One person with a gun is not a militia.
One person with a stethoscope is not a hospital. One person with a whistle is not a referee crew. One person with a playbook is not a football team. The word “militia” means something. It means a group. It means organization, command structure, training, collective purpose. It means multiple people working together as a unit.
You cannot be “well regulated” alone. The phrase is absurd applied to an individual. A clock can be well regulated. A militia can be well regulated. A guy named Steve with an AR-15 in his basement cannot be well regulated. He is just a guy with a gun.
The Constitution does not care about Steve.
The Second Amendment is twenty-seven words. Seventeen of them describe a militia. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” The right exists in that context. The right exists for that purpose. The founders did not ramble. They were lawyers who fought over every comma. They meant what they wrote.
But you wouldn’t know it from the Supreme Court.
In 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia looked at those seventeen words and decided they were decoration. Preamble. Prefatory. Interesting history, but legally irrelevant. The “originalist” who claimed to worship text simply deleted the words he didn’t like. He took an eraser to the Constitution and called it interpretation.
This is fraud. If a priest rewrote the Bible and claimed God said it, we’d call him a con artist. Scalia rewrote the Constitution and claimed the founders said it. Originalism is a con. It means “I will follow the text until the text inconveniences me, and then I will invent something new and call it old.”
The federal government plays a word game to hide the fraud. 10 U.S.C. § 246 defines the militia as “all able-bodied males” between 17 and 45. This is supposed to solve the problem. See? You’re in the militia! You qualify!
But being defined as “in the pool” of potential militia members is not the same as being a militia. You can be defined as a potential juror. That doesn’t make you a court. You can be defined as a potential voter. That doesn’t make you a legislature. The statute creates a list of people who could be called up. It does not create the unit.
The founders knew what a militia was. They lived it. It was an organized body that trained together, drilled together, fought together under officers. It wasn’t a collection of individuals doing their own thing. The phrase “well regulated” meant exactly what it sounds like. Function. Discipline. Collective readiness.
Now look at the state laws.
Every state prohibits private armies. Florida, Virginia, Texas, Georgia, California, New York. Same law, different names. You cannot form a paramilitary group. You cannot train for combat outside government control. The only legal militia is the National Guard. Government-run. Government-commanded. Government-owned.
You cannot satisfy the constitutional condition because the government made the condition impossible to satisfy. You cannot be a militia because the government made being a militia illegal.
So here’s the math:
The Constitution ties the right to bear arms to militia service. A militia is collective. An individual cannot be a militia. States prohibit private militias. The government controls the only legal one. No private citizen can satisfy the constitutional condition.
The right is conditional. The condition cannot be met. The right does not exist.
This is what the text says. This is what the words mean. This is reading.
But reading is not what the Supreme Court does anymore. It does politics. It wanted an individual gun right. The text didn’t provide one. So it edited the text. Seventeen words deleted. A new right invented. The fiction of originalism maintained.
The hypocrisy is the point. The same justices who scream about “textualism” and “strict construction” and “judicial restraint” looked at half the amendment and decided it didn’t count. They didn’t interpret. They rewrote. They didn’t follow the Constitution. They created one.
If Americans want an individual right to own guns, they should amend the Constitution. They should win the political fight in the open. They should change the text honestly. What they shouldn’t do is pretend the text already says something it doesn’t. What they shouldn’t do is wrap a judicial invention in constitutional language and demand everyone pretend it was always there.
The founders wrote what they wrote. The militia system collapsed. The National Guard replaced it. The historical purpose faded. But the text remains.
And the text says the right is tied to a militia.
An individual is not a militia.
Therefore, an individual has no constitutional right to bear arms.
This isn’t radical. It’s literacy. It’s reading the words on the page and accepting what they say. The Second Amendment does not protect your gun. It protects the right of the people to form a militia.
You’re not forming a militia.
You’re a person with a gun.
The Constitution doesn’t care.
If you don’t like it, amend the Constitution. Don’t lie about what it means. Don’t erase words and call it law. Don’t invent rights and claim the founders gave them.
The text says what it says.
Your imaginary gun right is not in it.
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I totally agree, there is an implication of CIVIC SERVICE in the 2nd ammendment. Personal “self defense” with a firearm which is what most people actually use guns for, is NOT in fact a constitutional right.
