Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

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The Federalist papers are not, as I recall, crystal clear on this issue (that is, what "well-regulated" means". If anything, they say the opposite.

From "Concerning the Militia":

"To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss"

This pretty clearly carries the implication that being "well-regulated" is more than just well-equipped.

It is, however, clear that the intention was to continue the policy of citizens bearing arms, even treating that as an implicit part of the culture of the time. Madison says, in "The Influence of the State and Federal Governments Compared", as an offhand remark, "Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, ...", and in comparison to Europe, it is expected that Americans can be trusted with guns: "Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."

Here is a decent list of quotes from founders: https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/the-founding-fathers-expl...

Notably...

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined…. The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.” – Patrick Henry, Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1778

“The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.” – Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788

I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.” – George Mason, Address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 4, 1788

“The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” – Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book (quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria), 1774-1776

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.” – Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776

Be careful with lists of quotes like this. Go back and examine the full context of the text and what the text was being written for. I have in many cases followed up on such quotes and found that the surrounding text made them mean something entirely different or sometimes even the opposite.

Case in point: when Ben Franklin argued "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.", he was actually arguing for the authority of the Federal government to tax the states in order to fund a frontier defense against Native American raids[0, 1], not making some general crypto-minarchist statement about the dangers of ceding personal liberty to the authority of governments.

[0]https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be...

[1]https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

The context doesn't make what Franklin meant any different.

What? The context shows that what Franklin meant is completely the opposite of what people claim.

He wasn't warning against the dangers of giving up one's rights to the creeping authoritarianism of the state, he was complaining that people were giving up the "essential Liberty" provided by an effective Federal government for the "temporary safety" purchased by refusing to fund it.

Or to quote from the NPR article, "(...) far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation."

Nah. It's a really shallow analysis to call his statement "pro-taxation and pro-defense spending", and far more of an inaccurate generalization than how the quote's usually used. Franklin was writing to answer the problem of the governor being bribed by the Penns to provide security and veto the taxation, rather than the state using its legitimate authority to tax the Penn's lands and provide that security. The alternative was undermining the integrity of the democratic state, not "refusing to fund it".

Interestingly enough, the context is being used here to invert the meaning of Franklin's beliefs, rather than clarify them.

That is very true. I plucked 5 or so statements from that list by people I have read other quotes/letters from that support those statements.

Thank you.

> "The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.” – Patrick Henry [1].

The citation given is incorrect and the two quotes are from unrelated debates. It is not at all clear that "everyone" here refers to citizens at larger rather than members of the state militia, that is, the duly constituted state militia, not the ad hoc militia of able bodied men.

> “The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.” – Samuel Adams [2]

This was in the context of a proposed amendment to the body of the constitution, that was rejected. And even here the caveat "peaceable" is thrown in, which is a loophole big enough to throw a whole busload of bans through.

I'm not going to pick through the remainder, which I assume are similarly ambiguous.

Either way I think this is a fruitless approach (namely attempting to clarify the preamble) -- the preamble to the amendment is clearly the motivation of it, but the body of the amendment carries the force. In the interests of public safety, the courts have reluctantly allowed the right to be infringed, and frankly, this is what everyone, including the NRA, wants. If courts rules that it was illegal to restrict the ownership or bearing of arms in any way, there would be a new amendment to supersede the second in a week.

[1] https://archive.org/details/debatesotherproc00virg/page/274

[2] https://archive.org/details/debatesandproce00peirgoog/page/n...

The Patrick Henry quote seems pretty clear to me. He says every man, not every militia man so I'm inclined to believe the direct quote unless you have evidence to the contrary.

Also, He is speaking against congress limiting it. The following two paragraphs in that citation are talking about how men in government can't be trusted to keep their word not to infringe / create tyranny.

> And even here the caveat "peaceable" is thrown in, which is a loophole big enough to throw a whole busload of bans through.

While "peaceable" isn't defined in stone here, I would take it to mean a person who hasn't been convicted of violent crimes or has intent to commit such crimes. That wouldn't really open the floodgates to bans other than ones we already have for criminals / people making threats. It could possibly justify red flag laws though.

