The History of the Second Amendment

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you know when forming the Bill of Rights you think the founders must have had some damn good reasoning behind making the right of the people to keep and bear arms amendment number two and there's a lot of important history behind why that is let's get into it a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed now where does something like this even come from well we need to take a look back at history a little bit and the cultural attitudes and influences that resulted in these words being written into our Constitution and I like history so let's start all the way back to 1628 with the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony it was founded by the Massachusetts Bay Company and was subsequently colonized with about 20,000 English migrants many of whom were strongly Puritan in their religious beliefs they loved their God they love their Jesus and they loved their hard-working eventually the colony would start to hold local elections to decide on their leaders and at the time the governor's that were selected had to be Puritan in their beliefs and even to be able to vote you had to be formally admitted by your local church and have your religious views examined by the church congregation they want to make sure they're getting the real Puritans here no heathens this heavy Puritan atmosphere surrounding the colony would end up making the people largely intolerant of any other religious views I'm looking at you Quakers and because Puritanism was an offshoot of the Church of England they weren't particularly keen of some of the people back home so we're already getting a taste of some of the animosity for the crown but after establishing the colony the people of Massachusetts found some pretty good economic success the fish were aplenty they're making all sorts of timber products selling furs hunting whales for their juicy blubber cccccc having lots of babies and trade was looking pretty good too they were making a name for themselves and building up their own community and this was largely done independently true freedom and then came the red man no I'm just kidding and then came Squatch no I'm just kidding and then came the Indians now the colony originally had some pretty good relations with the local Indian tribes no one really wanted to cause any more trouble than they had to and for the most part in the early colonial days the people were just trying to get by and survive I know gets muddled a lot due to politics in our terrible education system but if you didn't know the early settlers weren't out committing genocide on the Indians 24/7 they were just trying to get by with as little conflict as possible I seem to have brought a little something for you to put them in your piece forty bucks what forty dollars what forty bucks but eventually someone just had to start some shit and we get the peacock War from 1636 to 1638 and the colonists were on their own against the Indians no help was coming from Great Britain it's just us and the result of this war was the virtual destruction of the peacock tribe in a couple hundred dead bodies the numbers aren't exactly clear on that but with this war we established the idea that the people of Massachusetts were able to hold their own and claim their ground so now the community has grown even tougher skin and were able to come together and make a name for themselves helping to create the framework for an independent identity from England were hardcore Puritans were making a living on our own and we don't need no help from Great Britain a few decades later we get King Philip's War from 1675 to 1688 to be the single deadliest war in North American settlement history we had around 4,000 total casualties a thousand of those being on the colonists side along with the complete decimation of various towns local populations the economy of Rhode Island and more than half of the towns in New England were attacked by the Indians but at the end of the day the colonists persisted yet again and repaired their towns repaired their trading routes bred some more and continue to spread their New England influence and claim some more land now my site all this history because it's important to lay down the foundation of culture society and identity among the colonists they're mostly sovereign settlements and have established their own governments and their own rules they created their own towns and their own trade in marketplaces are relatively independent of England and not only that they themselves without the help of the British government were able to fend off large Indian attacks on a multitude of occasions all of this would help to build a New England identity and particularly among the people of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and this would be important as we go on to talk about the development of the Massachusetts government but first we need to go back to England because during this time in England was the great English restoration of Charles the second Charles was back from a 14-year exile and he was taking his rightful throne yeah I'm taking on back however with the restoration of the English monarchy came some problems for the colonists because unlike the previous monarchs and protectorates charles ii wanted to have more oversight on the colonies from the crown hey what's going on over here and the crown started making some moves to have more authority over colonial governing so they issued some quo warranto a reds and a Syre fascias which formally gave the crown control over the colonies thereby rescinding the original Royal Charter and to complement this they also implemented the Navigation Acts which restricted the colonies trading abilities now by this time charles ii had died so his brother james ii was in charge of this new unified dominion of New England but he couldn't run the whole thing on his own so he appointed