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Entry: Gun Rights, the Militia, and Community Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/gun_rights_the_militia_and_community#31214 Post contents: There is nothing ambiguous about the phrase in the Second Amendment that safeguards the fundamental right to bear arms and endorses the need for a "well regulated militia". The genesis of the wording is really quite simple. The Founders were against a standing army because these forces of empire were a symbol of aggressive Europe and one of the most potentially corrosive attractive nuisances for any nation to withstand. Standing armies militated and fomented....... and were a chronic and destructive drain on the finances of any nation. As an alternative, the Founders were in favor of a small and efficient Federal Government that would rely, in times of real need.... upon the speedy mobilization of a citizens militia. This citizens militia would only be required in extremis and it would be released to pursue a variety of liberties.... with their own arms..... when the emergency passed. Abjuring a standing army was an effective insurance that we would not "go abroad in search of monsters" nor resort to self-inflicted tyranny at home. This fundamental Republican Virtue was one of the earliest principles to fall into the widening abyss that separates us from the Foundational Philosophy. Government has grown out of any proportion to real need and the people have thoroughly habituated themselves to a nanny state that will think nothing of running roughshod over them in the years to come. Now, when the cows have been let out of the barn, fattened on corn and consumed as cheeseburgers, we have people assuming that the Founders were sloppy in their prose or "confused". No, on the contrary, what would confuse the literate, reasoning and deliberative Founders, even the uber-Federalist Hamilton, is the perverse state of the Republic they left for this witless generation to utterly destroy. The fact that neither conservatives nor liberals have raised this obvious truth about the Founders negation of a Standing Army during the discussion of this case is the best illustration that ignorance remains bliss. The Constitution is now, at best, a conceit to be parsed as required by an authoritarian government that would not recognize a Republic if somebody had a gun pointed at its tapering pin-head. We have been given a stellar seminar on the hazards of ignoring our own Revolution and its Founding Documents to a point of virtual no-return and hardly anyone raises an eyebrow beyond mindless partisan chattering. So, it is little wonder that the people of today think nothing of second-guessing or criticizing the Founders while armoring themselves in ignorance and pedestrian thinking. While the Supreme Court came to a correct conclusion, the reasoning behind it is not altogether clear beyond the easily identifiable influence of a recreational gun lobby. I really doubt that the NRA gives a damn about the fundamental corrosion that is slowly bankrupting our dissolute nation while grooming generations of both venal and craven politicians. Funny, but the Founder's disliked a Standing Government almost as much as they did a standing army, requiring it's elected and appointed representatives to spend the majority of their time at some gainful occupation at home, where they belonged. We'll take what we can get and we'll keep our right to bear arms even though one can question of what use it is when we are now, in effect, held hostage by two intractable forces: an ignorant and fearful citizen and their government and military that have become infected by authoritarian hubris. Sent at: 2008 12 02