Thread by @AlexandraErin

It's no accident that the #2A mentions the people and not persons. It establishes a collective right, not an individual one, reflecting the preference for a citizen militia over a standing army of professional soldiers (mercenaries).

"But how does that apply when we have a standing army of citizen-soldiers? And absent a militia, how can 'the people' meaningfully keep and bear arms if not as individual persons?"

Good point! You're right, the #2A is obsolete to the point of meaninglessness in the modern world.

I would argue that the existence of our military in and of itself satisfies the wording of the amendment. Our military is under civilian command, headed by a president elected by the people. Therefore the people are armed, like no people in history ever have been.

The second amendment does not forbid individual control, in other words. It forbids collective disarmament.

Gun confiscation and banning? Fully constitutional.

Decommissioning the military? Unconstitutional, absent an alternative arrangement for our collective defense.

You can tell that gun control laws and confiscations are Constitutional because the people who wrote the Constitution practiced them.

You can tell the idea it's about arming individuals to stand up to government overreach is a fantasy, because they used militias to fight that.

All the Republican tyrants tweeting "shall not be infringed" are accidentally correct.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed by gun control laws.

Kyle Rittenhouse might lose his favorite dildo.

But the people will still be armed.

I know you have a Twitter account of your own, since you're replying to me, where you're free to make whatever argument you want. So I don't think you're actually asking my permission so much as opining about what *I* should be arguing.

And I disagree.

https://twitter.com/charis_zoi/status/1532696350034362368

First, calling it irrelevant to modern life is a soft serve to the Republicans, who need only answer "Then pass an amendment to repeal it, if you can." Until we do that... or throw out the Constitution as a whole... the second amendment is the highest law of the land.

Which brings me to the second point of why I'm talking about the interpretation: because it IS irrelevant and useless to modern life, and the correct, originalist interpretation is both absolutely crucial to that, and makes repeal symbolic rather than essential.

When I said it was obsolete in our modern world back in the second tweet of this thread, I didn't mean "So we can just pretend it isn't there." We don't have to. It does NOTHING. It asks nothing of us and does nothing to us.

When conservative activist judges led by Scalia "read into" the second amendment to "find" an individual right in Heller... which only happened in 2008, not even a decade and a half ago... this required them to pretend that the #2A says things it does not.

In order to turn the #2A into something that has legal and practical applicability in the 21st century, Scalia et al had to pretend that 18th century legal scholars would have said "people" when they meant "more than one person", as someone writing informally today might.

And of course, it doesn't even say "the rights of people", but "the right [singular] of the people [singular] to keep and bear arms".

You have to willfully misread "the right of the people" as "a person has a right". It's very distinctly a collective reference.

A lot of focus has been given on the punctuation coordinating the "well-regulated militia" clause of the sentence with the rest of the text, to determine whether it was meant to have force of law or be read as a non-binding statement of intent.

In my opinion, that was a deliberate distraction, a bit of legal/verbal sleight-of-hand to disguise how blatantly the rest of the amendment was being re(mis)interpreted.

Whether anyone thinks the militia part is binding or not, there's no mention of any individual rights in the remainder of the text.

Sometimes when I point this out, someone objects, "But how would that even work?"

The militia part explains that.

If the militia part is taken to be advisory rather than binding... well, that means we are freed from any obligation to have militias to say the amendment is satisfied. It doesn't mean an individual right springs into existence out of nothing.

Geez, I'm terrible at the 6th amendment. I always forget how it goes. Maybe you can help me out by filling in a blank spot?

"The right of the people to be secure in their _____, houses, papers, and effects..."

Be a pal. What's the word I can't remember?

https://twitter.com/misgunception/status/1532699671927332869

As for the first amendment's right to protest... the wording of the amendment contains clear instructions to Congress: they shall pass no laws that do these things. Whether the implied rights are held to be collective or individual matters far less.

Now, if the second amendment is meant to function similarly, they worded it awfully toothlessly in comparison, didn't they? A passive "shall not be infringed". No injunction at Congress. No instructions for how this outcome should come to pass.

If you read through the entire bill of rights, you'll notice that several of the amendments mention the people, while others mention individuals: a soldier, the owner of a home, a person, the accused, etc.

You can choose to believe that these word choices are purely random, which calls into question whether we should put so much stock into the wording of these amendments as we do.

But you'd need a really strong argument to persuade me that this is the case.

Taking the wording of the first amendment literally, it lays out that the government doesn't have the power to restrict multiple forms of expression.

Taking the wording of the second amendment literally, it advises that the country must not be left unarmed.

And we're not.

If there were no privately owned guns in the entire United States, we would still be the least unarmed nation in the history of the world. There would be no need for any ruling power to bring in Hessian mercenaries. Which is the point.

The Founding Fathers might quibble with the way we've effected our armed status, as they were dubious of standing armies for similar reasons to why they were dubious of foreign mercenaries.

But Scalia et all say the "well-regulated militia" part is advisory, so sucks to be them?

Yep. The ol' "This is our sacred foundational legal document, which we wrote by flipping coins and pulling Scrabble tiles out of a bag." argument.

https://twitter.com/bexone/status/1532707505150697472

And the thing is... even Scalia in Heller didn't try to claim gun control was wholly unconstitutional. (Which suggests his misinterpretation was conscious and deliberate). The current GOP focus on "shall not be infringed" goes much further than he did...

...both in dreaming up an imaginary individual right that isn't mentioned in the Constitution, and in willfully throwing out portions of an amendment they claim to hold sacred in order to uphold that imagined right.

I guess in a few years they'll just be down to "shall not" and then "not". The GOP has long been the Party of No, so it would be fitting to have their entire understanding of the 2nd Amendment... of the Constitution itself, basically... boiled down to a single negation.