In a classroom debate in high school, just to make trouble, I asked the presenters if they thought Easton or Hillerich & Bradley should be liable if someone uses their sporting products to kill someone. When the other kid said yes, I pointed out that those companies make baseball bats, not guns. It's all fairly silly, IMO, because like it or not, the 2nd Amendment is the law of the land, and however you parse the militia clause, the fact is that an independant clause explicitly prohibits infringments on "the right of the people". The need (and precedent) for a Constitutional amendment to ban drugs did not stop the government from doing so, of course, much less waging war on them without an exit strategy (talk about your quagmires! ), so whatever the legality, the practicalities might be a different issue. But legally, to restrict gun ownership, we should have a Constitutional Amendment.


Not to mention it would be a rather absurd abberration for, in the midst of an enumeration of special protections for citizens, particularly against the government, for one Amendment to explicitly state the right of soldiers to keep and bear arms. The National Guard definitely falls into the latter category, and the idea that the Amendment pertains to a state-sponsored militia as opposed to a national army is equally absurd, given the explicit ban on states waging war or maintaining their own armies in peace time. Limiting the 2nd Amendment to ANY government-related forces is akin to suggesting the 1st only protects government publications or the right of government personnel to assemble peacefully.



My own interpretation of the language of the militia clause is that "security of a free state" does not imply protection of independence or sovereignty against foreign powers, but retention of individual liberties against the state state itself. In modern uage, it would read "A well-armed citizen body being necessary to prevent a free state from turning tyrannical, the right of the people..." Since the Preamble speaks of the Federal Government being created to "provide for the common defense" and uses the word SECURE in relation to individual liberty, it seems that's what they mean in the wording of the 2nd Amendment. Since that preceding clause and the apparent original intent of the Framers would suggest military weaponry, it would then follow that under the spirit (if not the explicit letter of the law) that hunting weapons, target shooting and other sporting-intended guns and bows, and personal self-defense or home protection weapons are NOT protected. While the letter of the Second Amendment protects anything that could be used as a weapon (hey...I wonder if you can use a 32 oz soda to kill a man - make Bloomberg back off), the spirit implied by the militia clause would appear to restrict its protection exclusively to military weapons and anti-government weapons, such as high-powered rifles, rocket launchers, anti-tank & aircraft weaponry, and especially, cop-killer bullets. A burglar or mugger (Omar Little notwithstanding) is highly unlikely to be wearing a bullet-proof vest, so armor-piercing rounds known as "cop-killers" rather than that name being a reason to ban them, would seem to be exactly the kind of thing the Founding Fathers wanted the citizens to have access to.