Obama is coming for your guns!
 

Made you look.



There ya go Edwin. :)




Carl

...and away we go.

I've always wondered why the NRA only quotes half of 2nd amendment.

Yep..... They quote only the half that fits their agenda.

Been a while.

Could be something to the fact that just because the fed took over the first half doesn't mean that the second half should be negated.

A recent 2nd Amendment challenge before the Supremes was DC v. Heller, 2008, where this particular issue was addressed. Supremes struck down a hand-gun ban in DC.

Then, in 2010, the Supremes in McDonald v. Chicago, essentially extended this to the individual states although McDonald was more of a 14th amendment deal.

Murray

It's really easy to make the case that the second clause of the 2nd Amendment is dependent on the first. In other words, the entire reason for the Amendment is to provide for the creation and arming of state militias, to be always armed and, therefore, always at the ready. At the time these were a substitute for the much hated alternative of a standing army.

Then there are the two key words, one per clause, of "regulated" and "infringed". The two words are thought, by he 2nd Amendment's most radical defenders, to be mutually exclusive, i.e. no regulation is possible without infringing on the right to bear arms. This is, of course, nonsense but it is vehemently asserted by many and is the reason why the first clause is regularly ignored.

Another reason why the first clause is "secret" is that it explains that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to provide for the national defense against both foreign invasion and home grown insurrection. In fact, the first time that the militia was called up was to put down tax revolts. These would be Shays Rebellion, where the Massachusetts Militia was under the command of the state, and the Whiskey Rebellion, where several state militias were federslized and led by Washington himself.. The next time was in the War of 1812.

This historical use of the militia flies in the face of "patriots" and sovereign citizens. They insist that the Amendment's purpose is to provide them with the means to foment revolution and "resist government tyranny", just as the Shaysites and Whiskey Rebels tried to do. This was never the Founders' intent.

John

Show me a militia that acted to preserve precious liberty from tyranny and oppression, and I'll show you 10 that acted to inflict oppression on minorities and workers.

The founders were way off base with the 2nd. It should be repealed.

Because nobody knows what the fuck the first half has to do with the second half.

I mean seriously, it's like they just put two unrelated phrases together.

That was never the Founders' intent. To be honest, they saw it in part as a tool of suppression, if not actually opression, and they used it that way more than once.

I'd like to see it repealed too, though I have no illusions of that ever happening, but the reason I'd like it gone is that it's an anachronism in search of a purpose so every crazy SOB invents his own personal assortment of paranoid fantasies for why we have to have it.

John

I do. See posts #6 & #9.