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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Well we could stop ignoring the first half, the "well regulated Militia" and "security of a free State" part.

That clause doesn't sound like they mean "unlimited guns for all".

Using the context before the comma, the "people" clearly means polis, as in society, not as in the "every human with a pulse" way we use it today.

The word "person" is used twice in the BoR, both times referring to individuals. The other 3 uses of "people" clearly refer to the collective polis.

This distinction, as people not merely being a plural of person, is laid bare in the fourth amendment: "the right of the people to be secure in their persons", that only makes sense if "people" means the abstract composition.

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Your first argument is wrong: http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/common.htm. (Also, nobody should be trying to parse the bill of rights as miserly as possible. There’s lots of debatable things in the Constitution. What does the commerce clause mean? What are the exceptions to the freedom of “speech?” But the combination of clarity of this provision and placement in a place in the constitution where a full reading should be encouraged this not one of those things.)

Your second example actually proves the opposite. In that context, “your person” is not referring to “you, a person” but “your body.” So the amendment is talking about the right of individual people to be secure from trespass upon their bodies.

When the Constitution refers to people as a collective, it capitalizes the term: “We the People.”

Your example also contradicts the use of “people” in the first amendment. (Unless you think the freedom of assembly is a collective right, than an individual right applying to groups of persons.) Same thing with the individual right to vote for senators in amendment 17.

What's your point? Every human with a pulse can't get a weapon. You have to be the right age and pass a background check. And in some states, go as far as provide evidence that your life is in potential danger and you need it for protection as well as a letter of recommendation from the local police chief.

It means the second amendment gives no individual right of gun ownership, at all. Zero, zilch, nada, nothing.

It's absolutely absent, it's not there. There is no right.

Perhaps there ought to be an individual right, but the second amendment doesn't have it.

The whole point is that the right to self-defense, which means the right to bear arms, pre-dates the Constitution and the formation of our nation. The 2nd Amendment only makes it clear that the government is not infringing upon the right which already exists.

For a deeper look at the issue dive into the positive rights vs. negative rights discussion which has been going on for ages. Sometimes it's phrased as positive vs negative liberty.

The short version, or my understanding of it, is negative rights means your rights were not given to you by your government, they are inherent, or given to you by God, or they are somehow a part of your very existence. This means your government can only take rights away from you but it doesn't have the power to ever grant you a right.

Positive rights on the other hand is the idea that rights are granted by your government. And since they are granted to you they may also be taken away.

Bingo. Only clarification I'd make is to this:

>This means your government can only take rights away from you but it doesn't have the power to ever grant you a right.

My understanding is that the government is unable to grant nor deny you the right, only infringe upon it. The right is always there by virtue of your existence, so it can only be infringed upon.

Right, I misspoke. Thank you. It's a subtle difference but the implications are massive.

For anybody following along (since daenz seems more informed than me already), the 9th Amendment and the discussions that led up to it flesh out the idea that the Bill of Rights merely guarantees that certain rights won't be infringed even though many other rights also exist but were not explicitly mentioned. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...)

The biggest modern example I can think of is the non-enumerated yet Constitutionally guaranteed (according to the Supreme Court) Right to Privacy which played a pivotal role in the Roe vs. Wade decision.

Your opinion appears to deviate from the legally accepted interpretation. Regardless of how we got here (per your other comment, about stacking the Court), people in charge disagree with you.

>Well we could stop ignoring the first half, the "well regulated Militia" and "security of a free State" part.

It's well established by SCOTUS that the 2A covers ownership of firearms unconnected to militia use:

>District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), is a landmark case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Second Amendment protects an individual's Right to keep and bear arms, unconnected with service in a militia, for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home, and that the District of Columbia's handgun ban and requirement that lawfully owned rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" violated this guarantee.

