Leftforge Doesn't Understand the Second Amendment...

How does it destroy my argument? Do tell.

Anyway, I think its properly hammered home that the title is flat out wrong.

I understand the second amendment, I understand all the amendments, I understand anything ever written down in the history of mankind in any language, I'm the smartest man in the world, and I can glow, and fly, and I'll never die.

But...maybe I don't constitute "leftforge".


Yeah, maybe that's it.
Okay, semantics saved your ass this time, Federal Farmer.

@Packard

Oh, dear, we're not doing the "2nd Amendment means nukes" attempt at reductio ad absurdem again, are we?

As had been repeated ad nauseum, the 2nd protects small arms, not ordnance or WMDs. Personal weapons wieldable by an individual against other individuals.

If you want to argue for nukes, be my guest. But it's not my argument nor is it the position of any mainstream gun rights proponent.

A legitimate militia acts to preserve law and order, resist tyranny, or to combat invaders, none of which apply to Bundy.

I'm totally on board with it being an individual right, not a collective one, and I think it's pretty clear, grammatically speaking, that the "being necessary" clause is simply an explanation of the authors' reasoning, and not a limiting clause. And therefore, it doesn't matter in the slightest what "well-regulated militia" means.

But do we know exactly what was intended by "arms"? Is the distinguishing factor whether or not a weapon can be carried by a single individual, unaided?

"Regulated" in the 2nd means "trained" or "disciplined" not "controlled by government bureaucracy."

But even if my view of the militia is completely wrong, the right to keep and bear does not turn on it. Being in the militia could mean swearing allegiance to the state, wearing a uniform, and training for three months, and a person who does none of that has the right to own and possess small arms.

There is plenty of precedent on the question. One of the exemptions for militia service was serving on a privateer, assuming it had sufficient cannon to serve in a military capacity. Those were commonly under corporate ownership or partnerships. They were also absolutely devastating to British shipping in the War of 1812, which is why the British attacked Baltimore, one of their main bases of operations.

So the militia might not be able to have a nuke, but if you know someone with a nuke you can get out of militia duty by joining them as a missile officer.

It's debatable.

It's clear that rifles, shotguns, handguns, knives, swords, clubs, etc. are protected. It's also clear that bombs, nukes, nerve gas, etc. aren't.

Things like machine guns fall on the edge and have historically been highly regulated. Anti-gunners have tried to move semi-autos and other repeating firearms into this category, but their common usage is going to make that constitutionally untenable.

The standard was sorta set way back in the Miller case: if a weapon is appropriate for militia use, it's protected.

Fun Fact: Under North Carolina law any store owner can have a belt-fed machine gun on the premises to deter robbers. I doubt the ATF looks highly upon the law.

Pay the feds the tax and pass the background check and you're good to go.

Of course, machine guns in the private market are absurdly expensive.

Yes they are. My M1919A3 Browning parts kit, which includes everything but the right side plate, was about $300, but one with a full-auto license costs thousands, even though all you do is make a right side plate.

I thought of a much better way to do the semi-auto conversion, by the way.

The M1919 is fired by pulling the sear downwards with the trigger bar, a simple lever that when pulled pivots the front end downward, pulling the sear along with it. The bolt and sear then move rearward in the cycle, the sear of course returning upward because it's got a very strong spring on it, and then the bolt returns to battery position. The forward end of the trigger bar ends in a ramp, so that when the bolt and sear return, if the trigger bar is still down, the sear hits the ramp on the trigger bar, gets pulled downward and the gun fires again. It's a beautifully simple system that was also used on the Browning M2 .50 caliber.

The semi-auto conversions do all sorts of crazy things to break the mechanical position of the trigger bar during the cycle, turning a single piece of metal into a bunch of parts with springs and such.