governor Edmund Andros who essentially ran the place with an iron fist and was described as being very haughty oh and he hated Puritans great oh and not only that this new Dominion of New England also introduced the Church of England into the colonies and especially in Massachusetts with the construction of the Kings Chapel you know that Anglican Church that literally everyone in Massachusetts was trying to get away from because you know they're all Puritans what the fuck so the people living in the colonies were pissed off not only did this new Dominion place them under the control of some asshole who was in ministry for some other asshole 3,000 miles away but it also completely revoked their charters which is how they established their own government and it completely stripped them of their sovereignty and the rights they had made within their charter governments Massachusetts was by far the most reluctant colony in the bunch and they resisted any semblance of crown rule over them as much as they could remember these guys are all Puritans who had just spent the last 50 years building up a new Puritan way of life and style of governing the king our new figure of authority a follower of the Church of England filth you filth well luckily for the colonists back home in England was yet another uprising our good friend William the third otherwise known as the Prince of Orange invaded England kicked out Jimmy the second married his daughter Mary and together they jointly ruled England bringing in a new age of British rule now along with their rule came a very important document known as the English Bill of Rights we'll get back to that later but first with this news of a new monarchy back home the colonists decided okay we got a new monarch there's a revolution going on back in England let's get this Andross fucker out of here right now and that's pretty much what they did they rounded up the mob and put him in jail as part of the 1689 Boston revolt and they all went back and reinstalled their old charter governments effectively dissolving the dominion of New England and going back to the way things were somewhat while certain colonies like Rhode Island and Connecticut were able to reinstate their old governments I'll call me like Massachusetts had a bit more trouble in doing so mainly due to the legality of reinstating their old government see another thing that a lot of people forget these days or don't know or don't really care about is that this is a nation of laws at least it's supposed to be now it's a nation of emotions and feelings and since legally the old Massachusetts Bay Charter was revoked with the restoration of Charles ii the Massachusetts Bay Colony didn't really have a legal foundation to reinstall their old charter government but because King William of Orange was a Protestant and because of reinstating the old charter government would have been reinstating a Puritan government King William said no way and he and his buddies over at the Lords of trade formed up a new Charter in 1691 creating the province of Massachusetts Bay which now included the entirety of Plymouth Colony in parts of Maine and Nova Scotia this new charter also changed some of the rules and building and government and removed a lot of the Puritan based religious laws the governor of the colony in certain senior officials in the government also began to be appointed by the crown taking even more sovereignty away from the colonists oh and you had to start taking oaths to the king this change was not all that welcome add on to that some more restrictions like the navigation acts of 1660 in 1696 and the colonists became even more unhappy skip ahead a couple years to 1733 and now the British were imposing the molasses Act which placed taxes on sugar and rum alright listen we have fought off hordes of Indians all by ourselves we have cultivated this land all by ourselves we have grown these colonies into major trading centres we have created a culture designed for us to thrive in and now you're telling me that you're going to tax or goddamn sugar and tell us that we can't trade with whoever we want to trade with and that we can only use British ships to trade with oh yeah Oh skip ahead a few more years and now we have the French and Indian War disrupting colonial life and then the impositions of the Stamp Act the declaratory act the Townshend act the sugar act the quartering act and people are starting to get a little pissed off and no less the people from Massachusetts especially after the Boston Massacre and then later the Boston Tea Party and by now you should know where this is all leading up to but here's where we get our first real influence on the writing of the Second Amendment and it starts with the lead-up to the Battle of Lexington and Concord so after the Boston Tea Party incident Britain was not having any more delinquency from Massachusetts they dump it in the ocean what da fuck and on May 20th 1774 Parliament passed the Massachusetts Government Act which officially repealed the 1791 charter and placed even more power in the hands of the crown from this point on town meetings were forbidden without the approval of the governor who was also appointed by the crown the Executive Council which used to be democratically elected officials were now appointed by the crown as well and many other positions in the local government were now appointed by the royal governor such as the Attorney General Provost Marshal's justices of the peace and even judges the act was designed to suppress and control the people of Massachusetts Bay and in the words of Lord North it was designed to take executive power from the hands of the Democratic part of government and one month later on June 1st 1774 Parliament also decided to enact a Boston port act which officially shut down the harbor until all reparations were made to the King in the East India Company and until all subjects of Massachusetts bowed down to the law now this