Etzelnik wrote:

The well regulated militia is meant to be to the exclusion of a standing army. The people are supposed to be the army. This is so the government is unable to employ an army against the people's freedoms. 

An important part that you are missing: The well regulated militia was meant for the security of the state. It explicitly says so in the amendment. The government was not supposed to employ a standing army (as can be derived from the historical debate around the amendment, not directly in the amendment), but similarly the people were not supposed to use their guns against the government, but for the security of the state (and this is directly in the amendment). Gun rightists miss this part.

Etzelnik wrote:

I might add that well regulated in the 18th century meant well-equipped. 

Yes, with some stretch of imagination. Cite your source and I will set it straight.

On my part, I might add that "bear arms" is an idiomatic expression that meant (and still means) to serve in the army or militia. Militia in particular is the kind of armed forces where you serve with your own equipment. So the "right" in the 2nd Amendment is not really a right, but a political twist that people should always be attentive to - it imposes an indirect duty to be ready to answer the call to defend the country at your own personal expense.

Last edited by seigneur (2/23/2018 7:41 am)

Etzelnik wrote:

You skipped an inconvenient word "the security of a free state".

That word won't help you one bit.

Etzelnik wrote:

Have you read The Federalist Papers? If you are an American, it's a must read.

I am not American, but I have read that and more. The Federalist Papers won't help you either. They only show where you are coming from.

Etzelnik wrote:

I myself don't think anyone who hasn't read it should be qualified to vote. In any event, No. 46 clearly states that the intended structure is that everyone have guns, while the state only heavily train a small proportion of them (the substitute for the standing army). The reason everyone else is armed is not only for personal defense, but also for the clear purpose of fighting the government if it becomes an instrument of tyranny.

Let's repeat that: "I myself don't think anyone who hasn't read it should be qualified to vote." Basically, you are saying that you'd like to take the vote away from those who do not side with Federalists in the Federalist vs anti-Federalist debate.

The good thing here is that you are positioning yourself clearly.

Etzelnik wrote:

You can disagree with the Federalists if you wish, but the Constitution is their ideas put into practice.

Not really. Both sides - all sides - provided all sorts of proposals and the proposals, regardless of what side initiated them, got heavily reformulated. In the 2nd Amendment in particular, the exception to the "religiously scrupulous" was dropped, definitions to the composition and function of the militia were dropped (the function being "common defense") and the text you now have is what remained after these cuts.
 
I know what you are doing. You are saying that there are those Federalist Papers that provide the original intent. Not so. The intent was even originally intensely debated, the debates are luckily well recorded, so the intent in all its nuances is actually perfectly reconstructible and Federalist Papers are not the only factor there.

To keep it simple, it is always appropriate to go by the text at hand. If you want to complicate things, things may become too complicated for you.

The theme of the thread is to layout all the factors leading up to not only this school shooting but really is a breakdown of America, the continuing collapse of America. The factors of the school shootings:

1st factor ---  Fatherlessness
2nd factor ----  It's the Culture
3rd factor  ---  Lack of the Virtue of Manliness/misconception of what manliness is. 
4th factor  ---  use of psychotropic drugs

The shooting is an evil. Evil is a spiritual thing. On Fox, the black female duo Trump supporters =15pxLynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson pointed to a very good point. They pointed to the loss of God in the American educational system and the loss of God in general throughout its culture. 

The fifth factor in the school shootings is the lack of grace in America. Just like trees need sunlight. Mankind needs the Grace of Almighty God. No man can do good without the Grace of God. No society can live without God. Yet, America is attempting to do so. America was founded to do so.

Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson pointed out to the Bible being taken out of the American school system. They are right. The growing violence in America and the breaking down of society can be traced to this event. 

Jesus said, "Man does not live by bread alone". Man can not live without God. Man needs to have a connection to God. Man needs to pray. This is all called piety. Piety is either a part of or a concomittant of the Virtue of Righteousness. 
What happened is that the atheists came by and said God was the opiate of the people and so they destroyed God and religion. This was accomplished by the modern republican movement that ensconced the Enlightenment idea. The "Enlightenment", the word is a religious term, meant that the atheist was enlightened about the superstition of the Priestcraft of the Roman Catholic Church. The atheists and deists one and all attached the Christian religion as nonsense. What they did was take away "the opiate" of the people. 

Stefan Molyneux, an atheist, in his YouTube channel, recognizes this. That the atheists destroyed "the opiate" of the people and did not replace it. 

