Quote:

---

Until the very recent past, individual gun rights were severely restricted. Believe it or not, the entire concept of “gun rights” – that is, of citizens’ unbridled freedom to buy and own firearms – is largely a creation of our own times.

Yes, the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the “right to bear arms.” But if that means individual citizens – as opposed to state militias – can carry firearms anywhere they want, someone forgot to tell our 19th-century forebears. As law professor Adam Winkler has found, 10 states passed laws in the 1800s barring the possession of concealed weapons.

One of them was Texas, the lodestar of the gun-rights movement today. But as the Lone Star governor said in 1893, “the mission of the concealed weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law abiding man.”

Founded in 1871 as a hunting organization, the National Rifle Association supported waiting periods for handgun buyers and a wide array of other state restrictions. It also backed the first major federal gun regulation, the 1934 National Firearms Act, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision five years later.

As US Solicitor General Robert Jackson told the Court, the Second Amendment did not protect the right of individuals to possess guns for “private purposes.” Instead, it was “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security,” wrote Jackson, who would join the Court himself in 1941.

Only in the 1970s would the NRA and conservatives start to argue that the Second Amendment guaranteed individual gun possession. Piggybacking cleverly on the minority and women’s rights revolutions, the NRA claimed that gun owners, too, were endowed with “rights” that were protected by the Constitution.

The group also created a giant lobbying and publicity apparatus to spread this new doctrine. Reflecting on the NRA's politicking, Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

But Burger had retired by the time he made that statement, and the NRA was on the rise. Today, millions of Americans take it for granted that the Constitution protects individual gun rights. So do their legislatures and courts, which have discovered a meaning in the Second Amendment that earlier generations never imagined.

That’s doesn’t mean they’re wrong, necessarily, or that prior interpretations were right. Our past is replete with legal doctrines that have shifted with the times, in ways that we justly celebrate. For nearly two centuries, most notoriously, courts upheld the enslavement, segregation, and disenfranchisement of African-Americans.

But no honest person could possibly maintain that blacks possessed equal rights throughout these years. And that’s exactly the kind of thing we hear routinely about gun rights from the NRA and others who want you to believe that these “freedoms” were deeply inscribed in American life before the big, bad liberal state took them away.

Americans can debate whether they should be able to own guns, and under what conditions. They can even argue that the country would be better off with more guns, rather than fewer.

But one cannot say that our foreparents intended to give everyone the right to own a gun and carry it wherever they wished. That’s a fraud, to borrow Justice Burger’s phrase. I repeat the word: fraud. Saying it over and over again won’t make it true. http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/1218/Sandy-Hook-massa
cre-The-NRA-s-gun-rights-are-a-fabrication-of-modern-times/(page)/2]
I've been here before with regard to what the Second Amendment "actually meant", so I'll add some background on at least one Founding Father's stance:

Quote:

---

Madison never meant Second Amendment to allow guns of Sandy Hook shooting

A close look shows that James Madison conceived the Second Amendment in a different time, under different circumstances, with different weapons.

Were firearms intended only for militias – as the first clause might indicate? Or are municipalities prohibited from banning certain firearms – as the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 in McDonald v. Chicago when it overturned the Windy City's ban on hand guns?

The problem with these lines of thought is that in both we are refusing to frame this debate in the 21st century. Or even more appropriate, the year 2012 – whose multiple mass shootings included the massacre in Aurora, Colo. and last week's two tragedies in Happy Valley, Ore. and Newtown. If we truly wish to demystify the intentions of James Madison when he wrote the Second Amendment, we must reconstruct the environment in which he conceived it and recognize that it was a very different time, with very different circumstances, and very different weapons.

At first, success in the Revolutionary War helped the Founding Fathers realize the necessity of firearms. A far-away government imposed taxes without representation, but with an armed citizenry, the colonies had fought for the right to form their own government. It is likely that Madison intended that guns be available if this course of action was ever again necessary.

But now the field has changed. The muskets that the minutemen took up against the British were a good match for the weapons they would be facing on the battlefield. This is undoubtedly no longer the case.

