That's because it isn't actually the fundamental purpose. It was written at a time where the country didn't have a permanent standing army. That's why the amendment starts with "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..."
You don't have to take my word for it, here is the latest from the supreme court:
> "It is undisputed that petitioners Koch and Nash—two ordinary, law-abiding, adult citizens—are part of “the people” whom the Second Amendment protects"
> “Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”
> "law-abiding citizen’s right to armed self-defense."
> "As we stated in Heller and repeated in McDonald, “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.”"
> "The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different"
You can drop that Supreme Court link but the Supreme Court is currently at one if it’s lowest trust levels by the public on record and is assumed corrupt by a large portion of the populace due to the fuckery around seating the current Justices and the openly political manner in which their nomination was decided.
The poster farther up the chain was asking about how we are in the current situation re missiles and that judgement had absolutely zero to do with it
Edit: additionally even the section you linked from the amendment refers to the entity “The People” and not “citizens” or “people”. There is the implicit assumption by the judicial system that the legislature meant what they put down and so the different terms refer to different entities. Something for “The People” is not automatically agreed by everyone to mean that each individual has the right
My point entirely.
Edit: as neither of us have put the full text, putting it here. In the course of getting the exact text I also learned that there are multiple versions of the bill of rights with different punctuation and capitalization(i.e. “The People” vs “the people”) which adds even more confusion to the intent. It was not an amendment written clearly enough to convey the specific intent 250+ years in the future and there going to be disagreements about it.
“ 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.”
The constitution is designed to be understood by the citizens who are subject to it. If you start to engage in word play you are almost certainly on the wrong track. Same goes for "charging a item with a crime and not a person", justifications for mass surveillance or limitations on press freedom or speech.
This is all besides the point though, I’m not here to argue about the specifics of the 2nd amendment and interpretations of each clause. The original poster asked how the US got in the situation with missiles not being in civilian hands based on what they currently knew of the US.
The historical reasons behind that are the same whether or not they were made incorrectly
> The constitution is designed to be understood by the citizens who are subject to it.
Even if I were to accept this as truth, that went out the window when the slaves were freed and I do not accept this as true as you needed to be a white land owning male[1] in the original founding to even vote.
There was zero expectation by the founders that everyone subject to the Constitution would be capable of interpreting it correctly. I would need to see some historical evidence before I could have my mind changed on that point
[1] Some exceptions, they were all changed to remove the women’s vote at some point up until women’s suffrage was passed
lol at the “socialist wait I mean democrat” comment.
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
You should look up that quote and find the socialists view on arms. I have zero problems with weaponry and have shot since I was a child. The instant infantile reaction to the idea that not everyone has the same interpretation of an ambiguous sentence is honestly kind of a tiring knee jerk reaction to discussing the second amendment at all.
If you are so concerned about weaponry go learn how to do some basic metal working and chemistry and you can manufacture all the weapons you want with hand tools even and the government won’t be able to take the knowledge from you
In a very technical sense, but if you understand what a subordinate clause means you'll know what can be dropped with changing the restriction on everyone of the main clause.
The technical sense comes from what the subordinate was politically achieving at that time, the Anti-Federalists were properly suspicious of standing armies and regulars, but the guys who actually got a reputation for the successful prosecution of the Revolutionary War starting with the indispensable man Washington knew the nation's defense could not entirely be left to militias.
This is a common mistake software engineers make when parsing law. It is not code and cannot be treated in a technical sense as the language it was written in was English which is not technical.
Imagine every person reading the law is like their own personal compiler and so when they intercept “the law” they get different results. Our Supreme Court exists entirely to determine the standard interpretation of the law whenever a disagreement occurs
I’m not arguing against Heller. I’m saying the amendment exists because an armed populace was needed for national security, not overthrowing the government.
The arms are required to not only secure the State, but also keep it free.
Really the law doesn't have much internal consistency. People like to say it's complicated, but I think it's just broken.
You're right; rather than fix the issues technological progress has made for the Constitution, we've chosen to wimp out and make a bewildering, inconsistent set of "yes, buuuuuut..." legal decisions.
> “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”