User profile: MTCicero

A bit of self-editing for the end of the last post:

"Most of our state and local police officers throughout the country (not to mention military personnel) are private gun owners and support an individual right to keep *and* bear arms; are they too the craven weaklings you would like to label the rest of us?"

While I recognize and understand the concerns that people like esquared have over matters of safety in a gun-owning society, I have little tolerance for his or her recourse to puerile insults and his or her general inability to engage others in a reasoned debate without devolving into childish name calling and close-mindedness (I do not mean to suggest that I am a conservative, regardless of what my handle might imply, but it is quite tiresome to see how liberals, who repeatedly pride themselves on progressive thought, are often so good at being selectively open-minded). Sir or madam esquared, while the ownership of firearms in a free society is not without its own set of particular issues both troublesome and problematic, the fact remains that the inborn right, merely acknowledged in and certainly not created by the Second Amendment, to defend oneself against all manifestations of physical violence (be this in the form of criminal assault or--much worse, yet thankfully more remote for most of us living in the western world of the twenty-first century--in the form of abusive government) is one that the Founding Fathers honored very seriously on an individual level. Regardless of the problems caused by those who exploit the rights we all enjoy, we cannot disregard the fundamental importance of said rights. You cannot punish the majority for the infractions of the minority. If you wish to eradicate from the Constitution the acknowledgment and protection of the right in question, you endanger thereby all of the other innate civil rights protected by the same document. You cannot, esquared, sacrifice one freedom for the sake of imagined security without the risk of losing all the other freedoms that remain behind. Do not allow yourself to be so close-minded; educate yourself further on the issue; take on some personal responsibility and discipline, and, if you have never done so, learn firsthand what it is like to shoot and own a firearm and do not simply believe what you see on TV or in the movies; accept the fact that educated and progressive-minded individuals throughout history (and into the present) have enjoyed and held sacred the right of free people to own weapons for their own defense and that of their homes and families against those who would do them harm without regard for the law. In short, not all gun owners are the uneducated and ignorant cowards you would like, in your apparently simple, hate-filled, and uninformed world, to believe that they are. Most of our state and local police officers throughout the country (not to mention military personnel) are private gun owners and support an individual right to keep are bear arms; are they too the craven weaklings you would like to label the rest of us? Are you, in your own mind, superior to them as well? And at what point do agents of the state become superior to the citizens themselves? I seem to have missed the point at which you explained that part of your curious assumptions.

I second gunrunner1911's suggestion that one read the "Second Amendment Primer" by Les Adams. It is a thoroughly researched work, albeit one that is now slightly out-of-date since the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the D.C. gun ban had not been made when the book was published. As gunrunner1911 points out, Adams started his inquiry as a skeptic of the individual right to keep and bear arms, yet finally realized that, as any honest and informed person who takes the time to study the matter must conclude, the historical, legal, and cultural background of the issue points decidedly and without qualification to an individual and not a collective or state's rights interpretation of the Second Amendment (or of any other amendment in the Bill of Rights).

Having said this, I would like to add a further point, since gunrunner1911 has brought up the language of the Constitution itself in his or her last post. While I do not quite agree that the document is rendered in a "foreign language," I would like to point out that Madison and the other Founding Fathers were well trained not only in matters of state, but also in other disciplines of the classical European tradition, grammar being among these. They knew what they were writing and they meant what they said. The so-called "qualifying clause" of the Second Amendment--"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state"--often highlighted by those hostile to the individual rights interpretation of the said amendment, is, in fact, what English grammarians would call a nominative absolute clause. That is, a clause containing a present-participial form of the verb "to be" (i.e., "being") whose function is not necessarily to create or limit a subsequent dependent clause, but to act adverbially as an element that merely states the circumstances in which another given independent statement is true. In other words, the latter half of the amendment--"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"--is a simple, free-standing clause, while the former portion of the amendment--"A well-regulated militia, *being* necessary to the security of a free state"--serves only to highlight the fact that the basic and inborn individual right to self preservation, identified in the latter portion of the amendment and recognized by all rational men and by nature herself since the beginning of time, is even more precious in light of the fact that governments throughout history have abused, do abuse, and will continue to abuse those beneath them who have not recourse to that ultimate expression of individual self-determination, symbolized in a free republic by the armed citizen, to resist encroachment. More simply put, the statement that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" remains unassailable as a stand-alone declaration of truth, regardless of whether or not the sentence is joined with the adverbial clause previously discussed.