A voter-approved Oregon gun control law violates the state constitution, a judge ruled Tuesday, continuing to block it from taking effect and casting fresh doubt over the future of the embattled measure.
The law requires people to undergo a criminal background check and complete a gun safety training course in order to obtain a permit to buy a firearm. It also bans high-capacity magazines.
The plaintiffs in the federal case, which include the Oregon Firearms Federation, have appealed the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case could potentially go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Well Regulated and militia back then both meant something entirely different from what it means today, that’s a large part of the problem.
The founders wanted a well armed and equipped population that could be called up for defense at a moments notice.
If you find that confusing, read the line about “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”.
I love seeing this argument because nothing makes it clearer that your views aren’t the product of any kind of critical thought, you’ve just been handed an excuse to keep doing what you want and you’ve accepted it with no further questions.
Because even if we just let you have “well regulated means operating well, not subject to regulations”, gun-owners in America still don’t meet that definition.
What good is a militia member who can’t demonstrate basic competence and safety with their weapon, isn’t required to meet any standard of fitness or miltary training, that potentially has a history of punching their wife?
And of course, the founding fathers were absolutely aware of this problem.
Washington spoke of his attempt to recruit from local militias by saying “you may, with almost equal success, attempt to raize the Dead to Life again, as the force of this country”.
In a letter to his nephew he stated “I am wearied to death all day with a variety of perplexing circumstances, disturbed at the conduct of the militia, whose behavior and want of discipline has done great injury to the other troops, who never had officers, except in a few instances, worth the bread they eat.”
So tell us more about how “this is what the founding fathers wanted”.
Tell me how Washington was involved in writing the 2nd Amendment… Oh… Riiiight… It was Madison and he describes his reasoning in Federalist 46:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed46.asp
“a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.”
He proposes a standing army no larger than 1/100 of the population or 1/25 able bodied men.
Compared to the militia which is literally “everybody else”.
More on the history of it here:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Second-Amendment
Aww, don’t be shy, tell us what his motivations were. It was to keep us safe from tyranny right?
Nope, he was concerned Congress couldn’t be relied on to arm the militas they used for slave control. He wasn’t even shy about it. Is this something that’s still important to you? How many school shootings would you say its worth?
Of course, he also spoke of how “An armed and trained militia is the firmest bulwark of republics”, so I guess you’ve only got a small pool of quotes to choose from where he doesn’t undermine your case.
But hey, if “well regulated” means “able to murder unarmed black people”, the pro-gun community really has built a well regulated militia, because some far-right fuckstain does that almost every month.
Edit: Oh look, here’s a well regulated militia now.
Oh, it was VERY much in fear of slave rebellions. That’s an established fact:
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers-the-racist-roots-of-the-2nd-amendment
“It was in response to the concerns coming out of the Virginia ratification convention for the Constitution, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason, that a militia that was controlled solely by the federal government would not be there to protect the slave owners from an enslaved uprising. And … James Madison crafted that language in order to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias — and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts. … The Second Amendment really provided the cover, the assurances that Patrick Henry and George Mason needed, that the militias would not be controlled by the federal government, but that they would be controlled by the states and at the beck and call of the states to be able to put down these uprisings.”
Well… I say “established”, there’s apparently still some debate:
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2022/09/GT-GLPP220045.pdf
"As Bogus concedes, no direct evidence supports the thesis. Instead, historical fact refutes it. The predecessor of the Amendment was the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which protected the right of Protestants to have arms. England had no domestic slave population. Beginning in 1776, some states adopted bills of rights that recognized the right to bear arms. Three of them were Northern states that had abolished slavery. When the federal Constitution was proposed in 1787, it was criticized for lacking a bill of rights. Demands for recognition of the right to bear arms emanated from antifederalists, including abolitionists, in the Northern states, while several Southern states ratifed with-out demanding amendments at all.
New Hampshire, whose bill of rights was read to abolish slavery, was the first state to ratify the Constitution and demand a prohibition on the disarming of citizens. The Virginia ratifying convention followed. While some supported an amendment stating that the states could maintain militias if Congress neglected the same, support for the militia was largely tied to rejection of a standing army, not maintenance of slavery. The right to bear arms was proposed in a declaration of rights that had nothing to do with slavery. New York ratifed next, also proposing recognition of the arms right.
James Madison introduced what became the Second Amendment in the first federal Congress, and it worked its way through both Houses without any hint of concern for the interests of slavery. Congress rejected the separate structural amendments that included a proposal for more state powers over the militia.
