re:2nd amend from el diaablos

[andyfox]

"lawyers and judges are ruining the Constitution by ascribing and applying meanings to it which run contrary to plain meanings and to common sense."

With all due respect, you want us to ignore the opening of the 2nd amendment, saying it's simply explanatory and has no meaning in regard to what the amendment says. How is this "plain meaning" or "common sense"? The words are there for a reason, that reason being that the right to keep and bear arms related to the civic duty to be part of a militia, not the right to have and use weapons for personal reasons. All the debates over arms in the press at the time of ratification, and in the states over their State Constitutions, concerned militias and standing armies. Two states, Massachusetts and Virginia, debated individual rights to arms, and the proposed laws were rejected. In Virginia, the law was proposed by Thomas Jefferson, whose thinking on this matter, as I pointed out in another post in this thread, was out of the mainstream on this issue (and others as well).