All good to know, and a big part of why I will not return to the States any time soon. Europe just seems so much saner. I find the discussion of the fineries of what the EU may regulate, what the German federal government may regulate, and what the States can tell the feds to keep their hands off of more interesting because the Germans fight it out in parliament and revised their constitution accordingly.
The famed German aversion to ambiguity is good when dealing with things like this.
Because, clearly, the 2nd Amendment reads “… the right of companies to sell arms, shall not be infringed”.
I mean, as bonkers as the law is at it is, this is quite some judicial yoga by S&W.
It wasn’t particularly ambiguous until the right and the fire arms industry spent billions and 4 decades making it that way.
Blame Citizens United. Corporations now have individual constitutional rights, so that would include 2nd amendment rights.
Bat wielder has the home field advantage.
Sure, the company may bear as many arms as they please…
That’s an interesting take in support of white supremacy, seeing that these are all depictions of territorial disputes over land stolen from the First Peoples, taken by genocide and broken treaties. If anyone should have been saved by the right to self-defense, it would have been them.
I think it’s only a matter of time before some one like Amazon asserts that.
LONG history of big companies buying military grade weaponry to suppress labor. Amazon is already hiring the Pinkertons. Might as well be the 1880s again.
Funny how the 2A folks always gloss over the “well-regulated” right there at the beginning…
I guess it’s because I’m a tall dude with an arm reach who can nail someone about 2 meters away (just ask my daughter how far I can reach with her LARPing toys 
)
I also have nothing worth stealing except my work laptops.
You want my 2 laptops? You’re gonna be right in that 2 meter mark. You touch my wife or kids? Then things go from a bat to my Wüsthofs. And I’m pretty good with either.
I’m not that historically versed in that period, but is this yet another ill we can trace to slavery? That is, slave owners wanted to make sure they always had the access to materiel necessary to put down slave revolts? Or, as with the Third Amendment (quartering of soldiers), is it just the result of garden-variety paranoia and resentment of the recent British overlords? It is so exceedingly odd that no other modern democracy (wait: no other country) has saw fit to enshrine this glorious right in their constitutions.
It is a shame the founders needed to put this in the Constitution (where it will stay, for eternity), rather than leaving it to the first business of the Washington Administration. A federal law outlawing any local state restrictions on bearing arms would have had the same effect.
My friend Sean put gun ownership / usage fairly succinctly.
Long guns are for hunting.
Shotguns are for hunting and home defense.
Hand guns are for killing people.
ETA: Kansas rural, born and bred. Grew up hunting and have family who literally survived the 80s thanks to semi-legal hunting (and by that I mean Full On deer poaching). I have no issues with individual gun ownership. I’d just really like it to be modeled after car ownership; registration, license, insurance.
Banning handguns would very likely be the most effective means of reducing gun violence in America
There are folks who promote the Ar15 as a home defense weapon, which seems strange considering the muzzle velocity.
2A sorts only really know the second half of the full text and that’s all they want or need
Being part of the militia is not a requirement for the right. It would be like saying freedom of speech only applies to the press because it is mentioned specifically.
While one of the reasons for the rights was enumerated in the 2nd Amendment, it isn’t the only reason for it, nor a requirement for one to have that right protected.
Here is how it was supposed to work: everyone was armed, so that you could pull from that armed populace an armed militia in times of war. If you look at the requirements for militias in the late 1700s, it required you had x amount of powder and ball ammo, as well as other supplies to make you self sufficient and equipped. You then met at certain times for drills and practice. (That is what regulated meant in the context of the amendment - a militia that was well equipped and in working order.)
But again - not a requirement. You needed a larger number of people at the ready, so that you could take the best of them (a much smaller percentage) to form your army. If only a small fraction of people were armed, your army would be forced to take what it could get. This system was what was put into action in the War of 1812, with mixed results.
As for making one safer or not - yes there is a risk in gun ownership, but that can be greatly mitigated taking proper precautions. Looking at accidental death rates, it is very low considering how many people own firearms. There is also a risk in private pool ownership and owning ladders and stairs in your house, as way more people accidentally die from falls and drownings (and poisonings).
Malicious use of firearms isn’t a safety issue, it is a crime issue. In that case the ownership facilitated the death, but the reason for why it happened was most likely due to being involved in illicit activities, or domestic abuse. If one uses those stats to bolster your claim, then it make ownership even riskier. I don’t consider that a good faith argument, though. YMMV.
I am not sure on the details of this case on whether NJ has a valid point or not, and vice versa. I will have to go read more about it.
Even then, current interpretation is built on a house of cards. They depend on the statement “shall not be infringed” and then ignore it when it comes to infants, prisoners, felons, air passengers, etc etc etc.
Considering that it’s by far the strongest statement of rights in the Constitution if the first clause is ignored, there is no legal justification to infringe upon the right of a mass shooter by taking away his weapons, even immediately after using them to kill dozens of people. Nor is there any legal justification to infringe upon the right of any given kindergartener from bringing a loaded weapon to school for show and tell.
Or, ya know, we can make sane and rational limitations on who, what, where and when firearms are permissible; but that requires us to invoke the first phrase of the 2A. Once we do that, we get back to the requirement of “a well regulated militia.”
Not neccisarily. Although that came up.
The strict militia interpretation was the original intent, and the dominant interpretation for quite some time.
The idea was to prevent the Federal Government from restricting the ability of States to form militias by restricting access to fire arms.
The collective right crept in through the practicalities of doing that at the time. Combined with a vague right to keep and bear arms in English Common law.
The phrasing of the 2nd Amendment was apparently drawn from common law, and massaged into the militia framing.
Though one of the reasons states wanted militias was to guard against Slave revolts. Which were a big concern around the time the US was forming. The Haitian Revolution when down around the same time as the Constitution and Bill of Rights did.
The other end of it was a debate about whether a strong Federal Government was better than State primacy, and a centralized standing army vs a distributed Miltia based military.
The Articles of Confederation had run with a week Federal Government which could not raise an Army on it’s own. The nation nearly collapsed. So the Constitution went with a “why not both” approach on a lot of things.
You do not need a fire arm for home defense. Especially not in rural Kansas.
The chances of anything actually happening are minimal. And even if it did, introducing a firearm to the situation is far, far more likely to lead to harm to yourself or a family member than anything else.
As far as justifications go “I like target shooting with handguns” is a better one than “I need shotguns for defense”. The former is an honest statement of practical use, the latter a macho fantasy people learned from advertising.
This is a big part of what makes the advertising angle on going after fire arms manufacturers so potentially fruitful.
The central “need” justification of the right wing is demonstrably false and likely pretty harmful. Together with the “tactical” framing of much firearms marketing. Which varies from implicitly to explicitly about how good these things kill. There’s a really strong case for culpability on the part of manufacturers.
It’s the approach the Sandy Hook case is taking (and succeeding with). It very much looks like that’s what Grewal is doing, along with multiple states looking at the NRA.
S&W is probably trying to cut this approach off at the knees. By establishing that such marketing is intimately connected to individual 2nd amendment rights.
the right to make fictional macho action movies is in the 1st amendment, not the 2nd
Those guys seem insecure in their manhood.
I’m only amateur-grade when it comes to history, so I’d defer to a professional like Mindysan to answer your question. But I can’t help but see the two great, foundational sins of the US, genocide and slavery, as being only a couple steps removed from any modern plague you can think of. It’s like the worst version of “six degrees of separation.”
