The people means individuals
In this spare time, Noah Seligman should try reading the Constitution:
The Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms. We have a “well regulated militia .” It’s called the National Guard. No one will take away the right to own a gun, but we will enforce responsibility. The assault weapons ban contributed to eight years of declining crime rates. Letting it expire was a failure of leadership.
Apparently, the second amendment established the National Guard 130 years after the second amendment was ratified.
October 25th, 2004 at 9:09 am
And unlike the rest of the Constitution, in the 2A “the people” was used in a socialist collective sense decades before the first forms of socialism were invented, and about a century before the Marxians started twisting words this way.
I’m trying to get a meme started here – only socialists (whether of the Swedish, communist, or Nazi sort) would interpret “the people” as a collective, and therefore anyone who interprets the 2A as not protecting an individual right is a…
October 25th, 2004 at 11:58 am
Typically, the “collective rights” folk will argue that the Second Amendment originally protected the state militias against being disarmed by the federal government. Now that they’ve been supplanted by the National Guard, however, even that argument doesn’t work, since other parts of the constitution give the federal government plenary powers to arm the military, disarm it, discipline it, or whatever. So a plain English translation of the collective rights interpretation would be “Congress shall not disarm its own military, unless it wants to.”
October 25th, 2004 at 12:09 pm
Also, and this is from memory, haven’t the courts ruled that the NG is under federal control and not a state army. Didn’t some governor refuse to send his state’s units to ‘nam or something?
October 25th, 2004 at 2:16 pm
I doubt that it would even take a court ruling to decide that, although there may have been a technicality as to how much power a federal statute grants to the governor, or what conditions have to be met to put the NG under direct federal control. They don’t call it the “National” Guard for nothing.
October 25th, 2004 at 3:18 pm
State militias do no more than a National Militia to preserve the free condition (or, as expressed in the 2nd Amendment, the free “state”). That is why it is the people (ruled consistantly by the SCOTUS to be individuals) whose right is not to be infringed.