stanc Wrote:"The left keeps trying to push farther and farther on this but was stopped in it's tracts." ~ montana
With that court case. OK!
stanc Wrote:All of that is so wrong. Only the organized militia was required to be armed. The unorganized militia was (and is) a manpower pool not required to be armed.http://constitutionalmilitia.org/well-re...d-militia/
The legal history formed the context in which the Articles, the Constitution, and the Second Amendment were adopted. It provided the standards according to which Militia were judged to be “well regulated”—standards which were already fixed, which had proven eminently workable over time, and with which everyone in every State was or could easily have become familiar. Indeed, the very source of the term “regulated” in respect of the Militia is the body of pre-constitutional Militia Acts. (footnote 1) And the principles these Acts applied uniquely defined “well regulated”—or legislators would never have persisted in employing them in one statute after another, decade after decade. So no need existed for the Articles, then the Constitution, and finally the Second Amendment to specify in detail what these standards were. The “well regulated and disciplined militia” required by the Articles; “the Militia of the several States” which the original Constitution incorporated into its federal system under the authority of Congress “[t]o provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining”; and the “well regulated Militia” the Second Amendment identified as “necessary to the security of a free State” then existed in fact within each of the several States, “well regulated” in both fact and law according to the principles developed, proven, and universally applied during pre-constitutional times. Thus, because they arose out of a long and consistent history, and their meanings were well known in fact and well settled in law, the words and phrases used in the Articles, in the original Constitution, and in the Second Amendment must be taken to have been used or incorporated by reference in the exact sense they had acquired during the pre-constitutional era.
Surely WE THE PEOPLE would never have included “the Militia of the several States” as permanent parts of their federal system, and assigned explicitly to them alone the all-important responsibilities “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions”, had they not believed, for good and sufficient reasons on adequate evidence, that those very Militia, as they existed in 1788 and were anticipated to continue to exist throughout the immediate future, were “well regulated” in both fact and law.
You are correct in saying they are not required to be armed. But they have every right to be armed.The most recent landmark decision issued by the Supreme Court came in 2008’s Heller v. District of Columbia, which held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a firearm for lawful purposes, such as self-defense. The case was related to Washington D.C.’s ban on handgun ownership and its requirement that rifles and shotguns be be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" in the home — both of which were found to be unconstitutional.
The Heller decision also held that the right to gun ownership under the Second Amendment isn’t unlimited, meaning that it doesn’t permit individuals "to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose." The majority opinion, written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts held that:
"The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."
stanc Wrote:http://www.constitution.org/mil/mil_act_1792.htm I don't see anything about women being subject to militia duty.You must not have read it. Quote:
The right of the "CITIZENS" to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”
Last time I looked, women were citizens LOL.