Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
I thought Jarhyn made a good point, but when you look at the text, it is explicitly talking to individual rights. The Bill of Rights was originally meant to protect the States and People from the Federal Government. But if the 2nd Amendment was enumerating the responsibility of gun ownership to the states, it is oddly worded. Additionally, gun ownership wasn't all too controversial in a country with a frontier and very rural.And my point is, it seemed that the 2nd was aimed at keeping the federal government from controlling the arming policies of the states so as to prevent federal control of munitions.
It's a right specifically granted to the states which they then abused by not actually regulating "the militia" at all.
And now we have a bunch of militias, really more terrorist cells, which are unregulated and running amok.
Again, I think that you make the mistake of thinking that "well-regulated" meant "well-governed" or "well-controlled". But why would personal ownership of a weapon be relevant to that sense of the expression? It made more sense if the authors were thinking of soldiers that could reload quickly and fire in a coordinated pattern. That is, the sense of "well-regulated" they intended was more probably "well-trained" in using single-shot muskets that took time to reload.
Jahryn, it is a mistake to think that the meaning of expressions is contained inside of the symbols that we call "words". Context is essential to interpreting any text. The text refers to "the right of the people", but is it referring to individuals or the collective? "We, the people" refers to a collective. The 2nd Amendment was usually interpreted as a collective right associated with arming and training a militia. The Bill of Rights was not meant to protect the states and people from the federal government. That is libertarian and NRA bullshit. The Constitution was meant to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". The Bill of Rights was a set of amendments added to the Constitution that ended with two amendments to underscore the existence of unenumerated rights held by the states, communities, and individuals. There is nothing in that amendment that directly ties it to personal or individual ownership, although that certainly was a right or privilege of individuals in those times. "The people" who joined militias could also "keep" their muskets and other weapons in arsenals and armories that could be accessed in times of emergency.
The Supreme Court has the right to interpret what the wording in the Constitution means, because we collectively give them that authority and responsibility through the Constitution. Unfortunately, the individual justices have varying opinions about what the historical context was that gave meaning to its wording. So they can choose to interpret "the people" as having an individual right to own a gun, and that is just what the majority of the Court is doing right now. A future Court could just as easily reinterpret "the people" back into being a collective. It's all a matter of how they choose to construe the context. And bear in mind that the framers and ratifiers also had varying opinions about what the words meant. The question really comes down to reconciling the historical and modern contexts in a way that makes sense in modern times, and the current interpretation so-called "fundamentalist" interpretation does not make any sense at all. So I think we need to reflect a little more on the difference between the needs of "the people" in the 18th century and the needs of "the people" in the 21st century. They aren't the same.