The Truth About The Right To Keep And Bear Arms

“I don’t think legitimate sportsmen are going to say, ‘I need an assault weapon to go hunting,’” Cuomo said, according to the New York Times. “There is a balance here — I understand the rights of gun owners; I understand the rights of hunters.”

Cuomo indicated the state will likely force some kind of permit process on owners of semi-automatic “assault weapons.” In addition to generating revenue and expanding the size and reach of government, the effort will allow the state to confiscate the weapons of citizens who do not comply.

“Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option — keep your gun but permit it,” the governor said.

This is the governor of one of the largest states (population-wise) in the country! We have devolved to a point in the gun rights argument that we’re reverting back to the very thing from which e sought independence. The Declaration of Independence lists several grievances that led to the Revolutionary War.

King George was an oppressive ruler. He quartered troops in private homes to keep the citizens in check. He forced sailors to take up arms against fellow contrymen. He taxed them into oblivion without any representation. He made up laws on the fly to deal with trouble makers and denied them due process.

In Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1803), St. George Tucker, a lawyer, Revolutionary War militia offcer, legal scholar, and later a U.S. District Court judge (appointed by James Madison in 1813), wrote of the 2nd Amendment that, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.”

Yes, I’m a nerd. I read and RESEARCH the meanings of the Constitution, especially the most fundamental and important of our rights. Delving into the Appendix, Tucker explains further the meaning of the 2nd Amendment (emphasis is mine).

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty …. The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

Sound familiar? Today’s progressive movement has sought to turn the 2nd Amendment’s meaning into something it isn’t. Our lofty politicians – protected with their throngs of security guards, armored vehicles, and other protections – and their lapdog media have succeeded at convincing the “low information voters,” as Rush Limbaugh likes to say, that this right is meant to apply to hunters only. Or in your home only.

In addition, they have tried to tell us that even if we were hunters, we “don’t need those kinds of weapons for hunting.” Nearly every argument I have with a progressive gun grabber usually incorporates the statements that there is no use for any type of magazine that can carry more than 10 rounds or to own a weapon that looks black and evil. Personally, I think that’s racist that they are trying to ban so-called “black rifles.”

Another constitutional scholar to our Founders, William Rawle, wrote a book in 1829 called, “A View of the Constitution of the United States of America.” In this book, he talks about the reach and authority of the 2nd Amendment while also discussing the limitations on those that would attempt to circumvent it. He, rightly so, points out that the 27 words that make up the 2nd Amendment are composed of two, separate clauses; not one run-on sentence. Of the first clause (a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free state), he writes:

Although in actual war, the services of regular troops are confessedly more valuable; yet, while peace prevails, and in the commencement of a war before a regular force can be raised, the militia form the palladium of the country. They are ready to repel invasion, to suppress insurrection, and preserve the good order and peace of government. That they should be well regulated, is judiciously added. A disorderly militia is disgraceful to itself, and dangerous not to the enemy, but to its own country. The duty of the state government is, to adopt such regulations as will tend to make good soldiers with the least interruptions of the ordinary and useful occupations of civil life. In this all the Union has a strong and visible interest.

Some would point to the National Guard and say that this is what constitutes the “well regulated Militia” of the 2nd Amendment. However, such is not the case. The National Guard is frequently called upon to take on standing military operations. Our politicians and government have done a stellar job at preventing “the people” from forming their own “well regulated Militias” by labeling such groups as extremist, hate, or seditious collections. Can anyone honestly say that if our government became so corrupt as to turn on its own people that the National Guard would be in place to oppose the regular military forces? We all know that the Guard’s troops are equipped with mostly secondhand equipment and arms. If – and this is a very long shot – the country was ordered into martial law either the National Guard would be called up to augment the active forces or would be defeated without support if it stood up for the people.

