First off, you are too late for any comment about the text to hold any water. 2008 Heller and 2010 McDonald settled that. It is an individuals right to keep and bear, not collective, never was. One term that came from Heller was “dangerous and unusual”, make note of the and.
Next, well regulated never meant lots of regulations. It meant well trained and in good working order. 1800s Oxford dictionary.
> It is an individuals right to keep and bear, not collective, never was.
Prior to 2008 it was. New SCOTUS precedent doesn't magically change the past.
> Next, well regulated never meant lots of regulations. It meant well trained and in good working order. 1800s Oxford dictionary.
The 1766 definition reads:
"Properly controlled, governed, or directed; subject to guidance or regulations."
Textualism/Originalism is just cherry picking things like this to justify the decision the majority was going to make anyways, which is why someone sought out just the right definition from just the right source from decades after the drafting of the 2nd amendment.
It's weird that they had to resort to this, because you could totally make a convincing case for private firearm ownership based on state militias and how they evolved. There's room for guaranteeing the individual ownership right under the Militia act of 1903 - any male aged 17 to 45 is eligible for "unorganized" state militia service unconnected to the various state-level military branches. That apparently is not their desired outcome, so one presumes this is why they did not pursue this avenue.
>Prior to 2008 it was. New SCOTUS precedent doesn't magically change the past.
It really wasn't. Had Miller not be basically defaulted on by death, but decided anyhow... this would have been clear earlier. Just because you don't like it - never made it any less of an individual right... You know, the second one in the section where all the other individual civil rights are - or was that an organizing mistake on their part?
Your definition is very interesting in that it seems to be a clear case of revisionist history, or a complete fabrication. Post a link, please.
Because here are quotes using the term, and not one in the 1700/1800s implies regulation as in government regulation [0] [1]. Working properly, in good working order, effective.
Do me a favor and read the definition of Militia as writ in Article 1 section 8 of the constitution. Then give the Second Amendment another read, since that is what it is referring to with the usage of the word "Militia". Then go read the Militia acts of 1792/1795/1862 and finally 1903. It's all really straightforward, and each thing logically follows the next. Miller follows along in that vein. There's nothing revisionist about it; it's all really straightforward.
Where things get crooked in the reasoning is literally the Heller decision. Somehow it refers to the first Militia act with the decision referring to "able bodied men", while then concluding that "Militia" in the 2A does not actually mean "Militia". It's pretty bonkers.
You seem to be as willing to cherry pick as the conservative SCOTUS majority was in 2008. It's kind of nuts, because what I cited above, actually does already provide for private firearm ownership (with some boundaries around it). It's quite obvious that the reason for the much more convoluted reasoning in Heller is because the conservative majority wanted to greatly expand gun rights, and had to work backward from that goal to something that gave them enough of a fig leaf to ignore the (massive, self-evident) history of Militias and their regulation.
Now - if I needed more to support my point (which any honest reading would make clear that I don't), you can have a look at the influence the Federalist Society had on the Heller case:
Note the 2 members of the society who voted on Heller, and the extra ones which currently sit on the court. And also note the 2 additional members who have some sympathetic relationship to the group although are not explicitly mentioned as members. That gets you 4/5 of the 5 votes on Heller. 5 sitting SCOTUS as of this writing.
QED, Heller was highly partisan and a break from hundreds of years of precedent. You'd be hard pressed to make an honest case otherwise.
"Settled" means that it's never, ever going to change, because the composition of the court isn't going to change. At least not during my lifetime, and probably not yours.
It doesn't matter whether it's "justified". The Constitution means what five people on the Court say it means. And if that comes from talking to James Madison on the ouija board, the rest of us have to live with it.
In that sense, it's "settled". And our daily school shootings are just a fact that we have to accept.
Of the four court members under 60, three are conservative.
Of the remaining five members, it takes only two conservatives to ensure that the court remains that way. Assuming that future nominations are equally distributed, there's about a 2/3 chance that at least two will be conservative.
