The following is a primer on the "IInd" amendment and explains its rationale. This is every bit as applicable now as it was at the Framing.
NomoSendero, this one's for You II.
ARMS
Prologue:
There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law that comes to us not by training or custom or reading but from nature itself...That, if our lives are endangered, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.
Marcus Tullius Cicero on the floor of the Roman Senate
That the subjects which are Protestants, may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.
English Bill of Rights December 16,1689
L. W. Levy Origins of the Bill of Rights
...it is the right of the people to alter it or to abolish it [government], and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such Principles, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Declaration of Independence
Philadelphia 1776
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
2nd article of amendment
U.S. Constitution
ARMS, PROPERTY, PREEXISTENCE
The states as conceived under the Constitution have the immediate affections and sympathies of the people. Central government residing in its Republican form has no sense of immediacy in so far as its affections are to the people. It is the aggregation of the states and their autonomies in balance that constitutes federal government. Because of this, it is the collective assemblage of a people to a region replete with its culture, laws, and traditions that constitute a state. Therefore to assure the security of a state, in its autonomy, the right to keep and bear arms is a precondition necessary to that. It is necessarily important to parse the phrase keep and bear to arrive at a proper understanding of the IInd. The right to keep arms is the right, first and foremost, to keep property. This right of property is concurrently recognized in the takings provisions of the Vth amendment,...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
The Framers at the Constitutional convention believed in natural law rights. Edmund Randolph a proponent of natural rights advocated that natural rights were possessed by all individuals in a state of nature before they were first gathered into a politic society. All men are born equally free and independent and have inalienable rights that when they gather into a politic society they must protect and preserve by a constitution in government for their posterity. These natural rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and safety, and are held in a man himself as his property also. It may be said that a man has a property in his rights and rights in his property. Therefore, the right to keep property that is maintained to protect ones life and property is fundamental to preserving and protecting an individuals natural law rights. Keeping property that protects an individuals life and property assists in maintaining the state with the affections of the people. The common understanding of bearing arms in the context of the IInd is to bear arms in the preservation of the good order and discipline of the state, maintaining its continuity of laws and governance, the rights of its citizens and inhabitants inviolate, the integrity of its borders uncontested, and recognized in its autonomy. Coequal with the right to keep property is the right to bear arms maintaining the right of the state to its freedom through security. The rights to keep and bear are conjunctive in the IInd.
As much a right to property the IInd is prima facie of the prefix phrase ...well regulated militia... a recognition of the autonomy of the states. The enunciation of right goes to the people and not the State; therefore it exists independently irrespective of militias and States. Militias are armed only because the people are armed and possess the right to be armed. this specification of the right of the people is flatly stated no less than four times as amendments to the formal Constitution, the Ist, IInd, IVth, and IXth Amendments. Madison and the Framers correctly understood that rights applied to the people and not to the states. In protection of the right/s of the people it was necessary that the State maintain its security.
The Madison construction of the IInd starkly points out the collective right of the States, as a matter of necessity, to also have militias. The historical record a priori the Philadelphia convention shows that the states were Peloponnesian in character and in instances had engaged each other in open war over any number of issues, borders and territory not the least of motives. Relationships between the states were very unsettled, chaotic in many instances; the explicit wording and detailed listing of unqualified prohibitions placed on the states in Article 1:10 of the formal Constitution illustrates this reality.
Madison and the Framers realized that regardless of the mode of government both State and the general [Federal] governments were in fact but different agents and trustees of the people, constituted with different powers, and designed for different purposes. #46
Therefore, the purpose of citizen armies, militias, in each of the States not only maintained the States in their security individually with each other but also presented a formidable combination collectively to the potential of an unchecked rapacity and despotism of a general government, a condition from which they had lately escaped and to which they earnestly desired themselves and their posterity not to return, and is ipso facto a recognition of the autonomy of the States.
In a brilliantly worded expose, Federalist #46, Madison put the rationale for the civil right to bear arms and the concurrent necessity of the militia squarely before the first session of Congress and for as yet unknown generations of Americans to come:
Besides the advantage of being armed, which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments [the States], to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, form a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.
In the end the IInd is an elegant extrapolation of the architecture of Republican checks and balances impressed on the States.
When the IInd was proposed and ratified as a part of the Bill there was a general fear and mistrust of central government. This past mistrust in light of its historical context has been misinterpreted by some as a theoretical right to insurrection, and rebellion. The Formal Constitution states in its articles clearly that treason against the United States would consist in taking up arms and levying war against them. In a clear and unmistakable counter to this notion, the Supreme Court in 1951 articulated in Dennis .v. United States that though there might be a hypothetical value in the proposition that a right to revolution exists against a dictatorial government, that right ... is without force where the existing structure of government provides for peaceful and orderly change. The Court further added,
We reject any principle of government helplessness in the face of preparations for revolution, which principle, carried to its logical conclusion, must lead to anarchy. *
NOT A CALL TO REVOLUTION BUT TO THE COMMON UNDERSTANDING
Polemic to the Court
re: Dennis .v. United States 1951
The right of the people to overthrow the government through alteration or abolition exists as a primitive right of the people expressed in the blunt force words of the Declaration. This statement presumes that men have the natural right of defending themselves and avenging wrongs; therefore a presumption is made that people individually are armed or generally possess the unhindered capacity to be armed. That men have the property of self defense is self evident, the reality of which indisputably exists as a demonstrated fact in nature on a daily basis from the pygmy bush man of the veldt to the home dweller of the metropolitan jungle living behind barred doors and windows where even the powers of the police dare not tread. Taken from their first state of nature, that men collectively have the right of avenging wrongs, of avenging the wrongs of grasping despotic governments through abolition there is likewise a primitive right stated in the Declaration. That right is primitive because it is first, pure and undiluted existing as a catalyst to change and in itself is unchanged; it is first because it is fundamental, and has been demonstrated as fact in practical matters of politics, in extremis, throughout all of recorded human history from Julius Caesar to the continuum created by the Fourth of July, therefore it is not theoretical, hypothetical or conjectural; it is actual.
Men being armed and possessed of their rights to defend themselves and avenge wrongs it follows then that from this, the devolved right of keeping and bearing arms is pristine and the first and dearest of all of our American Freedoms because when everything else fails as it can and men cannot any longer avail themselves of established legal remedies, even in the continuum of a Representative Republic, the right to keep and bear arms can absolutely guarantee that men can live in safety free from fear. It is the one right upon which all other devolved rights hinge and can be said to exist at all.
* Origins of the Bill of Rights
Levy
Anchor's Away/Semper Fi
CPO Bull
