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Old 11-22-2007, 08:09 PM
John Kilduff John Kilduff is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,903
Default Re: Clearest and Most Lucid Explanation I Have Found...

[ QUOTE ]
He's flat out wrong.

There never was any "absolute" right to gun ownership. And nobody's saying that "people shouldn't have the right to bear arms in today's world." (Well, at least I'm not.) What I'm saying is that the 2nd amendment does not address the individual right to have arms outside of a militia context.

He's wrong about "the people." The people were the miltia. Elbridge Gerry said "whenever government means to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia." That's why the 2nd amendment addressed people's concerns about the militia. That's why the preamble refers to a militia, to explain what the main clause it talking about. Nobody who reads the debates about the Constitution can come to any other conclusion.

[/ QUOTE ]

First off, everywhere else in the Constitution, where it says "the People", it means the people, not "the militia". It would have been easy enough for the founders to have written "the right of militia members to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" -- but they didn't, they wrote, "the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". Same exact number of words, no reason in the world they couldn't have written "the right of the militia" instead of "the right of the People" if indeed that was what they meant.

You are also twisting the English language and straining logic beyond any reasonable bounds by elsewhere concluding that giving a reason for an Amendment means also that absent that reason, the Amendment is not to apply. You might just as well commit the obvious logical fallacy of claiming that "A, therefore B" also implies "If not A, then not B". Well I sincerely hope you don't think that "A, therefore B" implies "if not A, then not B". Argumentation in this fallacious form is called

Denying The Antecedent

"Definition:

Any argument of the following form is invalid:

If A then B
Not A
Therefore, Not B"


EDIT: Maybe I am remembering incorrectly and you did not elsewhere make the second fallacious argument above. If not, then it is addressed to whomever may have made it instead of being addressed to you [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
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