Text of the Second Amendment: "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."
I've always come at this from a scifi perspective. Especially after reading the federalist papers and continental congress arguments.
Arm everyone. Federally train no one. Make it a sport, a thing to do for fun. Engrain it into the culture and maintain any minimally required professional troops at the state level as trainers and tacticians. Never invade but always finish the fights.
Allow personal weapons in war, provide a minimum if needed for those poorer. Simply require a military caliber and tailor it to the conflict. People will buy what they need to in order to survive.
As for mechanized and complex systems, i think people would be surprised at what the private citizen would maintain themselves, should such clubs exist. I don't know how a navy would work, though I suspect city funded ships and crews could be a thing. The point is decentralized power and a refusal to play the federal game... the federal game which we finally utterly lost after 1895 after more or less gradually losing the philosophical, political, and economic fight for 125 years.
Again, all my arguments might as well be scifi, but the point of our constitution was never to be able to invade others but to make it impossible to be invaded.
We were founded by libertarians not socialist democratic warhawks.
I've read that there was much resistance the formation of a US military at West Point due to the standing army issue. The justification is that most of them would do a short term of service, then as civilians become the source of expertise for the militias.
Sun Tzu “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics…”
Alexander the Great “My logisticians are a humorless lot … they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.”
Napoleon Bonaparte “an army marches on its stomach”
Attributed to General Foch “Behind every great leader there was an even greater logistician.”
Earnst King, “The war has been variously termed a war of production and a war of machines. Whatever else it is, so far as the United States is concerned, it is a war of logistics.”
Attributed to General Omar Bradley “Amateurs talk strategy, Professionals talk logistics”
“Leaders win through logistics. Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics.”
– Tom Peters – Rule #3: Leadership Is Confusing As Hell, Fast Company, March 2001
A lot of people have said this, Hannibal proved it during the 2nd Punic War, you've totally overlooked it.
So who is going to run your POL points? Who is going to run your transportation companies? Medical evac? Who is properly trained to safely run your Class V supply chains? How do you get your Class I up to the troops? This isn't some midnight re-run of Red Dawn.
Secondly, history shows us that militias have one tactic. They stand, fire one volley, then run. You put them behind a fortified line, or maybe in a city, they sometimes do slightly better (see the Volkssturm) but through out history it has been "run away'. (This is so true that the Americans used this fact to win The Battle of The Cowpens during the revolutionary war). That's because "Farmers with guns' aren't psychologically conditioned to being shot at, certainly not being shot at by cannon, and trained troops. ( See First Bull Run, July 21, 1861)
Not only that, your people aren't trained. The Roman Empire was built by the Legions, and the Legions were able to take on forces that heavily outnumbered them. At the Battle of Watling Street they totally crushed Boudicca's army that was 20 to 30 times their size, because they were trained. Trained to fight as a unit. Boudicca's mob may have been made up of skilled warriors, but they fought as individuals. That's how warrior cultures work, like the Sioux or Cheyenne, it's all about individual bravery and individual strength and individual glory. The Romans were a professional army with a command structure and a chain of command and military discipline and the men were trained to fight like a unit. That's why they won. That's why they almost always won. In fact the reason the Romans lost at Teutoburg Forest was because Arminius came up with a way to force them to fight as individuals, and prevent them from fighting as a team.
If your militia ever came across a professional unit, you wouldn't be the heroic WOLVERINES! you'd wind up playing the Iraqis in a musical version of The Battle of 73 Easting.
Apparently, the Viet Cong didn't know any of that. Nor did the Aghani Taliban.
But the Framers of the US Constitution must have been aware of the thesis you've presented. That's why they specified a "well-REGULATED militia" in the Second Amendment, and why they specifically granted Congress the power to "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress."
Note: Many members of any American militia would be military veterans.
But as Justice Scalia correctly pointed out in Heller:
Unlike armies and navies, which Congress is given the power to create (“to raise … Armies”; “to provide … a Navy,” Art. I, §8, cls. 12–13), the militia is assumed by Article I already to be in existence. Congress is given the power to “provide for calling forth the militia,” §8, cl. 15; and the power not to create, but to “organiz[e]” it—and not to organize “a” militia, which is what one would expect if the militia were to be a federal creation, but to organize “the” militia, connoting a body already in existence, ibid., cl. 16. This is fully consistent with the ordinary definition of the militia as all able-bodied men. From that pool, Congress has plenary power to organize the units that will make up an effective fighting force. That is what Congress did in the first militia Act, which specified that “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states, resident therein, who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.” Act of May 8, 1792, 1 Stat. 271. To be sure, Congress need not conscript every able-bodied man into the militia, because nothing in Article I suggests that in exercising its power to organize, discipline, and arm the militia, Congress must focus upon the entire body. Although the militia consists of all able-bodied men, the federally organized militia may consist of a subset of them.