was it for the colonists and not just those in Massachusetts but everywhere this act was seen as so harsh by all the other colonies mainly because it effectively shut down the economy of Massachusetts that they started sending in tons of grain shipments another relief aid to help out the citizens of Massachusetts all of the colonists started to feel a little closer connection to each other by this point and the center point of that connection being screw the crown while proceeded next were three very important events the first event occurred on September 9th where we get the passage of the Suffolk resolves it was written by the local leaders of Suffolk County Massachusetts and called for a boycott on all British goods until each and every Intolerable Act was repealed but most importantly it called for all the colonies to start raising militias next on September 17th the members of the very first Continental Congress which was just two weeks in at the time endorsed the Suffolk resolves and reiterated the call for boycotts on all British goods until the demands and their declaration of colonial rights were met by the crown as John Adams wrote at the time this was one of the happiest days of my life in Congress we had generous noble sentiments and manly eloquence this day convinced me that America will support Massachusetts or perish with her and finally on October we get the creation of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress where John Hancock would end up being its president the Congress would essentially govern all of Massachusetts outside of British control Boston taking on all the roles of an official government but most importantly it started to raise a militia and that was it Massachusetts was in a state of rebellion we find that a part of your Majesty's subjects in the province of Massachusetts Bay have proceeded so far to resist the authority of the supreme legislature that a rebellion at this time actually exists within the said province but the colonists were ready and they were waiting and they had formed an army ready to act on the defensive which was to be justified on the principles of reason and self-preservation meanwhile the British Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith received orders on April 18th to march with utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord where you will seize and destroy all military stores they're coming to take our guns and that was that we all know what happens from here [Music] now before we get into the details of the writing in the second amendment we need to talk about what the pressing issues were for the founders on the idea of resistance to tyranny what can we do to curtail an oppressive regime and prevent the risk of tyranny and this is where we get the initial split between the Federalists and the anti-federalists the Federalists assumed in the beginning that there would be no need for a second Amendment or a bill of rights they just assumed that state and local governments will be able to repel any federal government attack and that we didn't need to protect these very obvious and well respected natural rights because a federal government wouldn't even think about trying to step over those boundaries and their view a bill of rights would wind up limiting the rights of the people over actually protecting them this was the view of guys like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison initially well the anti-federalists weren't having this show me any government throughout history that hasn't stepped over the rights of the people show me one guys like George Mason stated that to disarm the people that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them by totally disusing and neglecting the militia and unless this natural right was protected from the federal government they figured that it would only be a matter of time before the government would come after the people's guns and try to dismantle the state militias so what's to stop this new government from trampling all over our natural rights and this is the point that you need to understand about what natural laws and rights are these things are not granted by the government they pre exist government they are not positive laws which are laws passed by human institutions they are laws of nature and that's why the Second Amendment and more broadly the Bill of Rights and all ten amendments within it are written as protections against the federal government over rights that have already existed throughout time and through the tradition of natural law and are settled by the authority of God God Jews boy oh boy here we go again with the bible thumpers what is this some Prager you bullshit this isn't even an issue of religion as Kevin Williamson over at National Review puts it whether one believes that man was created by God or by evolutionary processes the conclusion ends up being the same man has reason individual and corporate dignity individual and corporate value and these are not subject to revision by any prince power or potentate natural laws are inherent within the objective reality that human beings inhabit not of the institutions that human beings create men are not angels and without natural law you cannot make any sense out of moral or political freedom because you are not operating under a set of objective standards but rather under a subjective and ever-changing criterion that becomes impenetrable to reason and debate as it only runs on the emotions and desires that are shaped by the environment when you find yourself dealing with subjective morals created by human beings you find that the best way to secure those morals are screaming public shaming harassment and curtailing of basic human rights like freedom of speech when you operate under objective reality you find the best route of reasoning to be debate and critical argumentation these things exist in nature and our ability as human beings to reason and