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I don't think "you can just shoot anyone for whatever deluded reason you want" is a valid rationalisation of the second amendment, or a reason to have a gun.

shadowgovt 4y ago
Not for any reason, but make no mistake: the militia was argued to be a check on tyrannical abuse. "If there should be an army to be made use of as the engine of despotism, what need of the militia? If there should be no army, whither would the militia, irritated by being called upon to undertake a distant and hopeless expedition, for the purpose of riveting the chains of slavery upon a part of their countrymen, direct their course, but to the seat of the tyrants, who had meditated so foolish as well as so wicked a project, to crush them in their imagined intrenchments of power, and to make them an example of the just vengeance of an abused and incensed people?" ~Alexander Hamilton (as Publius) I should perhaps clarify: the main purpose of the militia at the time of the Constitution's creation was to serve as a check on Federal power by providing the States with control of their own instrument of violence. But after, well, the states used that power to rebel against what they saw as a tyranny (the imminent end of slavery and therefore loss of what they perceived as their legitimate property in the form of other human beings) and the government crushed that rebellion, the Fourteenth Amendment pretty much extinguished that purpose for the Second Amendment. So the only aspect of this justification for its existence that remains is the individual conscience of the American citizen on whether their government is tyranny that should be opposed with violence. Every other check-on-tyranny purpose was nullified by the Fourteenth Amendment after the 1860s. ... And if that means 2A sounds stupid to keep around in 2022, we are in agreement and I would support repealing it.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Not for any reason, but make no mistake: the militia was argued to be a check on tyrannical abuse. "If there should be an army to be made use of as the engine of despotism, what need of the militia? If there should be no army, whither would the militia, irritated by being called upon to undertake a distant and hopeless expedition, for the purpose of riveting the chains of slavery upon a part of their countrymen, direct their course, but to the seat of the tyrants, who had meditated so foolish as well as so wicked a project, to crush them in their imagined intrenchments of power, and to make them an example of the just vengeance of an abused and incensed people?" ~Alexander Hamilton (as Publius) I should perhaps clarify: the main purpose of the militia at the time of the Constitution's creation was to serve as a check on Federal power by providing the States with control of their own instrument of violence. But after, well, the states used that power to rebel against what they saw as a tyranny (the imminent end of slavery and therefore loss of what they perceived as their legitimate property in the form of other human beings) and the government crushed that rebellion, the Fourteenth Amendment pretty much extinguished that purpose for the Second Amendment. So the only aspect of this justification for its existence that remains is the individual conscience of the American citizen on whether their government is tyranny that should be opposed with violence. Every other check-on-tyranny purpose was nullified by the Fourteenth Amendment after the 1860s. ... And if that means 2A sounds stupid to keep around in 2022, we are in agreement and I would support repealing it.