Finally, the adjective “well-regulated” implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training. See Johnson 1619 (“Regulate”: “To adjust by rule or method”); Rawle 121–122; cf. Va. Declaration of Rights §13 (1776), in 7 Thorpe 3812, 3814 (referring to “a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms”).
Bottom line: Whether or not the Constitution's requirements are militarily optimal is irrelevant with respect to its correct interpretation. It means what it means. If you think it could be improved, you are free to propose one or more Amendments. I have to give credit to Governor Newsom for recognizing that fact publicly with respect to the Second Amendment.
You are good at pulling quotes from men that actually did something. But can tell you’ve never experienced physical combat where your life was in some peril. It’s funny because you didn’t mention any quotes from Von Clausewitz, like the one about the will to fight. Go and put yourself in some physical danger to harden yourself.
Ignorance is an opportunity for learning. You chose nursing for a career, for which I applaud you and your dedication, so I assume you were mostly ignorant of nursing protocols before being trained for your career.
Firearms present a similar opportunity when approached by those ignorant of their safe storage, proper usage and maintenance. I urge you to follow your newly appreciated need by finding someone you trust to answer your questions and explain to you what you need to know about them.
I suggest paying to go to a beginner’s firearms course. It would have saved me a lot of time and ammo probably. I’ve eventually learned more and found friends that taught me some good tips as well. YouTube is a good resource if you know which channels to check out. But there’s a lot of guys that think they’re WAY better than they are with their guns, and I’ll see them out at the range with their wives and girlfriends and they’re just awful at teaching. And I know this will sound generic and garner me a lot of hate but most professional instructors would agree, the Glock 19 is never a bad choice for a one gun does all choice.
OK so give a thought to the NFA enacted in 1934 then point me to where I can go buy a select-fire M4 please. Then I'd like to add on a suppressor w/o paying the $200 for the BATFE to issue a tax stamp so I can use it when necessary, maybe to assist in repelling an invasion.
I don't need a gun either, or a suppressor for that matter, but I like having both... just in case, you know?
I really enjoyed this post, but for me it is very simple: at that time of creating the 2cnd amendment, the Union trusted Congress and the citizens to be vigilant concerning the freedoms we fought and died for. However, we as a whole are so divided now and it is well established that a house divided against itself can not stand (house can be replaced with country or nation and still be accurate). Who can you truly trust? There has been so much lying going on without any justice or accountability. I would not trust any militia at this point. I am sure this is the outcome that the globalist in charge knew and wanted. People with arms, sawed off shotgun or not, instinctively will stand and defend themselves, their family and hard-earned property from invaders of their rights with what ever tactics or arms gets the job done. My fear is that, because of the trust issue with our now rogue govt., we like-minded citizens could find ourselves fighting each other for lack of a united platform. We are very good at talking about the issues but not good at putting any action with our talk. God bless.
i think while supremely aggravating and taxing on all systems... known and unknown... this experiment has yielded the appropriate catalytic and/or piezoelectric results, that it set out to achieve... an understanding of nuances... and the rippling effects of choices and their consequences...
Someone invented a gun like a gatlin gun, 100 years before Gatlin did. Don’t (democrats and other communists) give me this crap that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t include military grade firearms. It absolutely does.
Of course you’re one of those tools that think because you agree with a politically twisted piece of legislation handed down from the bench that it’s constitutional. Fucking insanity dude you need help
Shall not be infringed. That's all that matters. Those four words. And there is a whole lot of infringing going on now. Every "gun law" or "regulation" or "requirement" is completely unconstitutional.
Scalia did not really address the fact that Miller had already defined what weapons were covered by the Second Amendment. Namely, those useful for national defense. Nowhere in Heller did the Court overturn that holding in Miller. If you think otherwise, cite the precise words to that effect from Heller (or from Bruen.)
