Posts
Celebrating All The Bad Ideas in American History, Politics
and Economics
[Editor’s note: There
are innumerable writings about how great America is and what wonderful
things have been done in this nation.
This is one of an irregular series whose topics are all of the things America has
gotten wrong.]
The U. S.
Amendment II
A well regulated Militia,
being necessary to the security of a free
State
Now the quarrel with the 2nd Amendment here is not about
the right to have guns. In America that
right is so embedded in the national psyche that it would be impossible to
eradicate. It would be nice if guns were
much better regulated, like getting them out of the hands of crazy people and
getting automatic weapons out of everyone’s hands, but that is not the subject
at hand.
No what the issue here is the language of the 2nd
Amendment. It is gibberish. It is meaningless. No one knows what a ‘well regulated Militia”
is or is supposed to be. How did the
Founding Fathers want Militias to be regulated?
And does the right to keep and bear arms relate to a Militia or is it
just a right in general. And what exactly is a Militia? And does the term "free State" refers to the individual states or the nation as a whole?
In short, Madison and Monroe and all those other great men
really blew this one. If they wanted
states to have armies, they should have said so. If they wanted private citizens to have an
unlimited and unregulated access to every gun type imaginable, they should have
said so. Instead they left the nation
with an unintelligible mess. And the
result, automatic assault weapons litter the nation and we all have to endure
the NRA.
The 2nd Amendment – Another chapter in the Annals
of Idiocy in America .
Only the Second Amendment contains a preface ("A well regulated Militia ...") before it describes a right. The other amendments jump right in ("Congress shall make no law ...").
ReplyDeleteThe Framers likely added this preface because they thought bearing arms should have something to do with service in a "well regulated Militia." As you write, we don't know what a "Militia" is, but the Framers apparently thought it should be "well regulated." Well regulated! That means government restricting who does what with their arms. Again, nothing else in the Bill of Rights even hints at "regulation."
The first time the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment restricted states' rights to regulate guns was in 2010 - 219 years after the Bill of Rights' adoption. It took that long for the Supreme Court to assemble five justices who were so blind to the words on the Constitution's page.
The Bill of Rights is full of "shall nots" that really mean "usually shall not." The Second Amendment is badly written, but at least it makes some effort to provide context for the right to bear arms. It looks like that effort wasn't good enough.