@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
OmSigDavid wrote:In any event, the rights defended by the 2nd Amendment ARE NATURAL RIGHTS, like the right to believe what u wish to believe.
In all due respect, I think you need to read the
historical and philosophical background of the right to bear arms.
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), for one, is unambiguous in stating that the right to bear arms is a civil, procedural right, comparable to like the right to due process in court and to petitioning the government. It's not a natural right like life, liberty, and property.
With the fullness of counter-respect,
tho I admit that in his
Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765),
Blackstone is perfectly free to comment on the Laws of England,
I find myself in the position of Rene Descartes, when he uttered:
"Cogito ergo sum"; it was plain to him beyond doubt
that he coud not think if he did not exist.
No right can precede nor outrank the right to defend one 's life,
in the face of predatory violence. I am very confident that the
Founding Fathers agreed with me. Indeed, thay
expected everyone
to do that, as a matter of personal responsibility, to the extent
that when the Founding Instruments were enacted in the 1700s,
thay had no police anywhere in the USA.
The potential institution of a police force
(to which thay referred as "a standing army") was an object
of dread and abhorence, both in America and in England,
until the following century.
As a time-honored right of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
I have been informed that ancient Jewish principle
recognizes that it was a sin to fail to defend oneself,
if one were attacked.
Colonial America had its own gun control laws:
"every...inhabitant of this colony provide for himself and each
under him able to bear arms, a sufficient musket...with [ammunition]
and for each default ...forfeit ten shillings." (New Plymouth 1632)
For the sake of safety, in the spirit of today's mandatory seatbelt legislation,
colonial gun control laws prohibited going to church or to work,
in an unarmed condition. (Virginia 1631)
Clergymen checked to make sure that their congregants were well armed.
These laws were socially paradigmatic as, since 1512,
English boys aged 7 to 17 were required to be armed,
at their fathers' expense, with adapted longbows
deemed devastating since the 1346 Battle of Crecy and
the 1415 Battle of Agincourt (guns being less accurate,
before invention of rifling) and "bring them up in shooting".
Male adults were required to be armed.
(Statute of Winchester, as amended by King Henry VIII)
In America: no government was ever invested with authority
to abridge the right of self-defense from predatory violence.
At the foundation of any such government, if its adherents
had been asked that question, surely thay 'd proudly deny it,
in deference to personal liberty.
Do u dissent ?