As for the "in common use" test: The weapons used by our military (or their equivalents from other manufacturers) are in common use by the militaries of the world. Note also that the test is not "in common use" OR "not dangerous," but rather "in common use" AND "not dangerous." Military-grade weapons are safe enough to permit soldiers to bear them.
Hate to burn down your strawman here, but at no point did I ever claim that Heller overturned Miller.
I simply stated that Justice Scalia (who did NOT get his law degree out of cereal box) had completely outlined the current LAW with regard to firearms ownership in the U.S.A. I had assumed that you were interested in knowing the ACTUAL LAW on the subject, not just spinning off some sort of personal legal fan fiction.
The Constitution is the actual law. Supreme Court opinions are not: They are only interpretations of the law. They can be quite wrong...which is why courts (including SCOTUS) occasionally overturn their prior opinions. The fact you can't tell the difference between an exposition of the actual law versus the current highest-status interpretation of it is YOUR problem, not mine.
That said, nothing that Scalia wrote in that opinion contradicts anything I've said.
What I think they are getting at is that practically speaking, it doesn't matter how the law should be applied or interpreted, only how it currently is.
And as far as I know the American government isn't welcoming to the use of modern weapons like machine guns or armoured personel carriers by civilians.
Now a country where every single person has a bulletproof vehicle with a high caliber machine gun mounted on it ready to go sounds very scary to invade let alone tyrranise. So I can absolutely see why foreign agents would want to dismantle it.
I think the problem is that you let your media and education system be infiltrated and corrupted so now everyone is brainwashed. If you wanted to reverse this problem, you'd need to switch over to homeschooling and train people to recognise propaganda and construct their own guns.
For instance, the so-called "battle bus" can be made without too much technical skill, essentially just welding steel plates to a bus and compensating for the weight.
You're essentially correct, depending on what you mean by "it doesn't matter." If you mean that the courts will rule against you, that's correct. But that's not the only way to view it. If that were the only way that we ever viewed things, there would be no United States. Nor would most of the advancements and improvements in law and governance throughout human history have ever been made.
I've always come at this from a scifi perspective. Especially after reading the federalist papers and continental congress arguments.
Arm everyone. Federally train no one. Make it a sport, a thing to do for fun. Engrain it into the culture and maintain any minimally required professional troops at the state level as trainers and tacticians. Never invade but always finish the fights.
Allow personal weapons in war, provide a minimum if needed for those poorer. Simply require a military caliber and tailor it to the conflict. People will buy what they need to in order to survive.
As for mechanized and complex systems, i think people would be surprised at what the private citizen would maintain themselves, should such clubs exist. I don't know how a navy would work, though I suspect city funded ships and crews could be a thing. The point is decentralized power and a refusal to play the federal game... the federal game which we finally utterly lost after 1895 after more or less gradually losing the philosophical, political, and economic fight for 125 years.
Again, all my arguments might as well be scifi, but the point of our constitution was never to be able to invade others but to make it impossible to be invaded.
We were founded by libertarians not socialist democratic warhawks.
I've read that there was much resistance the formation of a US military at West Point due to the standing army issue. The justification is that most of them would do a short term of service, then as civilians become the source of expertise for the militias.
Sun Tzu “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics…”
Alexander the Great “My logisticians are a humorless lot … they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.”
Napoleon Bonaparte “an army marches on its stomach”
Attributed to General Foch “Behind every great leader there was an even greater logistician.”
Earnst King, “The war has been variously termed a war of production and a war of machines. Whatever else it is, so far as the United States is concerned, it is a war of logistics.”
Attributed to General Omar Bradley “Amateurs talk strategy, Professionals talk logistics”
“Leaders win through logistics. Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics.”
– Tom Peters – Rule #3: Leadership Is Confusing As Hell, Fast Company, March 2001
A lot of people have said this, Hannibal proved it during the 2nd Punic War, you've totally overlooked it.
So who is going to run your POL points? Who is going to run your transportation companies? Medical evac? Who is properly trained to safely run your Class V supply chains? How do you get your Class I up to the troops? This isn't some midnight re-run of Red Dawn.
