IANAL, but I think there was no interpretation until the Supreme Court made that ruling. The Second Amendment was in a quantum state before that, both an individual right and not. When it becomes necessary to clarify something, then SCOTUS collapses the wave function in that particular area of law.
John Paul Stevens was a lawyer and a judge on the Supreme Court. He disagrees and includes actual court decisions and opinions.
>the Miller Court unanimously concluded that the Second Amendment did not apply to the possession of a firearm that did not have “some relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” And in 1980, in a footnote to an opinion upholding a conviction for receipt of a firearm, the Court effectively affirmed Miller, writing: “[T]he Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have ‘some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.’
SCOTUS didn’t begin to apply the bill of rights to anyone besides the federal government until Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad v. City of Chicago in 1897. The entire notion of individual rights (in the modern sense) guaranteed by the constitution was in its nascency in 1878.
"In reality, the district court judge was in favor of the gun control law and ruled the law unconstitutional because he knew that Miller, who was a known bank robber and had just testified against the rest of his gang in court, would have to go into hiding as soon as he was released. He knew that Miller would not pay a lawyer to argue the case at the Supreme Court and would simply disappear. Therefore, the government's appeal to the Supreme Court would surely be a victory because Miller and his attorney would not even be present at the argument....Miller was found shot to death in April, before the decision had been rendered."
Yeah, sometimes legal strategies are odd. I guess the point is that 2A was always about militias; essentially everything up until Thomas' concurrence in Printz considered 2A in the context of militia readiness, and the draft of 2A was even more explicitly about militias. It's sort of unassailable, but obviously not actually unassailable, because now we have Heller.
Myself, I think 2A is just an anachronism. Militias as they were at the founding don't exist anymore. Almost no one in modern US society meets military readiness standards. Armed forces use bonkers weapons of war the founders could never have imagined. Even individual person-on-the-street weapons are pretty boggling by 18th century standards. And this is just considering firearms, expanding "arms" to whatever the US military considers to be a weapon (software/hardware exploits, biological weapons, chemical weapons).
Further, I think "2A as a check on government" is meritless because Congress regulates militias, and the Constitution (Article I, §8) reads: "The Congress shall have power to... provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." Allowing governments to suppress insurrections is the opposite of allowing checks on government.
I'm not like, super into gun control--I think the US is too big for a one-size-fits-all policy and I think a lot of implementations just land men of color in prison w/ felonies. But none of the pro-gun 2A interpretations make sense to me, and from where I sit the debate is more a reflection of Congress' ongoing slide into irrelevance and sclerosis as other less encumbered institutions in the US do the actual legislating.
You make several good points, but this whole "what can civilians with pew-pew weapons do against a modern army?" argument has been put to bed in actual combat now. See Vietnam and Afghanistan for humbling examples. Not to say it wouldn't be bloody, but victory is not assured by the technologically superior force, apparently.
Oh, definitely. But like, those weren't thriving countries at the time right. In any hypothetical US revolt, things go south very fast. Schools are closed, roads are closed, hospitals are commandeered, power stations are commandeered. Core internet infrastructure is shut down. We're talking about 1st to 3rd world country in under 2 years.
So to me, that kind of means the terrorists win. China/Russia would like nothing more than for that to happen--it would be a self-inflicted wound of insane magnitude, with global consequences. I don't know that any political issue is so bad that it's worth solving at that cost. Maybe climate change, but the groups of people who are heavily armed and the groups of people who care about climate change are mostly separate.
So I still think 2A is an anachronism. I'm not sure even TJ would agree that refreshing the tree of liberty at the cost of the west makes any sense at all. The world has just become unrecognizable in the last 250 years.
