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Old 03-25-2007, 12:29 AM
FreeMarketeer FreeMarketeer is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Posts: 11
Default Re: re:2nd amend from el diaablos

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The Framers chose their words quite carefully. If they had meant the second clause to be independent of the first, it wouldn't have been a second clause. The second clause has no plain meaning without the first clause.

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Come now. "The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" has no plain meaning?

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Consider the following from the Constitution:

"Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:"

The plain meaning of the sentence is not that "he shall take the following oath of affirmation," but rather that he shall do it before he enter on execution of his office. To ignore the first clause because the second clause is "plain" distorts what was intended in the language.

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This is clearly not analogous. In this case, the second clause is clearly meaningless without the first, since it is the first that defines the subject of the second. In the 2nd Amendment, this is not the case at all. Every word of "the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" has a plain meaning that can be easily understood by reference to contemporaneous documents penned by the very same authors and signers. In all such cases "the People" means the whole of the individual citizenry, "to keep" refers to individuals' privately owned arms, and said "arms" meant the full array of military weapons that could be carried by hand. The enumeration of one particular reason that the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed cannot be construed to disparage other reasons that the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and it most certainly cannot be construed to imply that the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall be infringed, which is essentially what your argument boils down to.

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That said, the Framers also intended that the Constitution would elaborate general principles;

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Indeed. One of those general principles being that a disarmed populace could not possibly remain free.

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they did not intend that their relating of those general principles to the circumstances of the 1780s should be the way that future generations should relate them.

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The Framers included a simple mechanism whereby the right of the People to keep and bear arms could be infringed. All that need be done is to amend the Constitution. I have yet to read such an amendment.

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Again, considering the sentence I have cited, since it says "he," does that mean a woman is not entitled to be president?

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Given that the male pronoun is the proper grammatical term to use in the case of indefinite gender of the subject, this analogy seems specious at best.
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