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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> So this was the whole point with the 2nd amendment right, that when/if the government repress you in that way, you have weapons to fight back?

The point of the second amendment was, in no small part, so that the central government wouldn't deny the states the means to commit genocide against the indigenous population on their own, because the states didn't trust he central government to be sufficiently enthusiastic about it. That was the major security concern alluded to by the “necessary to the security of a free state” bit.

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Zero of the Federalist papers corroborate this.

The Federalist papers were campaign ads for ratification of the base Constitution from a faction opposed to adding a Bill of Rights (an opposition explicitly stated in the Federalist Papers; it was, in fact, the central theme of Federalist #84.)

They are neither a reliable summary of the motivations for the provisions they support nor any kind of argument for the provisions in the Bill of Rights.

The opposition to the Bill of Rights was that it was unnecessary. Rights do not originate from the Constitution or the law.

The Bill of Rights was specifically designed to abrogate any possibility of infringement of those enumerated rights by an out of control State.

>The point of the second amendment was, in no small part, so that the central government wouldn't deny the states the means to commit genocide against the indigenous population on their own,

What kind of revisionist history is this?

The feds were telling the states "screw off, we do the negotiating" before the ink was even dry on that. Steamrolling the natives was never really a seriously contested job or a point of political contention, the feds were always gonna be the ones to do it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the case of the Cherokee forced relocation from Georgia, the Georgia state government told the federal government (Andrew Jackson) that if the gold-bearing lands weren't depopulated of indigenous peoples then the state would start killing them (after already having terrorized them with armed state militia).

That's 20+yr later and an entirely different generation of politicians though, a far cry from the "we'll just slip this in here so we can harass the red man" that the person above is alleging. And it was done with state backed forces, not like they would have been handicapped by lack of a 2a.

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