Xamonas Chegwé wrote:Collector1337 wrote:
What about the phrase "WELL REGULATED"?
"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."
The first half of the Amendment is an explanation of one of the primary reasons why the individual RKBA shall not be infringed
at the federal level, by Congress.
The "Militia" in the US has two components: the Organized Militia, which consists of state military forces (state guard, national guard, state militia) and the Unorganized Militia (reserve militia), which is comprised of (at the moment) all able-bodied males between 17 and 45 who are not members of the National Guard or Naval Militia.
"Well-regulated" means, in the context of linguistic usage at the time the Amendment was drafted means, in today's usage, "properly equipped and trained."
In order for a reserve militia to be properly equipped, it was (and is still) necessary for there to be a sufficient pool of arms of military type and quality available to the members of the unorganized militia so that when called to duty they can report fully-armed and prepared to go into battle immediately. It is not possible for either a state or the federal government to stockpile sufficient arms to equip every able-bodied male between 17 and 45 in a short enough time for them to be fielded effectively, nor is there time to train them all in marksmanship when an emergency requiring their call to duty occurs.
The concept the Framers used when drafting the 2nd Amendment
presumes a priori that all law-abiding citizens have an inherent, natural and unalienable right to keep and bear arms. The Amendment does not provide them with this right, the right predates and is superior to any authority granted to government to regulate anything.
Therefore, as an
a priori fact, the right to keep and bear arms exists prior to and independent of all government authority and the 2nd Amendment cannot be read to be permissive when it is in fact a
restriction on the power and authority of government to regulate the right to keep and bear arms.
One, but just one of the reasons that the Founders felt it was important to so constrain government authority to regulate the RKBA has to do with the ability of a state or the Congress to effectively raise an army in time of military need. Since the federal government only has authority over federal matters, the Founders wrote the 2nd Amendment to
prevent Congress from disarming the general public. They knew that the first act of a tyrant is to disarm the populace because they had just fought a bitter war for
precisely that reason. King George sent troops to Lexington and Concord to seize arms from the Colonists, which is where and why the Revolutionary War began. The Founders resolved that the new nation they were founding would never, ever permit its government to debar the possession and lawful use of arms by the citizenry.
So, the first half of the Amendment, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," simply states the primary reason that
congressional authority must be restricted; each State, in order to remain free and provide for it's own security
against usurpation by the federal government or some tyrant who takes control of the federal government, as well as the State's security against invasion or insurrection, must not be subject to Congressional infringement on it's citizen's ability to form an effective pre-armed military force on demand.
In order to protect both the entire nation's reserve military capacity and the military capacity of each state, the pre-existing right of each citizen to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed" by the Congress. With the passage of the 14th Amendment, the protections of the 2nd Amendment also extended to the authority of the several States to infringe on those rights, a fact that was ignored for a very, very long time, right up until the Supreme Court finally decided to squarely address the blatant violation of the rights of citizens in many states and cities such as New York, Chicago and Washington D.C. in the Heller case, in which it ruled that the RKBA is NOT limited to those who are members of the Organized Militia, or the Unorganized Militia either, but rather the RKBA is inherent, natural and unalienable and applies to EVERY citizen and that neither the federal government nor a state government, nor the government of the District of Columbia may "infringe" on that right. The Court went on to state that militia capacity is NOT the only thing controlled by the 2nd Amendment, it acknowledged a long-understood fact, going back to pre-colonial times, that the right of citizens to keep and bear arms includes the right to keep and bear them for
personal security and defense.
So, the issue has been settled with finality by the SCOTUS. The right to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed" by either the Congress or the legislature of any State. Period.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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