Notes From HPS
BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 9 months ago
At Mike Vanderboegh’s place, good grief.
There is a group working right now toward restoration of the Constitutional Militia and other goals, and it’s sharing that message and hoping to recruit members and support: AmericaAgain! I was approached by their founder a few months back and, while I found merit in many of their ideas, had concerns about the way they were presented. I see they have a reworked video message which merits being shared, because it opens the door to discussing what one group is going forward with to make the Militia as articulated in the Constitution a reality.
Read the whole thing, including the comment that prompted David’s column. I’m all for this kind of thing, except for one stipulation. The second amendment discusses the right to bear arms and be free of federal interference in the context of the states’ desire to keep that interference from happening. That is the historical milieu in which it was written. The founders only needed one excuse to prevent federal government interference with the states on firearms, and they chose the most likely and obvious choice, i.e., the militia. The second amendment is not a treatise on the foundation of liberty.
It’s an illogical jump to cast that as the only reason for the right to own and bear arms. If you had discussed regulation on the right to own and use a tool of their trade to protect their families, hunt, and ameliorate tyranny with a colonial man, he would have buried you under the remotest prison. God gave us our rights based on man being created in His image and the expected duty to work and subdue the earth to His glory. The militia was a convenient excuse for a certain clause in one part of the constitution. Limiting our rights to our understanding of that clause is a mistake.
Nice Holster. I’d take it is someone like say, Red’s Indoor Range, wanted to gift it to me.
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On March 15, 2016 at 9:24 am, gyrwan said:
“Limiting our rights to our understanding of that clause is a mistake.”
Exactamundo!
On March 15, 2016 at 10:17 am, gyrwan said:
This also goes to my mention (in a prior comment) of “collective rights”. Codrea’s piece discusses what specific weapons are “militia” weapons. It’s the wrong question.
If the rights of a collective cannot exceed the sum of rights of the individuals making up that collective, … then where did the U.S. government get the “collective right” to build and use nuclear weapons?
They could not have got it from the citizens if not one citizen has the right to have nuclear weapons.
Yet, there is no other place for government to obtain “collective rights”, except on loan (by unilateral agreement) from its citizens.
No government can legitimately exercise — as agent — a right or other power that its principal (i.e., each and every individual citizen) does not posess.
On March 15, 2016 at 10:22 am, gyrwan said:
sorry for monopolizing this comment section.
On March 15, 2016 at 10:00 am, gyrwan said:
“The second amendment is not a treatise on the foundation of liberty.”
Precisely. All the rights in the BoR are subsidiary, or appurtenant, rights. That is, appurtenant to the fundamental rights of Life, Liberty, and Property. The 2d Amdt is an agreement as to the practical, real-world way in which a people protects its fundamental rights, and which any just government must guarantee if the citizenry’s fundamental rights are to be protected.
It could be worded a thousand different ways (and the 2d always seemed poorly worded), but the underlying fundamental rights — and the necessity of a practical means of ensuring them — does not depend on the wording, nor upon whether there is any wording at all.
The rights exist. They cannot be overridden, taken, bargained away, or lost … especially not by appeal to legal or linguistic “precedent” (after all any word-wrestling that resulted in denial of the rights would be inherently unlawful, and therefore NOT “precedent” at all).
Despite all “precedent” and “legal” history to the contrary, the most important and meaningful Amendment in the BoR is the Ninth.