Rhode Island, the last of the original thirteen states to ratify the Constitution, demanded both recognition of the right to bear arms and abolition of the slave trade. Vermont was then admitted as a state—it had abolished slavery and recognized the right to bear arms in its 1777 Constitution—and it now ratifed the Second Amendment.
Contrary to Bogus, no secret conspiracy was afoot to make “the right of the people” to bear arms an instrument of slavery. Instead, the abolitionists, and then the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, would use those words to show that “the people” meant just that. African Americans were people and were thus entitled to all of the rights of Americans. The failure at the Founding was not that the rights of citizens were accorded to whites, but that these rights were not accorded to all persons without regard to race. By its very terms, the Second Amendment is a bulwark for the protection of the fundamental rights of all of the people."
Still needed to be regulated so they saw a need to make sure that they well trained etc. That didn’t want just anyone to be armed. Today they don’t care if you’re crazy as shit and threatened to kill loads of school kids. The right wants no regulation at all.
I swear we will get this issue fixed soon as one of these nuts start targeting the alt right and GOP.
They did want everone to be armed, that’s why it’s a right of the people. :)
No, it’s a right because it was deemed necessary to the security of a free state. But the individual right to bear arms was meant to be as part of a “well-regulated” militia, not simply as “everyone can have whatever weapon they want.”
Even our current very loose and I would argue inaccurate interpretation of the 2nd does not contemplate the idea that private citizens should be allowed to own tanks or heavy machine guns or SAMs without a ton of oversight.
And of course none of this touches on the elephant in the room which is the rather obvious fact that if we take originalism seriously, then we have to concede that Madison’s conception of the 2nd as being “necessary to the security of a free state,” no longer applies since he was specifically concerned with large-scale civil insurrections such as Shay’s Rebellion or slave uprisings, and we know very well that militias can play no role in putting down such incidents in a modern context, and to the contrary, generally only serve to exacerbate tensions and escalate violence.
That’s a common misreading of the 2nd amendment. You need to get a little further:
“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The people, not the militias.
This is why the Supreme Court ruled in 2008:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/
“Private citizens have the right under the Second Amendment to possess an ordinary type of weapon and use it for lawful, historically established situations such as self-defense in a home, even when there is no relationship to a local militia.”
https://truthout.org/articles/the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery/
Oh, I personally agree, but apparently that’s up for debate:
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2022/09/GT-GLPP220045.pdf
"As Bogus concedes, no direct evidence supports the thesis. Instead, historical fact refutes it. The predecessor of the Amendment was the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which protected the right of Protestants to have arms. England had no domestic slave population. Beginning in 1776, some states adopted bills of rights that recognized the right to bear arms. Three of them were Northern states that had abolished slavery. When the federal Constitution was proposed in 1787, it was criticized for lacking a bill of rights. Demands for recognition of the right to bear arms emanated from antifederalists, including abolitionists, in the Northern states, while several Southern states ratifed with-out demanding amendments at all.
New Hampshire, whose bill of rights was read to abolish slavery, was the first state to ratify the Constitution and demand a prohibition on the disarming of citizens. The Virginia ratifying convention followed. While some supported an amendment stating that the states could maintain militias if Congress neglected the same, support for the militia was largely tied to rejection of a standing army, not maintenance of slavery. The right to bear arms was proposed in a declaration of rights that had nothing to do with slavery. New York ratifed next, also proposing recognition of the arms right.
James Madison introduced what became the Second Amendment in the first federal Congress, and it worked its way through both Houses without any hint of concern for the interests of slavery. Congress rejected the separate structural amendments that included a proposal for more state powers over the militia.
Rhode Island, the last of the original thirteen states to ratify the Constitution, demanded both recognition of the right to bear arms and abolition of the slave trade. Vermont was then admitted as a state—it had abolished slavery and recognized the right to bear arms in its 1777 Constitution—and it now ratifed the Second Amendment.
Contrary to Bogus, no secret conspiracy was afoot to make “the right of the people” to bear arms an instrument of slavery. Instead, the abolitionists, and then the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, would use those words to show that “the people” meant just that. African Americans were people and were thus entitled to all of the rights of Americans. The failure at the Founding was not that the rights of citizens were accorded to whites, but that these rights were not accorded to all persons without regard to race. By its very terms, the Second Amendment is a bulwark for the protection of the fundamental rights of all of the people."
And that need was eliminated when we formed a standing army
Nope. The standing army is prevented from acting inside the United States. It’s the Posse Comitatus Act.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
That’s what the national guard is for.
We don’t need a militia
The National Guard pre-dates the 2nd Amendment by 155 years, if the founders really felt a militia wasn’t necessary, they would not have supported an arms bearing public.
https://www.nationalguard.mil/about-the-guard/how-we-began/