Recently it has been brought to my attention that United States citizens believe the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the rights of individual citizens to own guns. Even politicians believe this to be true. The fact is there is no constitutional right for US citizens to bear arms.
There is nothing so tragic as a nation that doesn’t know its rights. Every time I hear a politician promise to protect the right of citizens to bear arms, or criticize another politician for pushing for gun-laws, it breaks my heart because I know the vast majority of people, the politician included, are misinformed. When it comes to rights, one should never be misinformed.
Now, most of you reading this are probably already up in arms about this. "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." It’s clear that we all have a constitutional right to bear arms, isn’t it? It says so right there in the Amendment: “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Seems a reasonable argument for the common person, but we’re talking legalities here, so it’s not going to be that simple. Read the Amendment again, and it says “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State…" That part about the militia is the killer.
The first thing we want to do is understand what the Supreme Court says about this. For that, we turn to U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), where the Supreme Court said, “In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State of Tennessee, 2 Humph., Tenn., 154, 158."
The US Supreme Court has ruled twice more on this matter, and only twice more, in Burton vs. Sills ("...Congress, though admittedly governed by the second amendment, may regulate interstate firearms so long as the regulation does not impair the maintenance of the active, organized militias of the states." ) and Maryland vs. US. ("The National Guard is the modern Militia reserved to the States by Art. I. 8, cl. 15, 16, of the Constitution.")
The Supreme Court made it clear in Miller that in order to have protection under the 2nd Amendment one must demonstrate that the weapon is for military or common defense purposes. However, this does not mean that people cannot own guns. What it means is that the federal government can set regulations on individuals so long as those regulations don’t take weapons away from military and common defense purposes, each state government can set up state-constitutional rights to protect or prohibit firearms so long as they don’t conflict with federal law, and each county and town can prohibit or protect the sale, use and ownership of firearms so long as it doesn’t conflict with state or federal laws. |