Secondly, history shows us that militias have one tactic. They stand, fire one volley, then run. You put them behind a fortified line, or maybe in a city, they sometimes do slightly better (see the Volkssturm) but through out history it has been "run away'. (This is so true that the Americans used this fact to win The Battle of The Cowpens during the revolutionary war). That's because "Farmers with guns' aren't psychologically conditioned to being shot at, certainly not being shot at by cannon, and trained troops. ( See First Bull Run, July 21, 1861)
Not only that, your people aren't trained. The Roman Empire was built by the Legions, and the Legions were able to take on forces that heavily outnumbered them. At the Battle of Watling Street they totally crushed Boudicca's army that was 20 to 30 times their size, because they were trained. Trained to fight as a unit. Boudicca's mob may have been made up of skilled warriors, but they fought as individuals. That's how warrior cultures work, like the Sioux or Cheyenne, it's all about individual bravery and individual strength and individual glory. The Romans were a professional army with a command structure and a chain of command and military discipline and the men were trained to fight like a unit. That's why they won. That's why they almost always won. In fact the reason the Romans lost at Teutoburg Forest was because Arminius came up with a way to force them to fight as individuals, and prevent them from fighting as a team.
If your militia ever came across a professional unit, you wouldn't be the heroic WOLVERINES! you'd wind up playing the Iraqis in a musical version of The Battle of 73 Easting.
Apparently, the Viet Cong didn't know any of that. Nor did the Aghani Taliban.
But the Framers of the US Constitution must have been aware of the thesis you've presented. That's why they specified a "well-REGULATED militia" in the Second Amendment, and why they specifically granted Congress the power to "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress."
Note: Many members of any American militia would be military veterans.
But as Justice Scalia correctly pointed out in Heller:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unlike armies and navies, which Congress is given the power to create (“to raise … Armies”; “to provide … a Navy,” Art. I, §8, cls. 12–13), the militia is assumed by Article I already to be in existence. Congress is given the power to “provide for calling forth the militia,” §8, cl. 15; and the power not to create, but to “organiz[e]” it—and not to organize “a” militia, which is what one would expect if the militia were to be a federal creation, but to organize “the” militia, connoting a body already in existence, ibid., cl. 16. This is fully consistent with the ordinary definition of the militia as all able-bodied men. From that pool, Congress has plenary power to organize the units that will make up an effective fighting force. That is what Congress did in the first militia Act, which specified that “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states, resident therein, who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.” Act of May 8, 1792, 1 Stat. 271. To be sure, Congress need not conscript every able-bodied man into the militia, because nothing in Article I suggests that in exercising its power to organize, discipline, and arm the militia, Congress must focus upon the entire body. Although the militia consists of all able-bodied men, the federally organized militia may consist of a subset of them.
Finally, the adjective “well-regulated” implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training. See Johnson 1619 (“Regulate”: “To adjust by rule or method”); Rawle 121–122; cf. Va. Declaration of Rights §13 (1776), in 7 Thorpe 3812, 3814 (referring to “a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms”).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bottom line: Whether or not the Constitution's requirements are militarily optimal is irrelevant with respect to its correct interpretation. It means what it means. If you think it could be improved, you are free to propose one or more Amendments. I have to give credit to Governor Newsom for recognizing that fact publicly with respect to the Second Amendment.
You are good at pulling quotes from men that actually did something. But can tell you’ve never experienced physical combat where your life was in some peril. It’s funny because you didn’t mention any quotes from Von Clausewitz, like the one about the will to fight. Go and put yourself in some physical danger to harden yourself.
Yes, I am gun ignorant. Choosing nursing as my career, I have never felt like I needed a gun until recently. Thank you for educating us on this fact.
Ignorance is an opportunity for learning. You chose nursing for a career, for which I applaud you and your dedication, so I assume you were mostly ignorant of nursing protocols before being trained for your career.
Firearms present a similar opportunity when approached by those ignorant of their safe storage, proper usage and maintenance. I urge you to follow your newly appreciated need by finding someone you trust to answer your questions and explain to you what you need to know about them.
I suggest paying to go to a beginner’s firearms course. It would have saved me a lot of time and ammo probably. I’ve eventually learned more and found friends that taught me some good tips as well. YouTube is a good resource if you know which channels to check out. But there’s a lot of guys that think they’re WAY better than they are with their guns, and I’ll see them out at the range with their wives and girlfriends and they’re just awful at teaching. And I know this will sound generic and garner me a lot of hate but most professional instructors would agree, the Glock 19 is never a bad choice for a one gun does all choice.
When they tell you you don't need a gun is when you need one.
OK so give a thought to the NFA enacted in 1934 then point me to where I can go buy a select-fire M4 please. Then I'd like to add on a suppressor w/o paying the $200 for the BATFE to issue a tax stamp so I can use it when necessary, maybe to assist in repelling an invasion.