Even more problematic: when untrained individual gun owners do get involved in protecting their community… (because they happen to be carrying a gun when someting bad goes down.) There are lots of examples of this: A significant amount of the time, THOSE people get shot by the responding police who don’t know THEM from the agressor they are responding to.
It blows a hole (unfortunate unintended pun) in the quip that “the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”
That said, most readers might be surprised by how few police officers we actually have patrolling out city at any one time, and might be troubled by the fact that in a true regional emergency, the police would quickly be overwhelmed. We make it through plan-able events every year by calling in police from other jurisdictions, but our police force is a lot like the fractional reserve system of banks… it is not able to handle true large scale emergencies.
Most gun owners ( myself included ) are patriots, and I think, if asked, are MORE than willing to step up and help protect their communities, in a crisis. If we created “militias” to serve on a city level, if we trained them, created a way to communicate with them, and if our police had a way to have an ongoing relationship with them, we would indeed be much safer. Even more so if that militia had the ability to identify train and exclude people who are not mentally stable enough to serve. No service, no gun. That is entirely congruent with the 2nd ammendment
The ultimate proof is this: Of the countries that have high rates of gun ownership and LOW homicide rates? ALL of them have universal military service. ( Switzerland Israel Finland etc)
Having a “theoriecal militia”. gives the right without the responsibility. It doesnt even live up to the Spiderman power thesis: “with great power comes great responsibility”.
Much worse, the extremeists in gun culture equate gun ownership with a license to say “F-you”. which is definitely not what our founders envisioned. A “militia” in their day WAS the national guard / the army.
They never intended to give Americans the right to shoot their neighbor for trespassing.
Thank you for reading, and your additions.
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Every call for gun control has a mix of cowardice, malice, ignorance, and/or shortsightedness. Gun control kills people. By the millions. Please stop asking for it.
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“What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ is unclear? No restrictions are acceptable. No registration. No ‘permits’. No infringements. Period.
People spend their time arguing over the definitions of assault rifle and magazine vs. clip, when instead it needs to be made clear. No infringements. Period.
There should be no restrictions, ever. I have the natural right to arm myself with whatever I need to defend me and mine against any and all aggressors, including the state. And so do you. This includes all conventional munitions, vehicles, aircraft, watercraft, and more. The 2nd Amendment only enumerates a right that exists naturally. Shall not be infringed includes any weapon that the state has access to. This includes grenades, rocket launchers, and (whether you and I like it or not) nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. I do not want to argue over stupid restrictions like who can own an automatic weapon and who can’t, or how many rounds a magazine should hold. No infringements. Period.
They should repeal the 1934 National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act of 1968. No infringements. Period.”
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“Let me be clear on the subject of rights. By the nature of my existence, I own myself and my mind. I own the fruits of my labor (property rights). I have the right to defend myself and defend what is mine (self defense). By extension, I have the right to possess and carry the means to defend myself and my property. The right to bear arms is a natural human right belonging to everyone, no matter where they live. No other has the right to take my life, liberty or property. I owe others only non-aggression.” – Ted Wallerstedt
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“This includes grenades, rocket launchers, and (whether you and I like it or not) nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. ”
Absolutely and utterly ridiculous. No reasonable person argues for this. And it will never happen, so live with that.
People who actually want to be able to amass grenades, rocket launchers and nuclear, etc. weapons, do not belong in civil society, period.
Imagine living your one life on this earth with this philosophy underpinning your actions. The rest of us reasonable humans don’t want anything to do with your morally-bankrupt, Hobbesian vision of the world.
And most demanding such a world wouldn’t last two minutes in it. Good luck with that.
I’m sorry, but nothing in the above “article” is legitimate. It is a screed for authoritarianism, and more than a little dishonest. The Founders made it clear, not only in the Second Amendment, but in their related writings, that the right to bear arms is a right of THE PEOPLE. Just as the First Amendment is. The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution at the insistence of the Anti-Federalists, who felt the original Constitution gave the central government TOO MUCH power over the people, and the Bill of Rights was composed to protect the RIGHTS of the people they feared would be destroyed by a too-powerful centralized government…and you try to argue that a RIGHT in the BILL OF RIGHTS is actually about protecting the power of the State to possess a monopoly on force?