>They also noted that though the right to bear arms also helped preserve the citizen militia, "the activities [the Amendment] protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia." The court determined that handguns are "Arms" and concluded that thus they may not be banned by the District of Columbia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

Yes, that ruling is crazy. It took billions of dollars, decades of arm twisting, dozens of case attempts, and packing of the supreme court to get that because it's simply not there.

It was a crazy long hard won battle to make that sentence mean something it clearly and obviously doesn't.

We also can't just blindly defer to all supreme court rulings. They swap their opinions and contradict themselves quite a bit.

The truly crazy ruling was US v Miller [0], the case that is the foundation for essentially all gun regulation from the National Firearms Act onwards. A ruling where only the government presented an argument, because the defendant was in hiding after testifying against the rest of his gang.

> It was a crazy long hard won battle to make that sentence mean something it clearly and obviously doesn't.

I'd like "shall not be infringed" to have meaning again, thanks.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller

You may not like the ruling, but it is intellectually dishonest to spread misinformation about something that the highest court in the land has made very clear.

It's not intellectually dishonest. Most people know about that ruling already.

It certinally is. Please take a moment to listen to the decision:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/oyez.case-media.ogg/case_data/2007/...

Consider the future. We can print these. It's only going to get better. Are you going to ban non-DRM'd printers? Printer registration and therefore confiscation?

Weapons are the ultimate form of equality. Without them the strong rule the old and weak.

It's also the easiest way to tell if you live in a class system.

Just because I don't think the second amendment confers either rights or restrictions on individual gun ownership doesn't mean I'm against gun ownership.

Also degrees punishment or lack thereof for crimes differing by offender, is the easiest way to determine class, not whether consumers can acquire a specific class of objects.

That tells you to how well your system of law is functioning. It's rather moot if it's not premised on equal protection.

There is nothing more fundamental than preserving life. Whether a person, independent of social class, has the same rights to defend life and property is a hard dependency. The Freedmen are discussed in the audio file I linked above.

A collective well organized police state backed by public sentiment against someone with a 3D printed gun is no assurance of liberty.

I'm not anti gun but it's just salesmen hiding behind a noble sentiment. The only thing the NRA ever bans are generic after market add-ons which make cheap guns work like more expensive ones

A technology that reduces the profit margins of gun manufacturers, that's the quickly banned object.

People can buy what they want, whatever. The thing I actually don't like is marketers underhandedly trying to sell me things by waving a flag in my face.

Then people act like consuming a product somehow counteracts system upheaval, give me a break. Any strategic despot would get the gun owners to work for him through packing and cracking the party support and spin the tyranny as protecting liberty. Many gun owners would need very little convincing that they're "liberty defending foot soldiers". That's how this game plays out.

Making cheap guns work as well as expensive ones is unambigiously a good thing (you agree if I am reading your comment correctly).

GOA is a better org btw.

Sure. The important difference between us is I believe guns start and end as consumer goods.

All of the other things they serve are better handled through institutions and organizing.

The combinations of the two, organizations with guns, that becomes a much more plausible threat to peace and liberty because it affords an opportunity to exploit a power dynamic which could lead to tyranny.

Yielding to the wisdom of crowds with weapons mean that fear and threat become larger tools of society building than reflection, collaboration, listening, and creativity.

So ask the attacker to please pause 5+ min while you wait for the police? No, you want individuals to own effective weapons. Right?

It seems like you are pro-gun ownership, I'm not sure what your point is.

If you survey history, bad things are often preceeded by a segment of the population being disarmed.

Justice Antonin Scalia reads Heller(2008) for the majority: https://s3.amazonaws.com/oyez.case-media.ogg/case_data/2007/...

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2007/07-290

I take you've never tried to buy a weapon.

I encourage you to try, maybe take a firearms handling class, go to a range. Be informed about the thing you hate.

I've done all those things. My personal consumption history has nothing to do with the meaning of some words written 230 years ago.

Your deflection and presumptuous personal attacks doesn't change the words written on that parchment either.

I did not mean to "deflect", and I do apologize for presuming.

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