"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

It has always seemed to me that guns and gun regulation have been a nature of state regulation and not national regulation. A sawed off shotgun might not have any uses in new york city, but out in the woods is a whole different story.

The amendments were always about restoring the power to the people, the fact that guns are in there is just one other way the founders were protecting our liberties from government oppression. Being that no real problems with the understanding of this amendment happened till all the founder fathers were dead and buried is a real shame because now we are left in the hands of technocrats and people pushing their own pet agendas.

Have a hammer around as long as there's a nail to be driven in or pulled out.
Keep a shovel around until mastery over matter manipulation affords the effortless ease of moving earth from a to b points with a word or wave...

Have a gun, legally or illegally, until they don't exist any longer.....a tool is a tool, do what you will, the all of the law, with a brain that works and a heart that beats, yer fine. Fuck a constitution, fuck a congress, and , do as you please protect yourself from stupidity and dumb-ass motherfuckers is all....what was the point of this foray into fora anyhoo??....You want flowers in gun barels farhads?? -

National Guard is not Militia.

I got to meet one of the lawyers on the case for 2nd amendment rights in DC.

You see that The district of Columbia is not a state, yet they have taxes with out representation.

The whole city is unconstitutional.

It is a state matter to deal with guns, not a city or a federal matter.

When a gun issue comes up, that happens to be a legal issue a state trooper is called to the scene.

What do I mean? Any time there is concern for state law on guns, when a person has not committed a felony.

Well there is a more basic idea than law at stake here as VJ points out. Making just owning a gun a crime is an overly huge power of the government, much akin to prohibition of alcohol. However, I can't say I agree with his anarchism.

I think the main ploy to the ordinary man to give up his second amendment rights to bear arms usually comes with the idea of enhanced safety of all. If people don't have guns, then less violent crime will happen, or at least the violent crime won't be as easy to comment and take to the point of lethality. But this is a slippery slope of logic that I don't see any reasonable ending point to. You can carry that argument in every direction without bounds that aren't completely subjective. For instance, cars make bank robberies much easier to commit. Should the general populous not have access because it would make all of our dollar bills safer?

Gun laws seem very close in relation to drug laws, to make criminals out of people that have committed no other crime than possessing something. That is a moral problem. How is it right for a person to be brought to trial for committing no crime against his fellow man. A man going to jail because of his hypothetical use of a device in a violent manor is unjust and has no logical end.

No one can ignore the horrible atrocities that have happened in the recent upsurge of school shootings. The ease in which massive harm can be committed with automatic weapons is all to apparent. But making guns illegal doesn't solve that problem. In fact, it only gives power to those rouge elements in society that have no respect for the law. I find a similar parallel in the video game industry with all the new copyright protection methods. Hackers easily thwart all the new countermeasures within weeks or less, but the ordinary person has to deal with a whole new level of stress when dealing with the program (program stalls, interference with hardware settings and various others). I am not commenting on the legality of these copyright measures, but how they negatively affect the ordinary person and do nothing to stop the criminal.

It is a fact that in a free society, horrible things will happen. When such a thing happens, it is the immediate instinct to react. And what better way to react than with the false but convincing argument that more government controls will help the situation. You can outlaw criminal behavior as much as you want, but that doesn't eliminate crime. The fact is, the more unnecessary laws you create the more criminals you create, of which most are collateral damage, ordinary persons thrown in jail in the pursuit of unobtainable perfect safety.

In a free society, we have to get used to the fact that instead of a monarch committing atrocities on us, it will be our neighbors. A hard but certain truth when considering any law you would wish to create. In that, you want all the liberties you can get to ensure you freedoms will be preserved.

The Founders were addressing CIVILIANS keeping and bearing arms when the Constitution was written, as the very term "Militia" addresses an entity that is composed of ordinary citizens, NOT a government/military unit.

The Militia Act of 1903 resulted in the creation of the modern National Guard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Act_of_1903). The United States Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787... I think it is safe to say the Founders were not talking about the National Guard when they penned the Second Amendment.

Unfortunately, far too many hand-wringing bed-wetters project their inability to control their emotions and anger onto their armed neighbors - all the while forgetting the real threat of an unaccountable government out of control.

^ amen to that