But you could also just replace the ramp on the trigger bar with a super magnet, along with putting a supermagnet on the bottom of the sear, so that they have enough attraction force to pull the sear down when in direct contact, but not nearly enough force when separated by the quarter inch or so difference between an upward, returning sear and the still depressed trigger bar. So to fire the next round you'd have to let off the trigger so the supermagnets snap back together, and then you'd have enough magnetic contact force to pull the sear back down. If you consider the two supermagnets as permanent parts of the sear and trigger bar, the parts count doesn't even change.

Oh, and slightly incline the magnets so that they separate cleanly upon firing and rearward bolt travel, instead of rubbing.

ETA: Browning's cocking mechanism on the M1919 is so simple and elegant that when I first understood how it worked, I broke down in tears at the beauty of it. Where everyone else needs five parts, he would use one. I can beat him on the parts count for a 1911 though, extracting cartridges backwards out of the magazine so the chamber can be back at the hammer. Unfortunately this produces an empty reloading problem that can only end in a kludge.

Why is the latter clear?

Again, not small arms.

If you want to claim ordnance and WMDs are protected by the 2nd Amendment, be my guest. But no one in the pro-gun mainstream makes this claim.

That is not convincing. Even if we all agree that the second half of the sentence is in no way influenced by the first, the first is still there, and it names a prerequisite for a free state. As long as you are this nonchalant about finding out what it means, and checking whether the prerequisite is met, the only obvious conclusion has to be that you believe the thought of the framers to be obsolete and irrelevant. At that point, your right to keep and bear arms is just a law that's hard though not impossible to change, but probably should be changed or at least very carefully considered for change, since it comes from a time, according to you, whose thought about the basic requisites of a free state no longer matter much.

In other words, Gunforge proudly insists that it need not understand the 2nd amendment.

No, but they would have to in order to be logically consistent. It doesn't say "small arms" in the text. It does say that the weapons at minimum have to arm an effective military force, and you add that the latter must not limit what weapons you get to keep.

Don't take my word for it. Take the Supreme Court's:

Again, read the finding in Heller. You can say that the subordinate clause has some bearing on the right all you want, but the finding of the Supreme Court says differently.

The Framers saw a value in a militia, and they recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms. That's the meaning.

Sigh. Again, the subordinate clause imposes no restriction on the main clause. Even if militias were useless and would never ever be needed again under any circumstances...the right to keep and bear arms would still exist. Because the right to keep and bear arms is IN NO WAY PREDICATED ON PARTICIPATION IN OR THE EXISTENCE OF A MILITIA.

We do understand it. The problem is that you lot keep trying to misunderstand it.

Again, if you want to make that argument, feel free. I consider the "arms" in the amendment to mean small arms, and that's consistent with the Founders' writings on the subject and historical precedent.

If I'm wrong, well, I am perfectly content to have the government trample on my right to own nerve gas and H-bombs.

You are the one who is fucked dude. You have been reading too much mindless drivel and you simply are not smart enough to think for yourself or to realize the very different country the US was back in those days. Obviously you have been sniffing way too much of that patriotice whitewashing paint because you believe that shit.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery

You are a stupid fool and you are falling for a really retarded line made up by the gun retailers. They had restrictions on gun possession in big towns back then. No 2nd amendment protection was in tombstone when they banned guns in town. You are a gullible moron. Don't be such a fauxtard asshole.

That doesn't sound well regulated, but I guess that second clause in the amendment doesn't actually matter. In fact, it's probably not possible if the first clause is interpreted to mean guns for all.

@Paladin, you seem to be missing the point of my (and others') argument. Perhaps that point is mistaken; but so far, it hasn't been addressed.

Granted for the sake of this argument that the 2nd amendment protects your right to privately own firearms. That's a legal question about one small part of what the law effects. But there is also the political question of whether the law is good.

It is possible to change this law; the hurdle is high for a Constitutional amendment, but it has been done. So, should the law be changed? Well, how good a law is it? You have so far told me that the first half of the text is unclear to you, and worse, you have no great interest in clearing it up. We know that it speaks about a precondition for a free state; presumably you want a free state; so your disinterest obviously means you don't think this text will give you essential information on it. What it proposes about a free state, its political founding, is not especially relevant to you.

