“On every question of construction of the Constitution, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.” — Thomas Jefferson

A panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled the District’s total ban on handgun possession to be unconstitutional with a 2-1 majority. The majority ruling was authored by Judge Laurence Silberman. In the court’s majority opinion, two major points were addressed: The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms and when the Second Amendment speaks of the “right of the people”, it refers to the right of “individuals and not a “collective right” of state governments or the National Guard.

In the lone dissent, Justice Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms relates to those Militia whose continued vitality is required to safeguard the individual States.” She believes the District should be immune from the Second Amendment because it is not a state.

Subsequent to the ruling, both the plaintiff and defendant filed a petition with the United States Supreme Court to hear the case. The petitioner, Washington, D.C., filed for review the following question, “Whether the Second Amendment forbids the District of Columbia from banning private possession of handguns while allowing possession of rifles and shotguns.” The respondent, Heller, petitioned “Whether the Second Amendment guarantees law-abiding, adult individuals a right to keep ordinary, functional firearms, including handguns, in their homes.” The Supreme Court chose not to review either question petitioned but write their own question(s). The Supreme Court’s rephrased question: “Whether the following provisions, D.C. Code secs. 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02, violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?” This question is closer to Heller’s petition.

What is the original textual meanings and intents of the phrases and words “militia, people and state” in the context of the Constitution and its ensuing amendments by the framers.? Is it the majority opinion of the District’s ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right when addressing people or does the term “people” refer to the state. And is it limited to a state’s militia and without a state militia there is no fundamental individual right to own and possess a firearm?, as the dissenting justice wrote.

In dissenting, Justice Henderson summed up the liberal hypocrisy in using the Constitution to further their self serving agenda. For the past thirty years the District and liberal politicians have been pushing for D.C. to acquire voting rights in the House despite it being unconstitutional. Unless Washing D.C. is a state it cannot have voting rights, read Article 1 Section 2, and Article 1 Section 8, and the reason it does not have voting rights can be found in Federalist No. 43, Section 2. The hypocrisy of Justice Henderson’s dissent is that the District is not a state and should be immune from the Second Amendment.

To further their constitutional hypocrisy, liberals and their activist judges have stretched the boundaries of constitutional interpretation when it serves their purpose, yet they want to read the Second Amendment so narrowly they could thread it through the eye of a needle. To get an even further grasp on the left’s biased opinion of the Second Amendment one would only have to read the ACLU’s opposition of individual rights concerning the Second Amendment or the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The ACLU and the influential anti-gun organization, The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, is filled with hyperbole, self-serving conjecture and lies. Neither can produce one factual statement backed up by historical antithetical evidence that would legitimately contradict the decision by the D.C. Court of Appeals ruling in Heller v Washington D.C.

Does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual the right to have a gun for private use, or does it only guarantee a collective right to have guns in a militia such as a state’s National Guard? Does the first clause in the Second Amendment limit the last clause in the amendment?

Presented will be two arguments, one prejudicially concurring with the current ruling supported with historical evidence, judicial evidence and Supreme Court rulings concerning the language of the amendment, the opposing argument supported with historical evidence, judicial evidence and Supreme Court rulings concerning the language of the amendment contrary to the right of an individual’s right to own a gun .

Historical arguments and evidence supporting an individual’s rights to be armed:

The amendments were not written to give anyone any particular right, but as a restriction on the Federal Government from abridging individuals rights beyond the limits already set forth in the Constitution. The framers did not invent the right to keep and bear arms when they drafted the Second Amendment, it was a pre-existing right under Common Law ( Blackstone Commentaries on the Law…“natural right of resistance and self-preservation”, espousing the individual right to protect oneself.) and previously part of the state’s constitutions.

The Framers had already addressed the issue of a militia in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. Why was it addressed again in the Second Amendment and with the addition of guaranteeing individuals the right to bear arms? If the framers had meant to limit it to the “state“, why did they add the term “people” in the amendment? It was added for the same reason the other amendments were added–to double guarantee that a particular right would not be infringed upon by the Federal Government. Without the amendments the states would not have ratified the Constitution.

To use case law from other rulings is relevant in this case since there has never been a definitive ruling on the Second Amendment and since the Supreme Court has not looked at a Second Amendment case since the 1930’s. The Supreme Court has ruled that the term “people” means “individuals” in the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments.

There is little need for conjectural interpretation of something if you have a categorical definition of its meaning by its author(s). In the case of the Second Amendment there are annotations by George Mason, James Madison and the other crafters of the Second Amendment. There also exists the records of the debates for the ratification of the Second Amendment. A few notable attestments and quotes from the men involved with crafting the Second Amendment:

• “The great object is that every man be armed and everyone who is able may have a gun.” – Patrick Henry, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution
• ... to disarm the people - that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”
  – George Mason
• I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.”
  - George Mason
• No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
  – Thomas Jefferson
• “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and
  better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for
  an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
  -Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.
• “The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.”
  – Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188
• “Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?” –Patrick Henry

The Whiskey Rebellion started when four counties in western Pennsylvania refused to pay an excise tax on whiskey that had been levied by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton in the Spring of 1791. In 1794 the civil protests turned into an armed rebellion known as the Whiskey Insurrection. As word of this spread, many forms of many loosely organized revolts began in the region by robbing the mail, interrupting courts, assaulting tax collectors, etc. Washington raised a militia force of 13,000 men. Under the command of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and General Henry Lee, the militia marched into Western Pennsylvania in October of 1794 to quell the insurrection. The rebels were never found but the militia did arrest 20 people. They were all pardoned by Washington.

Why is the Whiskey Rebellion relevant to the Second Amendment? The Whiskey Rebellion happened five years after the ratification of the the Constitution and its amendments. The militia, under Washington’s lead, marched to engage armed individuals. With the ink on the Second Amendment not fully dried when the armed insurrection happened, and if the amendment’s original intent was as the current day anti-gun liberals claim it was, then where was the outrage at individuals being armed– especially when attacking government officials? Why did the government not try to enforce the lack of an individual’s right to bear arms? Because it was a right that the government knew they could not infringe upon.

From the date of the ratification of the Constitution and its amendments in 1787, there was not a law abridging the rights of individuals to possess arms until 1934 with the National Firearms Act. The simple reason there was not a law was because it was unconstitutional and would not have passed constitutional muster. FDR’s National Firearms Act came after 147 years void of challenges to the Second Amendment at the Supreme Court level.

As Jefferson stated in the quote at the beginning of this article, the spirit and intent of any clause in the Constitution and its amendments can be found by reading the debates and the author’s explanation of their text and thoughts. Starting with the Roosevelt administration, liberal, anti-gun zealots have been the source of the most dishonest constitutional scholarship against the right to own a gun. The Constitution and its amendments have either been so broadly interpreted as to be unrecognizable to their original intent, or in the case of the Second Amendment, so narrowly and dishonestly interpreted to have, as Jefferson stated, the text”squeezed and re-invented” to conform to the whimsical ideology of the day.

Historical arguments and evidence to support that an individual does not have the right to be armed:

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