comprehend the world around us allows us to find these objective truths which long predate any system of morality our species can create and if you follow this line of reasoning the set of objective truths had to be formed by some ultimate transcendent source that being God or if you don't really feel like going there your individual capacity for reason can lead you to these same objective truths the conclusion remains the same or as George Mason put it the laws of nature are the laws of God whose authority can be superseded by no power on earth and bestowed under natural law is the individual human right to self-preservation and resistance to tyranny which going back to the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which was one of the primary sources of inspiration and precedent for the Second Amendment was precisely the type of language used to affirm the right of all individuals to be armed if you remember our good friend King James a second something he had to deal with back in domestic England was the rising Protestant majority over Catholics and what better way to tamper a rising Protestant threat than to disarm all of them which was exactly what he did such as in the 1671 game act now while this action may have only pertained to Protestants its repudiation in the English Bill of Rights established a codified precedent for the natural right of all individuals to keep and bear arms by stating in as a restoration of an ancient right and Liberty meaning yet again that this is a right that had already existed and was not being created on the spot but rather was having its protection codified into law and that was the determination made by the founders when ratifying the Second Amendment it is a natural right of the people to form a militia and bear arms as individuals we have the right to self-preservation and resistance to tyranny it is a self-evident human imperative but now we need to get into certain contemporary issues with the Second Amendment and first and foremost we have to deal with the language and grammatical structure controversy because apparently people these days don't know how to read or comprehend language and historical context so there are people who actually believe that the Second Amendment only allows the right of the people in a militia to keep and bear arms and this is where we get into grammar nazi' territory and have to analyze each and every phrase of the Second Amendment but to preface you need to understand that words mean what they mean when they were written now thankfully the late Justice Antonin Scalia did most of the research for this next part in his opinion of the Corps on DC versus Heller first let's get into the preparatory and operative clauses both of which are present in the language of the Second Amendment a preparatory clause announces a purpose while the operative Clause announces the resolution or action to be taken or not taken and here's how the clauses are split up in the Second Amendment let's start with the operative clause and dissect it phrase by phrase the right of the people this phrase is used two other times in the Bill of Rights once in the First Amendment and once in the Fourth Amendment and there's also similar phrasing in the ninth amendment but each time it is used it is used unambiguously to describe individual rights not collective rights or rights that can only be exercised through participation in some corporate body or militia there are three other provisions in the Constitution that strictly used the phrase the people once in the preamble once an article 1 section 2 and once in the 10th amendment and in each of those instances the phrasing of the people is not used in the context of individual rights but collective powers powers that belong to the people in each of these instances the people refers to the exercising or reservation of powers such as the reserving of power to people in the Tenth Amendment or the exercising of powers in article 1 section 2 not rights powers nowhere else in the Constitution does a right attributed to the people refer to anything other than an individual rate what's more is that in all instances of the phrase the people it is used in reference to a class of people who are members of a national community or connection with this country meaning that when we say the people we are not referring to subsets of people like people in a militia but are referring to the whole people this is an opposition to the preparatory clause when it mentions the militia as a militia is a subset of people so reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to keep and bear arms in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clauses description of the holder of that right as the people another thing to understand about preparatory and operative clauses is that a preffer Tory Clause does not limit or expand the scope of an operative clause in fact the stated in the general treatise on statutes by Sir fortunate as Doris from 1848 it is nothing unusual in acts for the enacting part to go beyond the preamble the remedy often extends beyond the particular act or mischief which first suggested the necessity of the law and in regards to the English Court case Copeman verse gallant in 1716 the Lord Chancellor Hardwick stated that I can by no means a lot of the notion that the preamble shall restrain the operation of the enacting clause and that because the preamble is too narrow or defective therefore the enacting clause which has general words shall be restrained from its full latitude and from doing that good which the words would otherwise and of themselves in port so when you talk about something particular like a militia that doesn't then constrain the following phrase of the people into the context of a militia meaning that the Second Amendment protects an individual right of all Americans so now we move on to the phrase to keep and bear arms let's start with the word arms the 18th century