US CONSTITUTION 2ND AMENDMENT

[Unregistered]

HI,
IS THERE A DEFINITION OF 'ARMS'......AS IN 'THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS' ?

[otherone]

HI,
IS THERE A DEFINITION OF 'ARMS'......AS IN 'THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS' ?

That depends on what the definition of "is" is.

[brushfire]

You might find arms in an armory. That might range from firearms, to bladed weapons, items to this effect. Why come here to ask that question though?

[fisharmor]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW4vVglMjS8

[Danke]

Nuclear Arms.

[buck000]

A quick search yielded this explanation (https://www.quora.com/In-terms-of-the-2nd-Amendment-how-does-one-define-Arms) which I find acceptable.

[unknown]

HI,
IS THERE A DEFINITION OF 'ARMS'......AS IN 'THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS' ?

Any weapon that the government possesses.

No more, no less.

[unknown]

You might find arms in an armory. That might range from firearms, to bladed weapons, items to this effect. Why come here to ask that question though?

Because we are libertarians, Ron Paul followers who embrace freedom as prescribed in the Constitution and in some cases, even more so.

Its only natural that we should be asked this question as we make it our business to understand the Constitution per the Founders' intent, not political interpretations after the fact.

[brushfire]

Because we are libertarians, Ron Paul followers who embrace freedom as prescribed in the Constitution and in some cases, even more so.

Its only natural that we should be asked this question as we make it our business to understand the Constitution per the Founders' intent, not political interpretations after the fact.

So you weren't necessarily looking for the definition - more of an affirmation. I'm definitely with you, comrade!

..I just got done listening to Scott Adams dismiss his follower's arguments against further gun legislation. He rationalizes fully automatic weapons for private guard details, because those who need these guard details are "special cases" (politicians and celebrities like Scott Adams). Then Scott moves on to apply broad legislation upon the populous because of the general risks associated with unregulated bumpstock sales... Aren't mass shootings the "special case"? Are these shootings really an epidemic requiring broad reaching legislation? I guess when you view yourself an exception to the rules you wish to impose on everyone else, it becomes very easy to rationalize.

I'm still going out on a limb here to suggest you are more likely to be killed by a police officer than an active shooter - someone fact check me please. Perhaps every bumpstock sold should include a blue costume to give comfort to the likes of Scott Adams :) My opinion about gun control is that its never about the gun, and always about the control. There's no epidemic here, only a media that thrives on blood an gore, an a populous that is captivated by the plight of a few very unfortunate souls.

Call me ignorant, but I dont see the bumpstock as the problem in this equation, and I'm reluctant to chase anything up that tree. I think we have an irresponsible media, and a populous that is grossly entertained and infatuated with gratuitous violence. Whether its night vision wearing ninjas killing brown people abroad, or vigilante cops killing "bad guys" domestically. Heck, even gore on the side of the highway attracts onlookers causing congestion for miles - people just love a good blood bath, and both the media and the political interests it serves, know it.

[osan]

HI,
IS THERE A DEFINITION OF 'ARMS'......AS IN 'THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS' ?

Yes. The Constitution is clear on what it means by "arms": death rays.

[EBounding]

It's in the dictionary.

http://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/arms

'ARMS, noun plural [Latin arma.]

1. Weapons of offense, or armor for defense and protection of the body.

2. War; hostility.

[phill4paul]

The Constitution does not mention "ordinance" in the second amendment. It specifically mentions "Arms." Whereas, all able bodied men were considered militia and, whereas, all able bodied men were required to own arms and be ready for combat...all the arms and munitions of a U.S. Army Fire Team should be available to the defenders of Liberty. Select fire automatic carbines, grenadier (propelled grenades), and a light machine gun. Also, explosive munitions. A populace, determined, can over come a tyrannical government, or riots, or insurrections with these tools.

Unfortunately, under current 'law', the Second amendment doesn't apply. Law, a government creation, has superseded the very limitations placed upon it.

