Reply #102: You should re-read what the Fifth Circuit Court had to say about the 2nd [View All]

[Withergyld]

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/guns/emerson.htm
The Supreme Court recently interpreted the text of the Second Amendment and noted that the phrase "the people" in the Second Amendment has the same meaning in both the Preamble to the Constitution and in the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 265 (1990). The Court held that the phrase "the people" "seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution."

The Second Amendment protects "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to "the people."

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"here is a long tradition of widespread lawful gun ownership by private individuals in this country." Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600, 610 (1994). A historical examination of the right to bear arms, from English antecedents to the drafting of the Second Amendment, bears proof that the right to bear arms has consistently been, and should still be, construed as an individual right.
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Furthermore, the very inclusion of the right to keep and bear arms in the Bill of Rights shows that the framers of the Constitution considered it an individual right. "After all, the Bill of Rights is not a bill of states’ rights, but the bill of rights retained by the people." David Harmer, Securing a Free State: Why The Second Amendment Matters, 1998 BYU L. REV. 55, 60 (1998). Of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, only the Tenth concerns itself with the rights of the states, and refers to such rights in addition to, not instead of, individual rights. Id. Thus the structure of the Second Amendment, viewed in the context of the entire Bill of Rights, evinces an intent to recognize an individual right retained by the people.

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