meaning of the word arms is the exact same meaning as it is today in the 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary it defined the word arms as weapons of offense or armor of Defense and the 1771 legal dictionary by Timothy Cunningham defined the word arms as anything that a man wears for his defense or takes into his hands or euzeth in Wrath to cast at or strike another and even the 1828 Webster's American diction area of the English language also uses the same phrasing and even today's Webster's definition of the word arms is the exact same as it was back then the word arms then as now does not apply only to military service or service and connection to a militia in fact here's an example sentence from Timothy Cunningham 1771 legal dictionary servants and laborers shall use bows and arrows on Sundays and not bear other arms even the 1783 thesaurus titled the distinction between words synonymous in the English language while it may have limited the term arms to instruments of offense generally made use of in war it also states that arms constitute all firearms at this point some of you might be seeing now how this intersects with the it only applies to muskets argument we'll get to that in a bit but let's finish off this militia argument so now let's dig into the meaning of the word keep going back to the 1783 thesaurus it defines the word keep as we keep what we intend not to part with we keep that which is our own and the 1773 edition of a Dictionary of the English language defines it as to retain not to lose and to have in custody so now knowing what arms means to keep arms can most naturally be read as to have weapons now there's no specific phrasing of to keep arms in a dictionary but the way the phrase was commonly used and referred to was as a way of possessing arms both individually and also in regards to a militia some people cite laws in Delaware New Jersey and Virginia that stated the phrase keep arms in the context of a militia meaning that you can only use the phrase keep arms when talking about a militia but Justice Scalia points out that that's like saying that because there are many statutes that authorize aggrieved employees to file complaints with federal agencies that the phrase file complaints has an employee related connotation and that you can't file a complaint for any other reason if you're not an employee of an institution yeah that doesn't quite work guys moving on to the next phrase of bear this has always then and now meant to carry here's that 1773 dictionary again but when used in the context of arms good old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to have given a very good descriptor of its meaning and muscarello verse united state when analyzing the meaning of the phrase carries a firearm in that case she wrote surely a most familiar meaning is as the constitution's 2nd amendment indicates where bare or carry upon the person or in the clothing or in a pocket for the purpose of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person nowhere here is the act of bearing arms mentioned in relation to service in a militia or other organized military unit moreover in 9 state constitutional provisions written in the 18th century or the first two decades of the 19th they enshrined a right of the citizens to bear arms and defense of themselves in the state or bear arms and defense of himself in the state it is clear from those formulations that bear arms did not refer only to carrying a weapon in an organized military unit when Justice James Wilson analyzed the Pennsylvania Constitution's arms bearing right he also recognized it as a natural right of self-preservation and defense of one's person or house once again this is an individual right not limited to service in a militia there is no dictionary that defines the phrase bear arms only in relation to military service and there are numerous instances of its usage and non-military Affairs such as the already mentioned example sentence from Cunningham 1771 legal dictionary so any usage of the phrase bear arms and military context do not limit the term to that context this is important because the former Justice John Paul Stevens on the dissent in the DC verse Heller case pointed to a study by various professors of linguistics and English that cited a hundred and ten instances of the phrase bear arms being used in the context of military service so according to them the phrase bear arms can only mean the carrying of arms for military purposes this is how the dissent decided to reason well if the founders wanted to say that all people have the right to carry arms they should have made a qualifier after bear arms and written something like the right to bear arms for all citizens of America not in a militia or something but as Antonin Scalia points out this makes absolutely no sense if the idea is that bear arms can only mean to carry arms for military purposes then you can't add a modifier to that statement outside of military purposes because it would blatantly contradict the phrase it is trying to modify so a sentence like the right to bear arms for the purpose of killing game which was a sentence that these professors decided to exclude in this context would be like something out the mouth of a moron so you can only carry a weapon for military purposes to hunt animals he ya know bear arms means to carry arms or possess arms or have arms and the fact that you can modify with purpose if qualifiers objectively means that it is not limited to military use but also the phrase bear arms has a different idiomatic meaning when you place the word against after it which directs hostilities towards a target for the purposes of war fighting military service or serving as a soldier and in nearly all of the examples that the professors of linguistics and English gave they include the word against after bear arms now obviously if these professors in linguists decided to give bear arms this idiomatic