[TheTexan]

In the 2nd amendment, "arms" means any weapon typically used for hunting or Olympic target shooting. Some interpretations think it also covers weapons typically used for shooting tin cans in your backyard (such as bb guns)

[TheTexan]

A good rule of thumb, is if the weapon would be useful in actual warfare, it's not protected by the 2nd amendment

[oyarde]

HI,
IS THERE A DEFINITION OF 'ARMS'......AS IN 'THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS' ?

Yes , if it is made I should be able to have it . I may need it to defend myself against others that do .

[AZJoe]

[T]he right to arms is essentially a question of the balance of power between a people and the state that governs them. ...
We have, in the twentieth century, seen the rise of monstrous states capable of deprivations of liberty far in excess of anything that the English Whigs who authored the Declaration of Rights of 1689—or their American successors in 1791—could have envisioned. … That, in light of the history of the twentieth century, those we rely on for serious constitutional and political commentary have failed to examine the issues of whether the state should have a monopoly of force and whether an armed population might still play an important role in deterring government excesses bespeaks a dangerous intellectual cowardice, a self-imposed limit on political and constitutional discourse that causes us largely to ignore one of the most critical questions of our time. - Robert J Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, Book Review. The Fifth Auxiliary Right, 104 Yale L.J. 995, 1025-26 (1994), a review of Dr. Joyce Lee Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origin of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994)

[A] society with a dismal record of protecting a people has a dubious claim on the right to disarm them. - Robert J Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L. J. 309, 361 (1991).

[AZJoe]

Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, History will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. - Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; Gandhi, An Autobiography, pg 446.

In 1928, Germany enacted its Gesetz uber Schusswaffen und Munition (Law on Firearms and Ammunition), which required firearms and ammunition acquisition permits and record keeping for all transactions. Through this legislation, the police acquired knowledge of all firearm owners, which was used to the Nazis’ advantage when they took power in 1933. The Nazi Waffengesetz (Weapons Law) of 1938, signed by Adolph Hitler, built upon the previous registration systems and strictly regulated handguns. … On the first day the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, they put up posters in every town ordering the inhabitants to surrender all firearms, including hunting guns. The penalty for disobedience was death. The Nazis were able to use local and central registration records of firearms owners and hunters to execute the decree. Lists of potential dissidents and other suspects were already prepared, and those persons disappeared immediately. The Nazi commander of Belgium and Netherlands proclaimed that “[t]he surrender of weapons and other implements of war has been ordered by special proclamation.... Hunting guns are [also] to be surrendered ....” The Nazi head of Norway decreed that “[a]ll arms and munitions must be handed over” because only licensed officials and persons with police permits retained the right to possess arms. - Stephen P Halbrook, Congress Interprets The Second Amendment: Declarations By A Co-Equal Branch On The Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms, 62 Tenn. L.R. 597, 619-623 (1995).

[A]n armed populace can and does continue to create some deterrent against the threat of oppressive government. - Nelson Lund, The Past and Future of the Individual’s Right to Bear Arms, 31 Ga Law Rev. 1, 26-27 (1996).

[AZJoe]

Of course, there are those who suggest that democratically-elected public officials would never do anything to seriously harm the American people. But let’s look at just a few twentieth-century examples: They confiscated people’s gold. They repudiated gold clauses in government debts. They provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and then acted like they were surprised. They incarcerated Japanese-Americans for no crime at all. They injected dangerous, mind-altering drugs into American servicemen without their knowledge. They radiated the American people in the Pacific Northwest and then deliberately hid this information from them. They have surreptitiously confiscated and plundered people’s income and savings through the Federal Reserve System. They have plundered and terrorized the citizenry through the IRS. And, most recently, they have sent our fellow citizens to their deaths thousands of miles away in the pursuit of a relatively insignificant cause. - Jacob G. Hornberger, Gun Control, Patriotism and Civil Disobedience, Pamphlet published by International Society for Individual Liberty; also The Tyranny of Gun Control, 28 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).

