printFrom Breitbart.com:
“A federal appeals court overturned the District of Columbia’s long- standing handgun ban Friday, rejecting the city’s argument that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applied only to militias.”
Here’s an excerpt from the decision, courtesy of Volokh Conspiracy:
“In determining whether the Second Amendment’s guarantee is an individual one, or some sort of collective right, the most important word is the one the drafters chose to describe the holders of the right — ‘the people.’ That term is found in the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments. It has never been doubted that these provisions were designed to protect the interests of individuals against government intrusion, interference, or usurpation. We also note that the Tenth Amendment — ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people’ — indicates that the authors of the Bill of Rights were perfectly capable of distinguishing between ‘the people,’ on the one hand, and ‘the states,’ on the other. The natural reading of ‘the right of the people’ in the Second Amendment would accord with usage elsewhere in the Bill of Rights.
The District’s argument, on the other hand, asks us to read ‘the people’ to mean some subset of individuals such as ‘the organized militia’ or ‘the people who are engaged in militia service,’ or perhaps not any individuals at all — e.g., ‘the states.’ These strained interpretations of ‘the people’ simply cannot be squared with the uniform construction of our other Bill of Rights provisions….
The District points to the singular nature of the Second Amendment’s preamble as an indication that the operative clause must be restricted or conditioned in some way by the prefatory language. However, the structure of the Second Amendment turns out to be not so unusual when we examine state constitutional provisions guaranteeing rights or restricting governmental power. It was quite common for prefatory language to state a principle of good government that was narrower than the operative language used to achieve it.
We think the Second Amendment was similarly structured. The prefatory language announcing the desirability of a well-regulated militia — even bearing in mind the breadth of the concept of a militia [which the court had earlier concluded ‘was a large segment of the population’ rather than just a government-selected National Guard-like subgroup -EV] — is narrower than the guarantee of an individual right to keep and bear arms. The Amendment does not protect ‘the right of militiamen to keep and bear arms,’ but rather ‘the right of the people.’ The operative clause, properly read, protects the ownership and use of weaponry beyond that needed to preserve the state militias….
[I]f the competent drafters of the Second Amendment had meant the right to be limited to the protection of state militias, it is hard to imagine that they would have chosen the language they did. We therefore take it as an expression of the drafters’ view that the people possessed a natural right to keep and bear arms, and that the preservation of the militia was the right’s most salient political benefit —” and thus the most appropriate to express in a political document.”
So today the Supreme Court thinks the Second Amendment means precisely what it says and they used original intent as their guide. I wish that they would apply the same standard to the rest of the document–especially the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
To claim that the Second Ammendment is for “the National Guard” doesn’t hold water. At the time of writing of the Constitution there was barely a standing army, let alone a national Guard or Reserve. In fact, the founding fathers weren’t big supporters of a big standing army. It was too expensive and too likely to become a tool of an out of control central government. You know, like we have now. The Militia were the male citizens. Since nearly all Americans were armed they were expected to protect home and hearth on their own. I am amazed that judges have overturned the DC gun ban. The lawyers of the left will gather like flies to fight this and if they get it to the Supreme Court will likely win. At this point with the decision from those champions of the left, the Supreme Court, they will turn on the rest of us. For the Federal Government to get the complete control over the population that they have been aiming for these many years they must disarm us. The type of citizen who is a legal bearer of arms is much more unlikely to go along with governmental control than the average sheep out there who claims to be an American.
http://www.secondamendmentdocumentary.com/
At this link, information on a recently-produced DVD documentary on the right to arms, in which many American legal scholars are quoted as stating that the right is individual, not collective.
Also interesting is the idea that the right to arms is crucial in preventing genocides.
To Ms. Grant: A point well made. It has been estimated that the victims of genocide in the 20th century alone number in the tens if not hundreds of millions. Nearly all were disarmed by their governments ahead of time. It’s amazing that the institution that wants you disarmed is often the one who lines up to kill you. Can’t happen here? Why not?
As some of the professors in my documentary observe: perhaps in theory it is possible to commit genocide against an armed population. In practice, it is sufficiently difficult and risky that it has never been tried.
There are 2 huge things that the gun control people do not want to hear. First, and this is like fingernails on a chalkboard to them, is the 25 year comparison of crime in Morton Grove Illinois, vs. Kennesaw Georgia. If you don’t know about the contrast of these 2 cities, I suggest that you study them. Morton Grove outlaws ALL firearms, and Kennesaw requires every household to own a firearm for capable individuals of course. Every single year, Kennesaw’s crime is down, and Morton Groves is up. And mind you, Kennesaw is very, very close to one of the most violent cities in America…. Atlanta. Funny, how the word gets out about the fact that if you have the capablity to shoot back, it isn’t fun anymore to rob & rape & assault folks. The other ominous glaring fact that totally unravels the gun control freaks is that statistic whereby on every single day in the United States of America, literally thousands of violent or potentially violent crimes are thwarted sometimes by just the mere presense of a firearm, without a shot ever being fired. Martin Berrow