meaning to bear arms would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war an absurdity that no commentator has ever endorsed which is why they and justice Stevens created a hybrid meaning of the phrase bear arms to mean to carry arms in connection with service in the military or in this case a militia again no dictionary anywhere has ever taken on this meaning of bear arms Antonin Scalia also writes that were still the phrase keep and bear arms would be incoherent the word arms would have two different meanings at once weapons as the object of keep and as the object of bear one-half of an idiom it would be rather like saying he filled and kicked the bucket to mean he filled the bucket and died for those viewers watching who are not well accustomed to the English language another meaning of the phrase kicked the bucket means to die but even in the original English Bill of Rights which was again the primary source of inspiration there was no mention of an individual right to bear arms in relation to a militia in fact William Blackstone and his commentaries on the laws of England from 1765 made no mention of military service or militia when he talked about the natural right of resistance and soft preservation and the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense no war here does he talk about this natural right of self-preservation and defense in regards to the formation and service in a militia thus the rights secured in 1689 as a result of the Stewart's abuses was by the time of the founding understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence and no word games on the meaning of bear arms and keep and right of the people is going to change that historical and textual context so now let's shift back over to the preparatory clause and analyze each of these words and make sure they're in concordance with what was just described in the operative clause a well-regulated militia all right well let's go back to Webster's 1828 dictionary again the militia of a country of the able-bodied men organized into companies regiments and brigades with officers of all grades and required by law to attend military exercises on certain days only but I other times left to pursue their usual occupations in Federalist 46 James Madison a founding father specifically wrote about a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands officered by men chosen from among themselves fighting for their common liberties and United and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence Thomas Jefferson another founding father in his letter to the stood the Tracy wrote about the militia of the state that is to say of every man in it able to bear arms even in the 1939 Supreme Court case of the u.s. first Miller the court still retained this definition of a militia when explaining that the militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense so as clearly stated here the militia is all of the people this was another point that was contested by the dissent in DC verse Heller because according to them the militia is a federal creation and they point to article 1 section 8 to justify this but see if you actually read article 1 section 8 you see that Congress has only allowed the power to raise and support armies and to provide and maintain a navy but when they talk about the militia they say that Congress has the power to provide for calling forth the militia which means that the militia is already something that exists and that Congress has the ability to organize the militia not a militia which connotes that the militia is a body that already exists and is not something that the federal government can just create and this is something that Congress has already done with the first militia act of 1792 which specified that each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states resident therein who is or shall be of the age of 18 years and under the age of 45 years except as hereinafter accepted shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia now it's also important to note that this act in the subsequent acts following it do not define what the militia is over just organizing together a subset of the militia as allowed by article 1 section 8 but the federal government has no requirement to organize all of them together and so they can focus on the subset that they see the most use in when calling forth the militia next is the phrase well-regulated which means nothing other than the imposition of proper discipline and training the same imposition was used in the Virginia Declaration of Rights from 1776 when stating that a well-regulated militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms is the proper natural and safe defense of a free State it does not mean federal government regulation like we know it today or regulation from a governmental bureaucracy if that was the case the Second Amendment would have been framed as a militia well-regulated by the Congress being necessary to the security of a free State obviously if this was the case it would not provide enough of a separation of the militia from the federal government and the goal of preserving the security of a free State it would be too close to the control of the federal government to preserve this free State should the federal government go tyrannical and start dismantling the militia or removing rights of gun ownership it would make no sense for the Second Amendment which was written as a protection from the federal government over natural rights to also have that right act as a grant of power from the federal government it's completely asinine and incongruent with anything well-regulated is not a grant of regulation to the federal government when literally the entire purpose of its existence is to declare an individual right that is out of the range of government interference all able-bodied men are considered to be part of the overall unorganized militia who are allowed individually or