This is why militias comprised of “the people” are included in the Constitution. Imagine if the people were allowed to form these militias in Los Angeles before the LA riots. Neighborhoods of people could defend their homes and businesses. Heck, one only needs to look at this picture from the riots of what property owners were doing to defend and protect their property. These citizens were protecting Korea town.

There are videos online of the LA Riots of literal gun battles between looters and armed merchants protecting their assets. There were no police officers anywhere nearby and it was left to the citizen to protect himself and his belongings.

But, Rawle pointed out the distinctions in his book between the two clauses in the 2nd Amendment and there are two. Of the second clause – the right of the people to keep and bear arms – he said the following:

The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious (ie: criminal – CJ) attempt could only be made under some general pretence by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.

Rawle also understood that such rights are encumbered with certain responsibilities. Just because you have a right to “keep and bear arms” doesn’t mean you have a right to be an ass. Obviously, there is a certain etiquette to exercising all of our rights. For example, you can’t shout “FIRE” or “BOMB” in any crowded environment so as to induce panic. Rawle identified the limitation to exercising your 2nd Amendment rights this way:

This right ought not, however, in any government, to be abused to the disturbance of the public peace.

An assemblage of persons with arms, for an unlawful purpose, is an indictable offence, and even the carrying of arms abroad by a single, individual, attended with circumstances giving just reason to fear that he purposes to make an unlawful use of them, would be sufficient cause to require him to give surety of the peace. If he refused he would be liable to imprisonments.

In other words, ordering a Big Mac with fries and a Diet Dr. Pepper with a pistol in your hand would probably be defined as a “disturbance of the public peace.” Walking around the mall with an AK strapped to your back would probably also qualify as “an indictable offence.”

Rawle makes it quite clear that “the People” refers to individuals and not the military, or Militia. This isn’t someone over 200 years after the amendment was written trying to opine as to the true meaning of its words. This is of a man who was present during the debates and knew what the Founders meant when it was written.

Another founding contemporary was Justice Story, a Supreme Court Associate Justice appointed by James Madison in 1811. He wrote a book called “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States” in 1833. Again, this is a man that was present for the ensuing discussion and explanatory speeches by the Founders and writers of our Constitution. He obviously never imagined that we would have such Constitution-hating liberals filling offices to which they were sworn to protect and defend the very thing they hate.

The modern-day Democrat party talks more about the need to change the Constitution – and specifically the need to change the 2nd Amendment – than they talk about defending and supporting it. Without studying the words of those actually present during the 1880s to 1890s, they deign to just make up stuff and simply define that sacred document as “living” and “breathing.” Mayor Bloomingturd and Governor Cuckuomo obviously never “duly reflected upon the subject” of the meaning of the 2nd Amendment.

The importance of this article will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. 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.

In his essay “Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution,” which was published in the Federal Gazette on June 18, 1789 Tench Coxe wrote that it is the responsibility of the people (again, speaking as individuals) to be the final check on government. He writes:

As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.

I could go on and on. There is simply no factual basis behind the 2nd Amendment referring specifically to hunting or even that it was intended to restrict certain arms simply because of their physical appearance. Today’s liberal elite and their zombie-like followers won’t “carry [them]selves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed” as Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Johnson in 1823 (please read the great book, “The Complete Jefferson” to find other nuggets of intellectual knowledge on the founding of this country). Instead, they assign new and evolving meaning that suits their collective agendas.

“The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” — Thomas Jefferson

Perhaps, this is really why the rulers in Washington are so intent on taking away our weapons. Let there be no doubt now as we engage our intellectual inferiors on this subject about the true meaning and intent of our Founders when they debated and passed the Bill of Rights and specifically the 2nd Amendment. It’s time to put gun control to bed once and for all.

And as for the belief that “if we just ban high capacity magazines, the shooter won’t kill as many people” I offer you the following video on just how long it takes a trained or practiced shooter to change the magazine on these so-called “assault rifles.”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/Hx0JzYcwUiY[/youtube]