Clinias wrote:

Basically, the second amendment is about having guns to protect oneself and family from the government. The American elite and American government is Marxist. They seek to install a Marxist society in America. It is not about hunting. It is about a check-n-balance against depredations of government tyranny. 

This is all easily debunked. My recommended first-off reading on the topic of 2nd Amendment https://www.americanbar.org/publications/insights_on_law_andsociety/14/fall-2013/natural-rights--common-law--and-the-english-right-of-self-defens.html

Some foretaste, "Many English legal ideas were trans­formed by the realities of American colonial life. The idea of the right to have arms was no exception."

And a reminder for Christians, if we have any here: "My home is my castle" is not a verse in the Bible.

Clinias wrote:

The first sentences of Seigneur's linked article are full of errors. 
=12px1st sentence:

"Early modern English politi­cal theorists and jurists often described the right to defend oneself as the first law of nature."

I should charge the autor and English political theorists of the misuse and abuse of language. "Law of Nature" was used by the Greeks to describe Laws IN physical nature. And NO "right to defend oneself" is not a "law of nature". That is the misuse and abuse of definition and usage of the term. 

2nd sentence:

Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke described a world without government or law as a state of nature, a primitive and dangerous world in which each person could use deadly force when­ever they judged it necessary.

Thomas Hobbes, an atheist, and John Locke a deist/hater of the Trinity are not philosophers, but sophists. 

Maybe Hobbes and Locke were more sophists than philosophers, but they were surely early modern English political theorists. This makes the first sentence right.

The right to bear arms derives from English law. Both the "right" part and the "arms" part were limited there by many pragmatic considerations. It never was an unrestricted and unregulated right in the US either. You have no factual basis to claim otherwise.

In England, historically the so-called right to bear arms was first born as the right of aristocrats to protect themselves anywhere they went. Commoners had no such right. Later the right was expanded and it evolved into the right to be ready to be drafted into army where you had to serve with your own equipment. Common dictionary confirms this (look at the second definition) https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/bear-arms

Clinias wrote:

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Smith:

 half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it's natural manure. our Convention has been too much impressed by. . .

Thomas Jefferson clearly understood that the Right to bear arms was to protect oneself against the government and to have rebellions where patriots and tyrants will shoot it out. 

Read full quote here: 
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/105.html 
 

That quote is not about the right to bear arms nor about the 2nd amendment. It's an anti-British letter asserting the right to resist the government, something that is not in the Constitution, but rather in the Declaration of Independence. Right to bear arms and right to oppose (and even depose) the government are distinct. Here's a quantitative study about the right to resist the government all over the world https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2125186

Last edited by seigneur (2/22/2018 4:06 am)

I would like to hear the comments of the non-gun owners in that seminar after this; And for that matter, any anti-gun persons comments...

I would take a moderate view of this, and think poorly of extremist positions on both sides.

I think that if America did pass and enforce gun control measures like Britain or Australia, there'd be less mass shootings and gun violence, but, apart from the impractically of achieving that goal, there'd probably be a noteable amount of gun violence remaining.

Besides, removing private gun ownership would deny the right of legitimate self-defence. I think that is perhaps even more important in America than Britain or Australia.