The entire “collective rights” theory has been thoroughly discredited and rejected by modern jurisprudence. You say “one person with a gun is not a militia” and this is appalling ignorance. I am well trained and properly equipped; hence I am “well regulated”. I am also alive today precisely because I was armed and knew what I was doing.
Thomas Jefferson flatly stated that all power is intrinsic to the people, and that it was EVERY American’s “right and duty to be at all times armed”. Securing a “Free State” meant every individual had the means to defend themselves, their homes, and their communities. Heavily influenced by Blackstone in their composing of the Constitution, they all were aware of the fact that “self-defense is the first law of nature.” They all respected the words of Cesare Beccharia: ““False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that it has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are of such a nature. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” ― Cesare Beccaria.
Frankly, Mr. Stone, you should be ashamed of yourself.
“I am well trained and properly equipped; hence I am “well regulated”.”
And we only have your word to take for this. And that’s frankly not good enough for a civil society.
You are correct in saying, “The founders did not ramble. They were lawyers who fought over every comma. They meant what they wrote.”
They also wrote a lot and much of it is still available to read.
Madison is on record saying his intention was a moderate amendment to the constitution with the sole purpose of protecting individual rights.
Tench Coxe a Pennsylvania Delegate to the Congress that created the bill of rights wrote articles to the newspapers explaining the new constitution, and continued that practice with the bill of rights during the ratification process.
This is his explanation:
“Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize,
and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens,
the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.”
He sent a copy to Madison who complimented his explanation of what the 2nd amendment was meant to do, and also had that explanation published in newspapers in several states to help gain support for passing the Bill of Rights.
It’s pretty safe to assume the people who wrote it, and advocated for its passage have a better understanding of what the thing means than anyone 200+ years later.
“It’s pretty safe to assume the people who wrote it, and advocated for its passage have a better understanding of what the thing means than anyone 200+ years later.”
And they had no idea the weapons that would be available to the people of this country 200+ years later. Had they known, I have no doubt their position (if it is indeed as you say it is) would have been greatly moderated.
What do you think they were aware of?
Did you know about the Belton Flintlock, an early prototype repeating musket that was demonstrated to members of the continental congress in 1777, so during the revolution.
It was a gun that fired 8 shots in 3 seconds.
Belton proposed a scaled up version that fired 20 shots?
Over 100 years earlier in 1659 the royal guards in Denmark used Kalthoff repeaters defending a siege in Copenhagen. These are guns with a clockwork action that with a turn of a crank would load a lead ball, and a powder charge into the chamber while cocking the hammer and priming the pan.
The guns had 30 shots in their magazines.
Or the 1790s Chambers gun, a rail mounted swivel gun used on the USS Constitution that fired 224 shots in 2 minutes.
While not common because they were both intricate and expensive, guns that fired multiple shots in rapid succession existed as early as the 1500s, and the founding fathers absolutely knew that they existed.
Yet their positions did not moderate.
Again do the research, Coxe’s newspaper article exists, as does the letters he wrote Madison, and the responding letter from Madison. You can read them.
Here’s what the “your gun right is imaginary” crowd consistently gets wrong: they treat the Second Amendment as if it’s a permission slip. As if Congress sat down, invented a right out of nothing, and handed it to you. That’s not what the Bill of Rights is. That’s not what any of the first ten amendments are.
The Bill of Rights doesn’t grant rights. It restrains government from infringing on rights that already exist—rights that the founders understood to be natural, pre-political, given by God or inherent in human nature. The First Amendment doesn’t give you free speech. The Fourth doesn’t give you privacy. And the Second doesn’t give you the right to keep and bear arms.
What it does is tell the government: hands off.
The militia clause—”a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”—is prefatory. It provides context and rationale. It does not condition the right. The operative clause is what follows: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
That’s the command. That’s the prohibition. The comma between those clauses has been doing a lot of heavy lifting for people who want to read a limitation that isn’t there.
I’m a gun owner. I don’t carry because the government said I could. I carry because the right to defend myself and my family is mine by nature, and the Second Amendment exists specifically to stop the government from touching it.
You can disagree with that philosophy. But don’t tell me the right is imaginary. The infringement is the crime—not the ownership.