Perhaps still more damning, you also have no interest in protecting the right that it protects beyond your specific interest. You have no interest in arguing whether it protects larger weapons than firearms, and if it does, you are happy to see that right infringed, as you say.

So from your treatment of the text, you don't seem to think its political reasoning is of great interest today, and you don't seem to think that a right that it might technically grant should necessarily be granted; probably because you either suspect that it might not be useful, or that it might even be dangerous in our day and age, or because your interest is not in upholding this law because you think it is good, but only in using that part of it which coincidentally, for reasons with which you don't necessarily agree, applies to your current interest, even if the grounds for that right are gone, and the full extent of the right it grants is something you don't want protected.

If this law, in the eyes and words of its alleged proponents, is unclear and obsolete in its political reasoning, and the right that it protects might have to be seriously infringed considering the changed circumstances of our modern time, then the juridical question of what it says is the least of your problems. You have rolled out a red carpet for the political argument that it needs to be reformed.

I always laugh at this guns so we can fight the government nonsense. From what I see of American society and also on WF, the average gun owner seems to be a typical flag waving, USA USA hoo-rah type. Proud of their nation and their armed forces.

It really is a struggle to see a scenario where so much changes that these guys will take up arms against their own soldiers!

That's fine, but proper working order implies controls, measurements, orderliness, orders. Random people with guns and no means of control is a mob at best, lone-wolf terrorists at worst. Show me the controls.

Then gunforge should stop using militias as a pretext for supporting the 2nd (see OP). It's about having guns, pure and simple. No societal benefit is implied, or created.

Looks like @steve2^4 just schooled rightforge on the meaning of the 2nd amendment.

How's this work again? Can you give me an example?

The Civil War, oh wait, um, no the Whiskey Rebellion, oh wait, um no, maybe all those Indian uprisings? Er, where's the historian to provide some examples? Where's @Federal Farmer?

The L.A. riots? Surely there's some example of this besides Bundy ranch.

The Battle of Athens?

Was that between REM and the B52s?

I think it must be this one. Tennessee 1946. It doesn't seem like it changed anything:

Aftermath
The recovered ballots certified the election of the five GI Non-Partisan League candidates.[10] Among the reforms instituted was a change in the method of payment and a $5,000 salary cap for officials. In the initial momentum of victory, gambling houses in collusion with the Cantrell regime were raided and their operations demolished. Deputies of the prior administration resigned and were replaced.[10]

The new government encountered challenges including at least eleven resignations of county administrators.[citation needed] On January 4, 1947, four of the five leaders of the GI Non-Partisan League declared in an open letter: "We abolished one machine only to replace it with another and more powerful one in the making."[11] The League failed to establish itself permanently and traditional political parties soon returned to power.[7]​

Do you think this could happen today? How would it be dealt with?

Non cited article is non cited. What you did was linked to an article with quotes that aren't cited and only one quote from Patrick Henry mentioned slaves. That doesn't mean that the militias sole purpose was to suppress uprisings. I cited James Madison in my op, which gave a very clear and thorough explanation for the why the militias were created. James Madison wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not Patrick Henry. You found one man's opinion.

Everybody knows that the military, police and militias were used to enforce the protection of slavery, hence the fugitive slave acts. That doesn't mean that was there sole purpose nor does it mean that's why the militias, police or military were created, it's just one of their many functions.

Nobody is white washing anything either. We all know slavery existed and up until around the 1830s or so , it was a widely accepted practice. I don't know what you expect people to do back then when slaves did uprise. I'm defending slavery, but a majority of people didn't see things like we do, you can't expect them to behave the same as we do and you can't place modern morals on them. To say that the militias were created for the sole purpose of suppressing slave uprisings is just completely false and you know it. In fact, the person who wrote this article knows it too as is just trying to spin their own bias agenda as "truth" and trying to put a square peg in a round hole. In other words, you're full of shit and so is your article. Nice try, better luck next time.