Now there is no citizen armament – and really, nothing short of military aircraft or an atomic weapon – that could match the US military. And even today’s Supreme Court would find it hard to permit the construction of backyard missile silos. Regrettably or not, we must concede that the conditions allowing for an armed revolution of the people have long since vanished.

But, there’s still the question of why firearms for a militia might be necessary. Again, we should take Madison’s perspective. While America was fulfilling its manifest destiny, expansionists would often instigate territorial disputes with the native people whose land and resources they were claiming. When those peoples objected violently, groups of armed men, shoulder to shoulder, could repel them with force and keep their communities safe. Now that we have essentially concluded all territorial disputes in North America, it is safe to say that this justification’s time has passed.

But then, there is personal defense, by far the most controversial rationale for unmitigated gun rights. Proponents of this school of thought suggest that firearms – even automatic weapons – are necessary for protecting their homes from intruders and from violent criminals, both of whom may be similarly armed. They use this argument to justify owning weapons with silencers, expanded magazines, and semi-automatic triggering mechanisms. What they ignore though, is that in the days of James Madison, none of these technologies existed, nor was there any conception that they ever would be.

The weapons with which Madison was familiar were essentially muskets, in addition to rudimentary pistols and rifles. A competent user could generally only take a single wildly inaccurate shot, and then would likely find himself rummaging around with a ram-rod (and a powder bag he had to tear with his teeth) for as much as a minute before being able to take another. There was virtually no way an individual could maim two people before being subdued, let alone 32 as at Virginia Tech, or 26 in Sandy Hook Elementary.

The beauty of Madison’s musket was that, without being truly dangerous in large scale, it remained effective for personal defense. In addition to the propulsion mechanism, muskets were also outfitted with bayonets for issuing blows at short range, which could be used to subdue an attacker without killing them. When people did die from these weapons, it was often because of lead poisoning or bacterial infection. While the weapons of Madison’s era could be used for offense, and could certainly inflict deadly damage, they were only advantageous in situations involving group combat – not for an individual shooter to inflict quick and wide-scale harm.

If we accept the argument that today’s AK-47s fit the purpose and circumstances of Madison’s muskets, the fact that this nation experiences the insanity of mass murder is no longer surprising. The nature of this latest shooting in Connecticut, where the vast majority of the victims were young children, will hopefully shake us from this mindset. As families seek healing in the days and weeks ahead, lawmakers should consider specific reforms to curb gun violence, and they should start with access.

They can attempt to close loopholes, regulate sales, mandate more thorough background checks and waiting periods, raise awareness about mental health, or embark on a whole host of alternate approaches. But if we are continuing to defend the Second Amendment without restriction in a 21st-century context, what America really needs is to send our firearm technology back in time. American law can and should limit what technology is legal for citizens to access and own.

And as much as I would love to limit that technology to Revolutionary War-era muskets, more realistically, we can place restrictions on the kinds of weapons that are readily available in corner stores and at gun shows.

While hunters and gun collectors may complain about the decrease in speed and variety of weapons, no person’s sport is worth another person's man’s life. There is no logical reason that anyone should have to fire dozens of shots without reloading – unless intending to deprive that many people of life and limb. The US government must make the distinction between a weapon of war, and one that could be legitimately used for sport or self-defense.

If we as Americans mean to put the tragedy of mass murder behind us, we need to remove from public society the machines that make it possible. Guns may not kill people on their own, but making assault weaponry readily available trivializes the value of human life. http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/1217/Madison-never-me
ant-Second-Amendment-to-allow-guns-of-Sandy-Hook-shooting?nav=602141-csm_article-promoLink

---

I think the Second Amendment, used as it is to justify ANY ownership of ANY gun, is a good place to start for us, being just a bunch of people on a website discussing guns.

Quote:

---

Last year, around 30 people were killed by dogs, and many others injured. Since you quote an article that states no person's sport is worth another person's life, you will of course have your dogs put down. Right?

---