"Now in regards to atheism, ...if atheists wanted to get rid of God, okay, an intellectual excercise worth pursuing, you better give a reason to people to be good. ...in fact the atheists knocked down the house, the home that people lived in, which sheltered them from the storm of the world, without building them anything new, was cruel. Ohh, this structure is deficient, let's bring in the wrecking ball and smash down the churches. where are people going to live now? Where are people going to take shelter? It is an act of cruelty to drive people out of a structure even though you think it is substandard, into the hail, the storms, the vileness of the world with no protection and this is a part of sadism of much of the part of atheism... (Ref: "The Philosophy of Satan" Stefan Molyneux. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kL-pRg5Euk&t  min mark  1:00:19-55.)

Nicholas Cruz is the product of this. The Church has been taken away, The Hope, Comfort and a connection to a God that loves you was taken away from the people and they are left in the vileness of the world.  What does that describe?  Nihilism. 

To have religion is a very important aspect of the human being. Having a prayer life, attending communal religious liturgies is a way of showing our connection to God. This is called Piety. And just as an individual exhibits piety---so must the state.  From the Spartan Republic to the Roman Republic to Christendom and Byzantium, state officials participated in religious duties. It was part of the state's duties to exhibit piety and educate their people in religion. 

What is this situation that individuals and the state both engage in piety?  It is a Feedback loop. What goes on in the microcosm, goes on in the macrocosm and they feed each other. If a person has to exhibit virtue, the state must also exhibit virtue for Virtue to exist. The two different entities engaged in the same pursuit reinforce habits and values. 

What is fatherlessness, nihilistic culture, effeminacy, failed men, psychotropic drugs all doing?  They are a feedback loop that feed each other in an ever increasing circle of pathologies that the State practices. No piety in the State, no piety in the individual. The Nihilism of the State passes into the Nihilism of the part, the Nicholas Cruzes of America. 

The lack of a connection to God is what is the basis of the school shootings. It is another factor. The Fear of the Lord is another restraint on bad human behavior. Take that away, and man has no control. Piety, the practice of religion is necessary for the mental health and well-being of everybody concerned. And with Piety comes Grace. America is a country devoid of Grace.

Nicholas Cruz needed God---and no one gave him God. He needed a shoulder to lean on---and no one was there. There was no shelter from the bullying. There was no shelter from the vileness of the world. And the Vileness of Nihilism created a raging animal bent on revenge.

Blame the Wall of Separation on the Son of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson. 


 

Last edited by Clinias (2/24/2018 11:30 am)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

​But you have to understand what the text at hand actually means. There's not much point, unless one wants to rewrite the law, in using a modern interpretation that completely ignores what it meant at the time.

And there's not much point to say this to me, unless I used a modern interpretation that completely ignores what it meant at the time. Did I? You are not explicitly pointing to where and how I did so. But I am going to point out right now how you are using a modern interpretation.

​

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

You are aware that the jurisprudence, such as the Heller decision, has gone through this? Scalia and over originalists have made a compelling case that the original intent was to allow the citizenry to bear arms as private individuals, not simply so far as the state might decide to use them as a militia. Whatever the merits of the minority opinions in cases like Heller, they were nowhere near as effective at invoking the original intent.

In your support you are bringing a supreme court decision from 2008. How is this not a modern interpretation? In the Heller case, it so happens that the majority opinion, the one you call "originalist", ignores the brief by linguists who tell that "bear arms" is an idiom whose original meaning (really original, not "original") you can look up in common dictionaries even now. Namely, the meaning is "to serve in armed forces".

The majority "originalist" opinion bypasses the brief. The dissenting opinion refers to the brief that highlights the idiomatic meaning of "bear arms" and the fact that the idiomatic meaning would have been particularly strong at that time. So... At least I hope you were aware that there are differing opinions whose respective objectivity you can analyze side by side.

In the end, I know that all facts like this are fairly futile. There is not much use talking about this further unless we are explicit on some of the following points:

- What do you disagree with, in detail TYVM, in what I have said about the 2nd Amendment?
- What do you personally think the 2nd Amendment says? Full elaboration TYVM.
- What is your attitude to what the 2nd Amendment says? I.e. given the forum where we are, what is the moral/Christian/theistic import of it? Universal import, not just in terms of US constitution.

I'm not interested in getting bogged down in the news about the latest school shooting and yet another round of idiotic bashing of liberals versus conservatives, neither of which deserve their name, neither of which is more Christian than the other, so they are both irrelevant. Latest news in general is irrelevant, unless you can construct an instructive thought experiment out of it.

Last edited by seigneur (2/24/2018 4:50 am)