> If courts rules that it was illegal to restrict the ownership or bearing of arms in any way

I don't think that would happen and it wouldn't be what they wanted back then either. Several other quotes mention peaceful men bearing arms which I think would keep the no felons can buy guns laws.

> The Patrick Henry quote seems pretty clear to me. He says every man, not every militia man

I provided a link to the original source. He is arguing about who is responsible for arming the militia -- congress or the states, or whether citizens in the militia are responsible for bringing their own armaments. The important thing, he notes, is that every man have a firearm, whether by his own provenance or the state's or congress's provisioning.

Directly quoting, he says, in light of the organization of the militia being subject to both federal and state oversight, as to whether the members of the militia should be required to arm themselves:

> So that our militia shall have two sets of arms, double sets of regimentals, etc., and thus at a very great cost we shall be doubly armed --- The great object is that every man be armed --- But can the people afford to pay for double sets of arms, etc.? Every one who is able may have a gun.

Read the link and I dare you to offer an interpretation that explains why, during the discussion of arming the militia he engages in a total non sequitur of mentioning that all people should have guns?

Peaceable is certainly not set in stone, and you're welcome to your interpretation, but a reasonable alternate interpretation is that you have to comply with the idea that owning certain armaments is de facto non-peaceable.

It would be very easy to revisit Heller in this light and say that gun violence is a problem in DC, and thus owning a handgun is a non-peaceable act in itself.

There's no support for that viewpoint anywhere in the text of the 2nd amendment, nor is there in Heller.

In this case we are living in the alternate reality where Samuel Adams's proposal was adopted into the text of the consitution. I'm arguing that his phrasing would allow for more restrictive gun laws than the current 2nd amendment. So using his quote to defend a less restrictive gun policy seems counterproductive.

I disagree. The violent actions of others don't make your action of exercising the right to protect yourself inherently violent.

> This pretty clearly carries the implication that being "well-regulated" is more than just well-equipped.

In that context, it seems that to the writer, "well-regulated" meant trained, likely continuous training kept up at somewhat regular intervals (in how to use their weapon, and how to care for it so that it is ready to use), and that they should keep their knowledge up ("evolutions") on more recent advances in weaponry so that they have some idea how to care and use those as well.

> "...the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."

Today, there are many people who are showing that they cannot be trusted with arms. They use them instead of reason, they use them for illegal purposes, they use them as toys, they don't take regular training to understand them, they - in short - don't act like militiamen should act. They certainly don't seemingly act "well-regulated".

Are these the kind of citizens the Framers - and perhaps the Federalist papers - had in mind to keep and bear arms?

So my understanding of it was that the framers were generally tepid about the idea of standing armies, especially standing armies managed by the federal government. They wanted instead the armies to consist of militias organized by the states, and the command structure to ultimately roll up to the Commander-in-Chief.

The expectation was varied over who would arm the militias -- Congress, the states, or the people bringing their own weapons. To preserve the possibility of the last option, they wrote the second amendment so that when people went to join the militia, they would already have their own guns (and other armaments, like cannon, horses, etc.) that they could bring along.

This involves a whole bevy of unstated assumptions about firearm ownership based on the experience fighting the British. So if I were to rephrase the amendment to remove the brevity, I think it would read something like this: "In order that the states may raise and maintain a militia that is well-organized and trained, people must own and be prepared to bear their own personal armament in service of that militia, and therefore Congress may not forbid people from owning arms and by doing so prevent the states from raising militias outside of Congress's authority."

So I personally feel that this sentiment, while noble for the time, is outdated and no longer applicable, especially since the remnants of state militias are insignificant compared to the deployed power of the federal standing army, and we don't expect that to change. But it is what it is, and we have a process already for modifying the constitution when its dictates are no longer applicable, as we did with slavery, as we did with the voting age, as we did with income taxes. We should be using the power of amending the constitution to update it to reflect the reality of firearm ownership in the present time.

I guess the one thing if you accept my interpretation of the amendment that might be open to interpretation is that the states could arguably have the power to regulate the right to keep and bear arms as they see fit; the debate was mostly federal vs. state rather than government vs. individual, even if in the end it is expressed as an individual right that enforces the state's right.

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