in concert to train and discipline themselves in the basics of military tactics in order to be ready to face any threats to the security of a free state which leads us to the last phrase of analysis security of a free State now this doesn't mean the security of each individual state but to the security of a free polity or the entirety of the organized Society moreover the other instances of state and the Constitution are typically accompanied by modifiers making clear that the reference is to the several states each state several states any state that state particular states one state no state and the presence of the term foreign state in article one in article three shows that the word state did not have a single meaning in the Constitution and so as argued by the founders militias are useful for repelling invasions suppressing insurrection x' rendering large standing armies unnecessary and resisting government tyranny so now that we're all grammar nazi doubt and after all this historical legal and textual analysis has been laid out before you does the preparatory Clause fit in conjunction with an operative clause that creates an individual right to keep and bear arms yes the history showed that the way tyrants had eliminated a militia consisting of all the able-bodied men was not by banning the militia but simply by taking away the people's arms enabling a select militia or standing army to suppress political opponents this is what had occurred in England that prompted codification of the right to have arms in the English Bill of Rights the founders were never arguing over whether or not such a natural right existed but whether or not it had to be protected from the federal government and codified into the Constitution the preparatory Clause clearly indicates that because preventing the elimination of the militia is of utmost importance to the security of a free State you cannot disarm the people because the people make up the militia and the most effective way to prevent the existence of a citizens militia is to disarm the people thereby the people have the right to keep and bear arms what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance let them take arms so now that we've went out the facts behind the Second Amendment we need to get into all the other myths surrounding the issue though now that we've established this framework it really makes tackling all the other myths a lot easier so when you're arguing with someone who doesn't like evidence or at least only cares about evidence when it supports their vision of the world they like to do what's called moving the gold host so someone who's still watching and just lost all basis for their argument on it only applies to militias will now move the goalposts over - it only applies to muskets now if someone is still trying to make that argument at this point in the video they really weren't paying attention to the last 40 minutes because it was essentially already dispelled with but hey let's get into it No the Second Amendment does not only apply to muskets you'd think my bit earlier on the definition of arms would have already taken care of this but now first and foremost the majority of the founding fathers who signed the Constitution and took office in Congress were all lawyers if they wanted to limit the Second Amendment to muskets they would have wrote a singular object of a musket rather than writing arms secondly this is not how we interpret constitutional amendments if we interpreted amendments as only pertaining to the material objects of the time then literally every single word I have been uttering is not protected under law because you see the First Amendment doesn't protect speech and YouTube videos because in the founders days they didn't have YouTube did they they only had parchment quill and newspapers see I'm logic inge I'm doing logic ya know these amendments apply to all forms of modern uses and that includes all instruments that constitute bearable arms even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding for anyone to think that messages they sent on their iPhones are not protected under the First Amendment is absolutely ridiculous and the same applies to the Second Amendment and muskets and as I already stated before arms back during the ratification of the Second Amendment meant weapons of offense or armor of defense it does not mean freaking muskets so now that that argument has been taken care of the goalposts will probably shift over to well they only knew about muskets what okay so this argument seems to try and justify the former unfounded argument by trying to say that the only weapons in use at the time were muskets so even if they didn't specifically say muskets they only had muskets so I suppose an order for you to take up this argument you need to be really ignorant on the history of firearms and you have to also think that the founding fathers were just straight-up morons who had no capacity to think ahead or ponder about what the future might look like hey George yeah what if guns like get better [Music] the argument usually goes something along the lines of look at this musket it's from the days of the founding fathers it only shot one round every minute they never expected a gun would exist that could shoot more than one round every minute therefore only muskets well history doesn't really support this argument either so let's just take a look back in time at all the weapons that existed and existed hundreds of years before the Second Amendment was ever written that shot more than one round at a time ever heard of hand cannons these things were first created in the 13th century and introduced to Europe as early as the 14th century later renditions included hand cannons that can shoot up to 10 rounds ever heard of volley guns this one's got up to 20 barrels 16th century stuff man how about the duck foot pistol that looks like more than one round to me what about the pepper box