They were protecting their right to self defense and self protection from a government trying to disarm them and is a fundamental basis of the 2nd Amendment that the citizens do not have to rely solely of government for their protection.
Goody for her. You know what smarty pants, you failed to refute the premise, that the reason for 2a was 1. To enable citizens to fight a tyrannical government. 2. To guarantee every man in the south over the age of 18 the right to bear arms in order to participate in the state mandated militia for slave patrols. So, the premise you failed to refute was that Both points are moot, today, because #1, no citizen today can beat our military. #2. Militias are moot, given the National Guard, Let's see if you can stay on point on your next reply without getting sidetracked on unimportant details.
I have discussed the Second Amendment at length in this and other threads at length on the Second Amendment. You were trying to show the strength of the US military versus the citizens while by your own admission, you have not kept up on the subject. In other words you are speaking out of self admitted ignorance of the subject.
Grammatically, the independent clause's expression of the people's, and therefore the individual's, right to keep and bear arms is in no way modified to mean the opposite thereof; the prefatory absolute clause is simply giving a reason for the right. Going into the philosophy of why the absolute phrase was used goes outside of the scope of grammar of the phrasing of the Second Amendment. Purely grammatically speaking, the Second Amendment enshrines the individual's right to keep and bear arms and thus safeguards the right to own firearms by Americans. Those who intensely focus on the militia aspect of the phrasing of the Second Amendment don't fully understand what an absolute phrase is, much less how it is operating in the amendment.
I believe it’s time to take a look at the “sources” which the premise of the OP is founded on. I have taken the liberty of going to the actual source (Corpus of Early Modern English) and verifying the data. I was not surprised to find the claims by this source to be far from accurate. https://lawnlinguistics.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/b9db5-baron_46.3.pdf (The above link was not supplied by the OP directly, but can be linked to through his source that follows) https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42613 Now, to the relevant information. From only 15-20 minutes of fact checking we find the claim only 7 out of 900 references to “bear arms” in the Corpus is deal with the phrase outside of strictly military context is patently false. Here are just a sample from a few minutes reading and research. Here is one example that is ambiguous but counted as non ambiguous by the author. Also, the original document was by a French author written in French. This is a translation of that work, yet counted as English literature. That fact alone casts doubt on the use of this Corpus as a definitive authority on word usage in English of the time period. If bear arms in this case was in military service only, it would have been included in prohibited occupations in the preceding sentence. Instead a separate sentence is used just like for hair length and clothing. Here is another instance attributed solely to military purposes by the author when in actuality the religious sect was acting in purely self defense with no affiliation with militias or government. Here is another case where bearing arms is not in a military setting, but instead employed in robbery by state sanctioned highwaymen. It’s clear the premise of this thread is false as the claims made by provided sources are demonstrably false. In a few minutes time I’ve found three ambiguous or clearly non military references not counted by the source author or the bloggers citing that author. As is usually the case, I seem to be the only one doing any actual research.
The strength of our military is a self evident truth, independent of whether or not the Navy has battleships, which is NOT a fact important to the premise. Lack of knowledge of Navy's ships does not constitute 'ignorance' when the premise does not depend on that fact. All it shows is that I'm a lay person who has a minimal knowledge of the Navy. What IS ARROGANCE is your misuse of the term, and, in fact, it proves your own ignorance. The fact that you cannot understand that is testament to your inability to stay on point and grasp what is important and what is not.
You can parse words and make all the semantic arguments you want but the founders, for whatever reason, clearly approved of the private use weapons and wanted to protect the ability of people to have them. Privately held weapons have not prevented the nation from becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet.
If you are looking for "parsed language," you'd be better off to read the late Supreme Court Justice Scalia's majority opinion in the District of Columbia v. Heller.
So you are saying that the second amendment has no purpose because of what you view as the semantics of the motivation behind the amendment? You also believe that the U.S. military would go to war against the US population? Sounds like you didn't refute anything. You just posted whatever you view is best for government, the basic tenet of the left. Not too well done.
Isn't, according to the first Republican President, government of the people, by the people and for the people?
You're right! It's not unqualified. I stand corrected. The absolute clause qualifies to make it abundantly clear that they are referring to a military scenario. "....military use in defense of himself"???? I have no idea what that means
I have no idea what that has to do with this thread. I'm talking about the 2nd A. They could use the arms as door-stoppers, for all I care. But such use is not protected by the 2nd A.
Yes. The one and only reason is expressed in the absolute clause: because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. No other qualifiers. The militia aspect is the absolute clause. This was addressed in a thread created for that very topic. This one is only about the expression "to keep and bear arms"
That any and all arms may be kept and born is not obvious, either. As long as some arms are available, the right to keep and bear them would conform. That one owns and carries a .357 is one thing, missiles and nukes not equivalent.
First, I am UN-parsing the words. Gun apologists like Scalia tried to arbitrarily extract some... individual right to own weapons by doing exactly what you claim: parsing the words. My point is that the 2nd A is one complete statement from beginning to end in which nothing is superfluous... as Scalia argued. Second, of course they approved private ownership of weapons. Everybody agreed that private ownership of weapons was desirable at the time. Especially as they were under fear of the English attempting an invasion. It was likely unanimous at the time. So much so that they didn't feel a need to address it in the Bill of Rights. It was just not controversial. But the result is that it is also not in the 2nd A.
Your interpretation, as you know, has no basis in law and you’ve been shown it also has no basis by the rules of grammar. It’s why your argument has lost every single time it’s been tried in court.
If the assumption is that ownership of weapons was desirable at the time, why would you assume that they intended there to be any limits on ownership in the future? None of your arguments have made any sense.
As usual the only thing you demonstrate is a willingness to stand logic on its head in order to achieve your desired end. The phrasing is simple. Basically all it means is a country requires a militia for it's defense, and because a militia in that day consisted of all males between 14 and 65, you could not deny said males the right to possess weapons specifically militarily useful weapons such as a common infantry soldier might carry.
Says the man in the mirror. Refute what I posted. What exactly do you believe was the mission of the British Forces that day? What were the Minute Men protecting.
The militia was the armed citizens formed to protect themselves when the government could not including Indian and marauder raids and during war from those enemies. That the citizens have a right to be able to protect themselves with arms they can bear is embolden in the 2nd Amendment.
