The meaning of the second ammendment?

Question

I am curious to see how many of you know the true meaning. Take a stab at it!

Answer 1

This is really "old hat" for it depends on your perspectiveand wasn't made clear either way from it's beginning.

Answer 2

Too much to go into.

It is deeply entwined with the 1st Amendment:

A law prof:

Deepening Students' Understanding of Checks on Government Power. The Framers' conception of "checks and balances" and "divided powers" includes more than just each federal branch checking the others, the states checking the federal government, and the Senate checking the House and vice versa. Chairman Mao wasn't the first to think that all power flows from the barrel of a gun -- the revolutionaries who founded this nation took a similar view.


The armed citizenry was for many of them the ultimate check on government excess. The Second Amendment was aimed at preserving this armed citizenry; the Militia Clauses set up a complex web of state and federal control over it. Whether one reads the Second Amendment as creating an individual right or a states' right, it has a huge importance for the con law issue: the allocation of power.

I also bring out my favorite piece of history, which is St. George Tucker's explanation of the Second Amendment in his Blackstone's Commentaries. 20 In his discussion of the First Amendment, Tucker offered the first clean, unambiguous statement from a legal source that the First Amendment was intended to go beyond the prior restraint/subsequent punishment dichotomy and to wholly bar a federal seditious libel statute. 21 This places Tucker on the side of the angels and gives him some credibility. In that same first American edition of the Commentaries, Tucker, after quoting the Second Amendment, writes: "This may be considered the true palladium of liberty." 22 As with the First Amendment, Tucker contrasts the situation in the United States with that in Great Britain where he believed that "the right of keeping arms is effectually taken away from the people." 23 This could not happen in America because the people could bear arms "without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as it the case in the British government." 24 Americans, accordingly, could exercise the "right of self-defence, the first law of nature" 25 and also protect their "liberty" which, in lands with standing armies but no individual right to bear arms, "if not already annihilated, [was] on the brink of destruction." 26 It is hard to be more explicit on the supposed relationship between guns and liberty.

Answer 3

As the US Supreme Court has reasoned before if all the rights in the 1st amendment were given to individuals than the same holds true for the second. Would it not seem silly for the states to have the right to a well regulated militia and that be the only meaning of the 2nd Amendment? So states have the right to peaceably assemble? Of course not, "the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". It is an individual right.

Answer 4

If you interpret it loosely, it means that we can own guns.

But if taken in the context of the time it was written, it has a far different meaning. At that time, our military was composed of militias or citizens' armies. This law gave citizens the right to keep and maintain the arms necessary to defend the country in the event of an invasion. It was not intended otherwise.

Answer 5

during the time it was written, the greatest fear was an oppressive government that weakened the freedoms of Americans.
So it is a contingency plan built into our nation, that allows us the right to own weapons, so that if our government ever becomes the type of government that early Americans were considered terrorists to, then we would have a way to reclaim it.

Answer 6

Basically it gives the right to bear arms.

However, as with all legislation it is more complex then that.

Answer 7

it is the right to "bear arms in case of a national emergency that requires urban militia to arm themselves for their personal safety"

Answer 8

the right to bear arms. also meaning you can store guns for protection.