LogFAQs > #922182720

Xeybozn posted...

pyresword posted...

Especially when the Constitution was explicitly designed to be a malleable document specifically for the reason that times change and it's impossible for the creators to have known about and accounted for everything.

No, I'm pretty sure you're the one who's wrong here. The founding fathers were perfect people who wrote a flawless document. How could anyone think they didn't know exactly what the Second Amendment meant, which just happens to be exactly what pro-gun people want it to mean? (PS - You have to ignore any pre-Heller precedents and gun control laws. Obviously the liberal deep state and the globalists spent 200 years trying to suppress the REAL Constitution because they hate our freedom.)

The similarities between the phrasing of the Second Amendment and the Second Commandment are so strikingly similar that I'm all but convinced the founders based the Second Amendment on the Second Commandment. And they knew that the Second Commandment, by the 1780s, had inspired literally thousands of years of debate as to its meaning. So I'm pretty sure they intended the founders intended the Second Amendment to be richly debated.

Second Commandment:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

Second Amendment:

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.

Notice how both give a very broad direct command and also give a purpose that appears to be narrower, but neither expressly says that the direct command is limited by the purpose. The plain meaning of the text of the Second Commandment appears to say that you cannot draw any pictures of anything that exists in reality, and that is indeed the interpretation followed in Islam and some Calvinist churches. But that doesn't seem to square with the purpose - why would drawing an elephant offend God's jealousy if we aren't worshiping it?

So anyway, presuming that the founders were well-read scholars of history, they surely knew about the long history of debate over the meaning of the Second Commandment, and their choice to fashion the Second Amendment after it means that they intended it to be interpreted differently by different people and hotly debated for centuries.
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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
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