

Everyone can agree to a clause when they see what they want in it. That is basic contract drafting: sometimes clarity is the enemy of agreement.
 
I agree with Dr. Keith.

My honest feeling is no one really knows what it means. I see the logic on both sides, it can be read to confer a collective right or it can be read to confer an individual right.

My feeling is, since some state constitutions written at the time specifically stated that the people had the right to bear arms "for self-defence" that the Second Amendment does NOT include those words is probably not accidental. So I lean towards it being a collective right.

Am I certain that's what it means? No I'm not. And I don't believe anyone else is either.
 
elbe said:
By grammar alone? Yes. If you want your intention to be clear you should attempt to write clearly. Now I understand we aren't always successful at that but we should at least try.
That is one of the pluses to having the courts who can make decisions on what the constitution says or means. They've weighed in already. That doesn't make the amemdment LESS poorly written, though.
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Actually I find it quite obvious what the intent was. In the case of guns, where is the militia drawn from? The people. In order to have a well-regulated militia it is helpful to have people who know how to fire a gun. Ditto with Congress; in order to have a well-educated Congress, it is helpful to have people who read books. None of this is to say that a militia is the only reason for the people to have guns, or that Congress is the only reason for the people to have books.
 
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