In your own words what does the Second Amendment mean?

Answer 1

That would be a good question for a teacher to ask for homework. Did your teacher thing so too?

Answer 2

During the time when it was written, most men owned guns and were part of a local militia. There were no police, so these men would act as law enforcement and protection of it's town. In this context, the amendment was clearly meant to give all people the right to bear arms and join a local militia. However, times have changed and our ever-growing, liberty-stealing government creates more and more police forces, be it local or federal. Personally I am somewhere in between. I don't believe there is a need for militia any more, since we have city/county and state police departments. But I do believe every legal, law abiding citizen should have the right to own guns, and a right to join local militias. Once the government has all the police power, there will be no one to stop them from taking the guns. Once the citizens are unarmed, the power of the government will know no bounds, as there will be no one capable of stopping them from establishing an oligarchy, stealing wealth and land from the people, and committing treasonous acts against the citizens who keep them wealthy. Just take a look at Cuba. I don't understand why so many people are trying to turn the U.S. into Cuba.

Answer 3

"In my own words" doesn't matter, unless this an academic exercise. I am not qualified to interpret the Constitution. What matters is the how federal courts have interpreted the second amendment.

But if this is an academic exercise, I would say that the right to bear arms should be limited to the arms that were available when the second amendment was ratified.

Answer 4

It means exactly what it says: The Right of The People to keep and bear arms is a pre-existing right which the government may not violate. The people means each and every individual, just as it does in every other place it is used in the constitution. The introductory clause just modifies the main part of the sentence, and does not change the meaning, especially when you realize that "the militia" consists of every individual between 16 and 60.

The 2nd amendment does not GRANT any rights to anyone, it just guarantees said right should not be removed by the government. The supreme court case of Emerson implied that any weapons used by the military were covered under this amendment as "arms".

Answer 5

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RE:
In your own words what does the Second Amendment mean?

Answer 6

I like how Bill t put it. This was written during the Revolutionary war, where militias were forming everywhere to aid in the fight of the British tyrannical rule. Militia being "an army composed of ordinary citizens rather than professional soldiers" from dictionary.com. There are a couple defs but they all pretty much say this. So our forefathers wanted to make sure we would have the unalienable right to fight back. I don't think they meant for this to give us the right to own such weapons as individuals. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't, just in my opinion, the 2nd amendment doesn't give us that right.

Answer 7

The right to keep and bear arms is pretty plain to me. It means the right to keep firearms for person protection and protection from tyranny. These sentiments can be found in the Federalist Papers as well as the writings of the Founding Fathers.

Gun ownership is a natural right. One that you are born with. Not a privilege that can be handed out by the politicians like a block of free cheese.

It is amazing to me that the most clearly written amendment is the one that petty tyrants try to obscure.

Answer 8

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Now, we get into it, don't we? This is the part of the Constitution that seems to be so inconvenient for some people. Times have changed. Not only has the well regulated militia disappeared, but the right to keep and bear the arms is being chipped away, slowly, but surely.

Every once in a while we hear the lame reasoning that the National Guard is the militia and the rest of the people don't need to keep their arms. But where does the National Guard keep their arms? They keep them locked up securely. It would take hours at the minimum for Guardsmen to drive to their armory and arm themselves in case of an emergency. Somehow, that just doesn't sound like the instant response this amendment invisioned. Our nation's founders were thinking more of something like Neighborhood Watch with M-16's

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Answer 9

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"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." George Mason "An instance within the memory of some of this house will show us how our militia may be destroyed. Forty years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliment was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that is and was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia." George Mason The individual's right to defend their life, liberty, and property is deeply rooted in both Natural and Common Law. The Founders based our system of government on the rationale provided by John Locke and others who outlined the premise that government exists only to protect the rights of the governed. It cannot create rights and it cannot act positively on law abiding citizens. Doing so necessarily deprives one or more law abiding citizens of their life, liberty, and/or property for the benefit of another. Government can only act negatively on those who commit injustice. Individuals have a rights to protect their life liberty and property from any entity seeking to violate their rights. The 2nd Amendment is the affirmation that government cannot take this right from individuals. It affirms the individual's right to protect their rights from violation by the state or other individuals. This "Modern Interpretations" garbage is exactly that. This answer retains its meaning today, tomorrow, and 500 years from now in the context that I wrote it. Some future reader cannot change the point of what I am saying to fit their argument by just changing the definition of the words I use. Such arguments are baseless and only work on weak minded individuals who want to be led by the popular whims of others. The founders were consistent (both in the documents related to the founding and in their private writings outside of the Congressional record) in their assertion individual rights and limited government. While we may use different words to describe concepts, the only legitimate "interpretations" of their words are those that retain the essential context in which the words were used. Altering that context to compensate for societal changes requires an amendment consented to by the citizens and the states. Simple judicial fiat cannot suffice if we are to legitimately claim to be a free society. There is no intellectually honest person who can argue that they believe in the principles of the founding while maintaining that they reject the context in which the founders used the words written in the Constitution and Bill of Rights in favor of principles that stand diametrically opposed to that context.

Answer 10

To understand how "militia" was intended in the second amendment, all we need do is see what the founding fathers called the militia. It was every able bodied American male. They were expected to have their own weapons, and that meant state of the art military weapons of the day accepted.

The other point. Any reference to "the people" in the Constitution, Bill of Rights refers to the individual. To interpret "the people" in the second amendment to mean other than the individual would be contrary to that meaning as used in that document.

Answer 11

In my own words. Hmmm. Well to be honest, I've found this quote to be most profound in terms of the 2nd amendments interpretation.

"The second amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed. Where the government refuses to stand for re-election and silences those who protest ; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."
Alex Kosinski (Federal appeals judge & immigrant from Eastern Europe)

or...

Thomas Jefferson: "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

or...

George Washington: "Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth."



To me, this is what the founding fathers had in mind. After studying much of what was written at that time, this seems to be the overall attitude toward gun ownership. In my own words... Its the right of the people to protect themselves from a tyranical government, and from crimes against him/her self. It requires education, responsibility, and the wisdom to know when and when not to use such power. This, is liberty.

Hope this helps. :)