"Jim Wilson" wrote in message
.net...
Ed Huntress wrote...
"Jim Wilson" wrote in message
k.net...
I want to know why the framers considered the
freedom to bear arms a right of the people.

See Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Then you'll want to look
up
annotations regarding the calling of the militia and the Militia Act of
1792. In the annotations, you'll want to note the relative authorities
of
the federal government versus those of the states in peacetime versus
war.
It's a little tricky to follow but it's worth the effort.

Done. Thank you.

It was left up to the states to decide how to constitute their own
militias,
but the Militia Act required the states to do so. Most didn't want the
expense of arming them, which is one likely reason that the militia
phrase
was written into the 2nd. It was a reason that all of them would agree
to
without complaint.

It seems you were responding primarily to my remark that "if the framers
wanted to avoid vulnerability to invasion, it would have been far more
prudent to *require* that the populace maintain arms."

Yes, I was.

That statement was
in response to Alan's assertion that the second amendment was written to
address the framers' concerns that the nation could not afford an army
but nevertheless needed protection from potential invasion. I am
convinced that the vulnerability was indeed addressed explicitly, but
elsewhere; not in the Second Amendment. I doubt that the framers were
motivated by the reason Alan suggested.

I don't believe that it was a matter of cost, but, as you saw in Article I
and the Militia Act, the federal government at that time depended upon the
state militias for defense at the federal level. The federal government had
the authority to call up the militias and to organize them into an army.

They had a strong aversion to standing armies, you'll recall, and as the
result of several factors -- the assumed right to bear arms, the prerogative
of the states to maintain militias, and the abovementioned aversion to
standing armies -- an ad-hoc army assembled from states' militias, which in
turn were assembled from able-bodied and armed citizens, was the design for
land defense. You probably noted somewhere in there, I think in Article I,
that the federal government was to maintain a navy but not an army.


Unless I misunderstand you, I believe my original question stands. The
annotations -- thanks for the reference, BTW -- on the Second Amendment
are interesting and enlightening, but it appears that nothing in them nor
in the amendment itself provides a clear answer as to its purpose [1].
Also, I do not find anything in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution
or in its annotations that suggests why the Second Amendment might later
have been proposed (and adopted!).

Do you know of any contemporary or historical references that
directly address why the Second Amendment was made?

I do, but not much that I'd recommend unless you have the time to make a
career of it. 99% of it is written by advocates and they tend to be
selective arguments.

One exception, and an important work on the subject, is an article by
Sanford Levinson, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," Yale Law Journal 99
(December 1989). It may be online.

There are several troubles in understanding the 2nd. First is that there is
almost no record of the discussions about it that were conducted during the
First Federal Congress. Second, the Anti-Federalists who demanded a bill of
rights wanted a list of specific changes to the plan for federal government,
not a list of individual rights, as many people suppose. Third, it was
written by highly literate men and they chose to couch it in an arch
grammatical construction (the nominative absolute), which is inherently
ambiguous today, as it was in the late 18th century.

No doubt you'll be directed to various sources by others here. If you choose
to read them, keep in mind that the primary purpose of the Bill of Rights
was to pacify those who demanded such a bill. Several of the framers,
including Hamilton, thought the Bill was entirely unnecessary. In that sense
it was a political document intended to secure approval of the Constitution
itself.

And if you should be sidetracked into an argument that the federal Bill of
Rights was derived from the Virginia Bill of Rights (1776), bear in mind
that Virginia's B of R did not say anything about the right to keep and bear
arms. It did talk about a militia:

"SEC. 13. That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people,
trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free State;
that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to
liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict
subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."

Have fun. You can make a life's avocation out of studying it, and there are
worse ways to spend your time.

--
Ed Huntress
(remove "3" from email address for email reply)