I don't need a gun either, or a suppressor for that matter, but I like having both... just in case, you know?
I really enjoyed this post, but for me it is very simple: at that time of creating the 2cnd amendment, the Union trusted Congress and the citizens to be vigilant concerning the freedoms we fought and died for. However, we as a whole are so divided now and it is well established that a house divided against itself can not stand (house can be replaced with country or nation and still be accurate). Who can you truly trust? There has been so much lying going on without any justice or accountability. I would not trust any militia at this point. I am sure this is the outcome that the globalist in charge knew and wanted. People with arms, sawed off shotgun or not, instinctively will stand and defend themselves, their family and hard-earned property from invaders of their rights with what ever tactics or arms gets the job done. My fear is that, because of the trust issue with our now rogue govt., we like-minded citizens could find ourselves fighting each other for lack of a united platform. We are very good at talking about the issues but not good at putting any action with our talk. God bless.
i think while supremely aggravating and taxing on all systems... known and unknown... this experiment has yielded the appropriate catalytic and/or piezoelectric results, that it set out to achieve... an understanding of nuances... and the rippling effects of choices and their consequences...
Someone invented a gun like a gatlin gun, 100 years before Gatlin did. Don’t (democrats and other communists) give me this crap that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t include military grade firearms. It absolutely does.
Of course you’re one of those tools that think because you agree with a politically twisted piece of legislation handed down from the bench that it’s constitutional. Fucking insanity dude you need help
Shall not be infringed. That's all that matters. Those four words. And there is a whole lot of infringing going on now. Every "gun law" or "regulation" or "requirement" is completely unconstitutional.
Interesting
In 1776 a musket was a military grade weapon.
Dude, this was thoroughly and completely covered, in great detail, in Justice Scalia's majority opinion for D.C. v Heller. 554 U.S. 570 (2008) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/
You might also be interested in this. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=13638801134672616502&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=2003
Scalia did not really address the fact that Miller had already defined what weapons were covered by the Second Amendment. Namely, those useful for national defense. Nowhere in Heller did the Court overturn that holding in Miller. If you think otherwise, cite the precise words to that effect from Heller (or from Bruen.)
As for the "in common use" test: The weapons used by our military (or their equivalents from other manufacturers) are in common use by the militaries of the world. Note also that the test is not "in common use" OR "not dangerous," but rather "in common use" AND "not dangerous." Military-grade weapons are safe enough to permit soldiers to bear them.
Hate to burn down your strawman here, but at no point did I ever claim that Heller overturned Miller.
I simply stated that Justice Scalia (who did NOT get his law degree out of cereal box) had completely outlined the current LAW with regard to firearms ownership in the U.S.A. I had assumed that you were interested in knowing the ACTUAL LAW on the subject, not just spinning off some sort of personal legal fan fiction.
I apologize for my mistake.
The Constitution is the actual law. Supreme Court opinions are not: They are only interpretations of the law. They can be quite wrong...which is why courts (including SCOTUS) occasionally overturn their prior opinions. The fact you can't tell the difference between an exposition of the actual law versus the current highest-status interpretation of it is YOUR problem, not mine.
That said, nothing that Scalia wrote in that opinion contradicts anything I've said.
What I think they are getting at is that practically speaking, it doesn't matter how the law should be applied or interpreted, only how it currently is.
And as far as I know the American government isn't welcoming to the use of modern weapons like machine guns or armoured personel carriers by civilians.
Now a country where every single person has a bulletproof vehicle with a high caliber machine gun mounted on it ready to go sounds very scary to invade let alone tyrranise. So I can absolutely see why foreign agents would want to dismantle it.
I think the problem is that you let your media and education system be infiltrated and corrupted so now everyone is brainwashed. If you wanted to reverse this problem, you'd need to switch over to homeschooling and train people to recognise propaganda and construct their own guns.
For instance, the so-called "battle bus" can be made without too much technical skill, essentially just welding steel plates to a bus and compensating for the weight.
You're essentially correct, depending on what you mean by "it doesn't matter." If you mean that the courts will rule against you, that's correct. But that's not the only way to view it. If that were the only way that we ever viewed things, there would be no United States. Nor would most of the advancements and improvements in law and governance throughout human history have ever been made.
In 1791, a musket was a "military grade" weapon.