Political killings of innocent people could never happen in America, our fellow citizens tell us. America is a democracy. but so was Nazi Germany. Hitler was popularly elected, and his economic policies were widely favored and acclaimed (by Germans and Americans!) - Jacob G. Hornberger, The Nazi Mind-Set in America, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 59-60 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997

The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned—the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach—is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!. - Jacob G. Hornberger, Gun Control, Patriotism and Civil Disobedience, Pamphlet published by International Society for Individual Liberty.

The ultimate barrier to the ultimate tyranny lies not with the ballot box. It lies not with the soapbox. It lies not with the jury box. The ultimate barrier to the tyranny of one’s own government lies with the cartridge box. - Jacob G. Hornberger, The Nazi Mind-Set in America, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 62 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).

Those who believe that democratically-elected rulers lack the potential and inclination for destructive conduct against their citizenry are living in la-la land. - ​Jacob G. Hornberger, Gun Control, Patriotism and Civil Disobedience, Pamphlet published by International Society for Individual Liberty.

[AZJoe]

[G]enocide has cost the lives of more innocents this century than all the soldiers killed on all sides in all the world’s wars in the same period.... [Genocide] has overtaken countries both rich and poor, urban and agrarian. Most of the people who were murdered by their own governments in this century would undoubtedly have said, before the fact, that their becoming the victims of any such wholesale mass-atrocities was a simply unthinkable eventuality. - Kates, Don B., Jr. and Daniel D. Polsby, Of Genocide and Disarmament, 86 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 247, 255, 250 (1995).

The right of arms is one of the first to be taken away by tyrants, not only for the physical security despotism gains in monopolizing armed power in the hands of the state, but also for its moral effects. The tyrant disarms his citizens in order to degrade them; he knows that being unarmed “palsies the hand and brutalizes the mind: an habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.” Thus, when Machiavelli said that “to be disarmed is to be contemptible,” he meant not simply to be held in contempt, but to deserve it; by disarming men tyrants render them at once brutish and pusillanimous. - Kates, Don B., Jr. , The Second Amendment and the Ideology of Self-Protection, 9 Const. Commentary 87, 90-91

Far from proving invincible, in the vast majority of cases in this century in which they have confronted popular insurgencies, modern armies have been unable to suppress the insurgents. This is why the British no longer rule in Israel and Ireland, the French in Indo-china, Algeria, and Madagascar, the Portuguese in Angola, the whites in Rhodesia, or General Somoza, General Battista, or the Shah in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Iran respectively—not to mention the examples of the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. - Kates, Don B., Jr. ,Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment, 82 Mich. L. Rev. 204, 270 (1983).

[AZJoe]

In the twentieth century, the United States government forced 100,000 United States citizens into concentration camps. In 1941, American citizens of Japanese descent were herded into concentration camps run by the United States government. Like the victims of other mass deportations, these Americans were allowed to retain only the property they could carry with them. Everything else—including family businesses built up over generations—had to be sold immediately at fire-sale prices or abandoned. The camps were “ringed with barbed wire fences and guard towers.” During the war, the federal government pushed Central and South American governments to round up persons of Japanese ancestry in those nations and have them shipped to the U.S. concentration camps. ... the incarceration of Japanese-Americans continued long after any plausible national security justification had vanished. ... what if the war had gone differently? What if a frustrated, angry America, continuing to lose a war in the Pacific, had been tempted to take revenge on the “enemy” that was, in the concentration camps, a safe target. Would killing all the Japanese be a potential policy option? In 1944, by which time America’s eventual victory in the war seemed assured, the Gallup Poll asked Americans, “What do you think we should do with Japan, as a country, after the war?” Thirteen percent of Americans chose the response “Kill all Japanese people.” - David B Kopel, commenting on whether a tyrannical or genocidal government could occur in America in Book Review: Lethal Laws. by Jay Simpkin, Aaron Zelman, & Alan M. Rice, Jews for The Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Inc., 2872 South Wentworth Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53207, (414) 769-0760, 15 N.Y.L. Sch. J. Int’l & Comp. L. 355, 381-382 (1995) citing Gallup Poll released Dec. 20, 1944, question 2, in 1 The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1971, at 477 (1972).