And let's just say that I don't think it will be randomly distributed. The existing court composition has a thumb on the scale of future nominees. The party that nominates conservative judges has won only one election outright this century, but until recently only one opposing candidate had been able to win -- including once because the Supreme Court directly stepped in.
It's harder to calculate just what that means, but I think it's sufficient to affirm that the odds are very long against being able to generally reverse this court's direction before Halley's Comet returns.
> "Settled" means that it's never, ever going to change, because the composition of the court isn't going to change. At least not during my lifetime, and probably not yours.
I am confident that the composition of the court will change, during my lifetime. I suspect yours as well.
FWIW, I do have a strong opinion on school shootings, of course. I am not comfortable with the assertion that there's something uniquely broken about Americans that means we can't have RTKBA. But if there is, I'm not confident that eliminating 2A would resolve the real problem.
You are allowed to be mad at a ruling you cannot change. Just don’t drag me into your feelings. Maybe it is overruled someday, that’s pretty rare. Maybe you can point to another amendment that made it almost 250 before being interpreted to say something, it does not?
I'm not mad at all. I have no feelings on the issue whatsoever, honestly.
But you're also wrong if you think there's meaningful precedent.
And BTW the entire Bill of Rights is the same age. All are subject to interpretation by the sitting Court.
...
FWIW, I would place 2A lowest on my list of important entries in the BoR though. They're all important because if one is threatened then they are all threatened, but I think 2A is probably net-harmful in the current world. If there was an A/B test, with and without, I'd choose without.
2A has transformed from this vaguely self-protective/deterministic right into this bizarro testament to machismo and the absurd idea that carrying makes one safer from fellow humans, and the frankly asinine idea that it's insurance against government overreach. The statistics, and clear thinking, prove otherwise. Are you that guy? Don't be that guy.
> the frankly asinine idea that it's insurance against government overreach
Why is it asinine? It is precisely intended to be the insurance of last resort against a government that turns tyrannical. If your claim is that the might of the US military is so overwhelming that a bunch of rednecks toting AR-15s could be of no match, well, Vietnam and Afghanistan both proved that a determined and armed population is actually quite hard to conquer even for the foremost military power.
The presence of "that guy" doesn't invalidate any Constitutional right. Neo-Nazis wanting to march through Skokie is "those guys" taking the 1st Amendment to the absurd. You could say that the Miranda warning arose as a result of "those guys" defense attorneys taking the 5th amendment to the absurd. They are all still rights held by the people.
It's almost not worth trying to explain it. Some people are wired in a way that makes taking care of their own fate terrifying and they're extremely happy to outsource that to a government they know full well to be inefficient and ineffective.
*Tanks and drones don't stand on street corners.* F18s can't enforce a curfew. No amount of equipment is going to control a population. We've seen it over. Now all of that is putting aside that anyone seriously thinks our military wouldn't crumble in a second if directed internally? They're reeling from kicking kids out that didn't want covid shots and failing to recruit, watch what happens when even Career Srgt Bootlicker is asked to open fire on a street that looks just like his back home.
I'm not interested in entertaining the idea I need firearms to stop the US military. I'm cautious I would need to protect mine against the people that would support something like that.
I'm pro-gun ownership but European. To me you're especially right about that part
> It meant well trained and in good working order.
In WV, I've seen people who barely knew how to handle hunting rifles, handle semi-automatique rifles. It's terrifying. Any hunter in my country seeing people handle firearms like those two would've reported them to have their license revoked and firearms locked until further training. (not that hunting permit/license are a big thing in the area btw, I think a lot are hunting kinda illegaly, but well, the woods are shared, and some really need basic training. ).
The court make-up isn't expected to change for decades. The previous President appointed three young members who will be there for a very long time, adding to three existing members. It will be many, many years before the composition of the court is likely to shift significantly.
Next, well regulated never meant lots of regulations. It meant well trained and in good working order. 1800s Oxford dictionary.