revolvers these things were around for hundreds of years before the Second Amendment and can hold up to 20 rounds hey here's a gun that was developed during the Revolutionary War the Belton flintlock and according to Joseph Belton the guy who made it they could fire up to eight rounds with one loading eight balls one after another in eight five or three seconds of time he also had a way of modifying this gun to fire 16 to 20 rounds at a time oh and the founding father specifically knew about this one you know how we know that because the guy who made this gun tried to sell it to them at the Continental Congress yeah now unfortunately for him they didn't end up buying his gun but you better believe they had knowledge of a gun that could fire multiple rounds within seconds with one trigger pull oh shoot uh right across without a right of the people to keep and bear arms except for this belt and flintlock thing because it fires multiple rounds and that's scary or hey what about the gerund donee air rifle this was already in service in the Austrian army by 1780 and used in the Napoleonic Wars well over a decade before the Second Amendment was ratified and could fire 20 rounds from a magazine in less than 30 seconds not only that Thomas Jefferson used this gun to outfit the Lewis and Clark expedition with in Meriwether Lewis his first diary entry he mentions how he demonstrated the firepower of the air rifle to the people living on bruno's Island in fact they nearly killed a woman when mr. blase being unacquainted with the management of the gun suffered her to discharge herself accidentally the ball passed through the Hat of the woman about 40 yards distance cutting her temple about the fourth of the diameter of the ball she fell instantly in the blood gushing from her temple we were all in the greatest consternation suppose she was dead but in a minute she revived to our inexpressible satisfaction and by examination we found the wound by no means mortal or even dangerous they traveled across the entire United States with this gun and showed it off to various Indian tribes as they went along oh and also it's not a musket it's a rifle or hey what about the Puckle gun this was patented in 1718 and was one of the first machine guns or prototype Gatling guns ever created that could fire sixty three rounds in seven minutes or before that there was the Calif repeater which could fire up to six seven twelve or even thirty shots that could be reloaded in one to two seconds so all of these guns had either existed before or during the time of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Second Amendment there weren't just muskets in the world people all right I think that just about wraps it up for the Second Amendment arguments there's still a bunch of other gun related myths out there with things regarding semi-automatic weapons and Firearms licensing and the such but that's more of a gun control issue than it is pertaining directly to the Second Amendment but with all the contemporary Second Amendment issues there's one more goalpost at this debate shifts to and that's your racist okay yeah we're done here if I have to say one thing on the semi-automatic rifle conflict though just know that more people are killed from knives clubs hammers and bare hands and feet in this country than are killed by assault rifles now if you don't like guns or don't like the Second Amendment in general or are in favor of certain gun control policies you can take that stance and you can try to argue and reason for that stance what you can't do is to start lying about the Second Amendment and what it has meant and been interpreted to mean for centuries that's not going to help you and in my opinion the 1846 Supreme Court case of nun versus Georgia sums all of the sub perfectly the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed the right of the whole people old and young men woman and boys and not militia only to keep and bear arms of every description not such merely as are used by the militia shall not be infringed curtailed are broken in upon in the smallest degree and all this for the important end to be attained the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia so vitally necessary to the security of a free State our opinion is that any law state or federal is repugnant to the Constitution and void which contravenes this right originally belonging to our forefathers trampled underfoot by Charles the first and his two wicked sons and successors re-established by the Revolution of 1688 conveyed to this land of liberty by the colonists and finally incorporated conspicuously in our own Magna Carta it was clear in the 18th century with the Second Amendment meant it was clear in the 19th century it was clear before ratification it was clear after ratification this is what the Second Amendment has always meant throughout its entire history and always will mean now get your hands off my goddamn gun [Music]

Info

Channel: Political Juice

Views: 590,007

Rating: 4.846745 out of 5

Keywords: Second, Amendment, 2nd, Second amendment, Juice, Political, Juice Boy, Juice Boi, The History of the second amendment, History, Why, Why do we have a second amendment, what is the second amendment, myths, gun, Colonists, Pilgrims, Constitution, founding, Political Juice, Episode 12, Episode, Founding Fathers, Fathers, Washington, Federalist Papers, Bill of Rights, Bill, Rights, Natural Rights, Natural, Right, America

Id: rhBwHiLcTG8

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 43min 59sec (2639 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2018

Reddit Comments

Just watched the whole thing great points made. Would recommend if you have 40 minutes to spend.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/read-a-lot 📅︎︎ Dec 19 2018 🗫︎ replies

I subscribed. That was well researched and well presented.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/almightybuffalo 📅︎︎ Dec 19 2018 🗫︎ replies