The Bush administration must have spent more time reading National Rifle Association propaganda than court decisions. In Lewis vs. U.S. 1980, the Supreme Court synthesized the Miller decision with: “The 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.” In 1983 the Supreme Court concurred with the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals when it decided: “We conclude the right to keep and bear a handgun is not protected by the Second Amendment.”
If the intent was directed to protect individual rights rather than the militia, why did James Madison’s original proposal include a third clause: “…but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person”? This clause was roundly debated and dropped.
Before the last election, there was a film clip of an NRA meeting where they said they will have a seat in the White House. Attorney General John Ashcroft is distorting the Constitution, which he swore to protect, in order to justify a political pay-off to the NRA for their support for Republican causes. Of course the reason the NRA has the millions to offer is 45 years of a flag-waving, drum-beating campaign to sell their patriotic-sounding, though bogus, interpretation of the Second Amendment. It obviously worked.
The reason for the right to keep and bear arms was that the people assigned to the militia had to supply their own specific weapons. They were worried that some future federal government could disarm the state militias by stopping the militiamen from purchasing their needed weapons. Nothing more.
Snohomish
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