Yeah, it kind of is. It’s just that the reality has changed (standing army, no state militias, etc.) so completely that it no longer makes sense. No doubt, it’s laughable to think personal ownership of guns accomplishes this. That is the new interpretation that was required because reality had changed so drastically.
2A activists should really be railing about the fact we have a standing army instead of crying about their right to caress their Sweetness being infringed, but saying the 2A wasn’t about checking tyranny isn’t really correct. There’s just so many things that have fundamentally changed that are ignored that it just no longer makes sense as originally intended.
In the modern world, the likely scenario, if you really had a rogue government, would be that various units of the military would be the effective leaders of the opposition, as has occurred in Syria and Libya. They would be far more effective than untrained civilians with “assault rifles” or even with RPGs.
You’re going to have to be a little more forthcoming, here. If you are saying that the original intent of the 2nd Amendment was to provide for a counterbalance against a tyrannical government and that isn’t a recent construction,then, you’re kind of wrong.
As I’ve said on a number of occasions, on these pages and elsewhere, if you don’t believe that your neighbor is entitled to a Stinger missile or an Abrams tank, you’re for gun control.
Yeah, and that would be a lot closer to what the founders intended in an odd way, I have to think.
I totally think conservatives don’t get that we are the government and think of it as some foreign “other”, and that has a lot to do with the debate they present. The citizen soldiers of a militia the founders were counting on are pretty much the US armed services.
When a rogue government is coming for me I prefer a tank or perhaps a fighter-bomber. Preferably the kind that allows for a vertical take off and landing, so I can store it out in the back yard (next to the tank).
That’s not my understanding. The situation has fundamentally changed and the specific arguments have totally changed also (many times ignoring the changes in reality), but yeah, my understanding is that it was intended as a check on tyranny. Feel free to correct that with support if it’s wrong.
I’ve been through this debate a hundred times from Shays Rebellion, to the Militia Acts and subsequent revisions, to the Supreme Court decisions on Second Amendment cases, none of which cite the historical right to own weapons in order to fight the government and the military.
This is a fringe idea that has always been around and always been treated with the contempt it deserves. It gained more play with the rise of the Birchers and exists today as a convenient myth for the NRA and dominionists to justify their extremist views.
Kind of. You seem to be focusing on the individual right to weapons to fight tyranny. And yeah, you’re correct on that. The complicated part comes with jiving current reality, original intent, and a history of people ignoring both in relation to each other (people talking original intent based on assumptions that have drastically changed).
2A was intended to check tyranny, just not how the NRA fantasizes about it on the individual level.
