It's entirely false that our "freedom" comes from this hobby, and I wouldn't want the kind of 'freedom' bought by 30,000 dead civilians annually anyway.
Obdigore, on 22 February 2018 - 08:55 PM, said:
There was absolutely nothing included in any writings about keeping the United States government in line with armed force.
Here's where I will grant Nico something. There is an element of the 2nd Amendment that imagines the States (as in the individual states) protecting themselves from the federal government. That might seem a little quaint, but the 3rd Amendment (the one about not being forced to lodge soldiers) may seem quaint too, but who knows how things would have shaken out if we didn't have it? But this means a few specific things about the 2nd:
Most importantly, it's a States' Rights compromise. And we ALL know what states' rights is a euphemism for. The 2nd Amendment is one of the first examples of the same 'compromise' our country has made time and again. So along that narrow line, it's fair imo to say you're both right.
More generally, it imagines a United States where the individual states really are more sovereign. There actually is a bit of quaintness about it, relative to how we think of nations now.
It's not explicit in the text, but like the 3rd Amendment, it was written in reflection of a time of emergency, with emergency situations in mind. Regardless of where they're stored, the guns come out for well-regulated militia use in collective defense of the State.
There's absolutely nothing in the 2nd Amendment in the text or historically that addresses or even imagines individual self defense. Perhaps the founders thought it was obvious from other aspects of the body of the Constitution that self defense was a natural right. But that's what makes the 2nd such a navel-gazing dunce cap of an amendment: it's a lousy compromise between high-minded ideals, statecraft, and the special interests of a few very rich, very slave-owning men, and it stinks up the rest of the Bill of Rights with how obvious that is.
And speaking of special interests, the individual right to bear arms was excreted by SCOTUS in 2008 in the Heller decision, the culmination of the gun industry lobby pouring money into our politics.