Imagine that the year is 1900. You are told that within fifty years, a nation in the world will kill over six million members of a religious minority. Which nation would you pick? If you were well-informed about world affairs, it is very unlikely that you would pick Germany. In 1900, Germany was a democratic, progressive nation. Jews living there enjoyed fuller acceptance in society than they did in Britain, France or the United States. - David B. Kopel, commenting on whether a tyrannical or genocidal government could occur in America in Book Review: Lethal Laws. by Jay Simpkin, Aaron Zelman, & Alan M. Rice, Jews for The Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Inc., 2872 South Wentworth Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53207, (414) 769-0760, 15 N.Y.L. Sch. J. Int’l & Comp. L. 355, 383 (1995).

[AZJoe]

To assert that constitutional protections only extend to the technologies in existence in 1791 … would be to claim that the First Amendment only protects the right to write with quill pens and not with computers, and that the fourth Amendment only protects the right to freedom from unreasonable searches in log cabins and not in homes made from high-tech synthetics. Does “freedom of the press” in the Constitution’s First Amendment, and its state counterparts, apply only to printing presses “of the sort” in use in 1789? Are printing technologies that rely on lead type protected, while xerographic processes are not? Is a pamphlet distributed on floppy diskette or through electronic mail unprotected? Should the Supreme court hold that presses capable of printing thousands of pages of libels per hour are not protected? The Constitution does not protect particular physical objects, such as quill pens, muskets, or log cabins. Instead, the Constitution defines a relationship between individuals and the government that applies to every new technology. - David B. Kopel, Article: A Tale of Three Cities: The Right to Bear Arms in State Supreme Courts, 68 Temple L. Rev. 1177 (Fall 1995).

[Danke]

In the 2nd amendment, "arms" means any weapon typically used for hunting or Olympic target shooting. Some interpretations think it also covers weapons typically used for shooting tin cans in your backyard (such as bb guns) Ridiculous argument. They didn't have BB guns when they wrote the constitution.

[phill4paul]

Ridiculous argument. They didn't have BB guns when they wrote the constitution.

Disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girandoni_air_rifle

[otherone]

Where in the constitution does it allow the government to bear arms?

[DamianTV]

In response to the OP, try this video:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOwy9OWfnAM

[Weston White]

HI,
IS THERE A DEFINITION OF 'ARMS'......AS IN 'THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS' ?

SCOTUS has already defined this, it pertains to whatever standardized weaponry a soldier would use in battle, e.g., a soldier would not use a shank, dirk or dagger so shanks, dirks and daggers are not protected by the 2nd Amend.

[fedupinmo]

SCOTUS has already defined this, it pertains to whatever standardized weaponry a soldier would use in battle, e.g., a soldier would not use a shank, dirk or dagger so shanks, dirks and daggers are not protected by the 2nd Amend.

https://www.carid.com/images/ka-bar/hunting/2217kabar.jpg

[osan]

A quick search yielded this explanation (https://www.quora.com/In-terms-of-the-2nd-Amendment-how-does-one-define-Arms) which I find acceptable.


I don't. The definitions given there are OK as far as they go. The problem is that they don't go far enough.

Arms: any instrumentality, whether physical or otherwise, that may be used as a means of defense by a man against any threat to his person or property, as well as that of others.

I'd call that a good start, if not even quite there.

One of the really deep and troubling problems I've noticed with people is their apparent inability to properly judge scope. The definitions given in the referenced site are far too narrow. The weapons allowed the military should always be a subset of those allowed the militia. ALWAYS.

[osan]

SCOTUS has already defined this, it pertains to whatever standardized weaponry a soldier would use in battle, e.g., a soldier would not use a shank, dirk or dagger so shanks, dirks and daggers are not protected by the 2nd Amend.

Yeah well, SCOTUS is notorious for getting things impossibly wrong. I would not trust them to tell me water is wet without leaving some backdoor open for further government involvement in the issue.

SCOTUS != credible, even when they get things marginally right on rare occasion. See Heller and MacDonald for prime examples of this.