The well-regulated Militia hits the Waffle House

[struggle4progress]

Dick Polman
April 23, 2018

... This kind of rote bloodletting was not what the Founders intended.

John Paul Stevens, the 98-year-old U.S. Supreme Court retiree, took heat recently when he rightly argued that the Second Amendment was not designed to lock and load every American citizen. For nearly two centuries, he pointed out, the courts hewed to the amendment’s literal meaning (“a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the right people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”), which in no way blessed the deluded notion that virtually everyone (like the Waffle House active shooter) should be free to arm themselves to the teeth ...

There is no evidence, in the debates about the Constitution, or the press coverage of the debates, that the signers ever sought to bless the notion of a universally armed citizenry. The “right to bear arms” was used solely in a military context, to ensure that state militias could be organized and sustained. Rhode Island’s provision was typical; it required that men aged 16 to 50 “bear Arms in the respective Trained Bands whereto by Law they shall belong.” And when a Pennsylvania faction tried to broaden the Second Amendment’s proposed language by suggesting that “the people have the right to bear arms for the defense of themselves … or for the purpose of killing game,” the majority of delegates resoundingly said no ...

As the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Republican appointee, remarked as a retiree in 1991, the assault on the true meaning of the amendment has been “one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word fraud — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” And ours as well.

https://whyy.org/articles/the-well-regulated-militia-hits-the-waffle-house/

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. A fraud perpetrated by that HORRIBLE SC justice Scalia, replaced by someone WORSE probably

[bronxiteforever]

2. Kick and recommend.

Rinse the blood and repeat. America’s blood sacrifice continues. One day it will end.

[Hoyt]

3. There were four SC Justices who joined Stevens in Heller. And even Scalia only talked about guns

kept at home. Even then, he said regulations were fine.

Point is, Supreme Court has never ruled the way white wing gun-fanciers interpret the 2nd Amendment. Most of them leave out the important parts because they read pointing at, and mouthing, each word.

________________

"The Heller majority opinion did not, in the words of its author, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, secure an “unlimited” right to buy or carry weapons. The Second Amendment would not, for example, scuttle bans on concealed weapons or machine guns. And Justice Scalia emphasised that nothing in Heller “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings”. Nearly every gun regulation under discussion today—from expanded background checks to bans on military-style weapons—would seem to pass constitutional muster."

https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2018/02/economist-explains-14