It used to be more nearly true 230 years ago, when administrations often didn't have enough money to pay for proper defence in the form of a properly paid standing army, and so depended to a greater extent on volunteer forces. At that time in Britain, for example in the Napoleonic Wars, commissioned officers weren't paid at all - rather used their position to corruptly gain advantage or were independently wealthy - and substantial parts of the forces were put together by press-gangs and the "King's Shilling" was a one-off payment, not a weekly wage.Millennie Al wrote: ↑Thu Jun 23, 2022 11:05 pmThat's what happens when you base something on a falsehood. The security of a free state is just as easily guaranteed by a standing army. Russia would not have been deterred from invading Ukraine by learning that every Ukranian had ten rifles and ten thousand rounds of ammunition.IvanV wrote: ↑Thu Jun 23, 2022 4:03 pmThe 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Heller vs DC in effect did this to the 2nd Amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, t[T}he right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
And the present members of the Supreme Court were only going to reinforce that.
One possible way of reading the amendment with that understanding, is that when you no longer need a militia, then the 2nd Amendment ceases to give you any right to keep and arm bears. Some sensible people have said that.
Even Scala did not believe that the 2nd amendment was an unlimited right to keep and arm bears. But having dismissed the first half of it as having no practical effect, he was unable to point to any words of it that actually said so. Rather he seemed to rely on history.Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote:When we no longer need people to keep muskets in their home, then the Second Amendment has no function ... If the Court had properly interpreted the Second Amendment, the Court would have said that amendment was very important when the nation was new; it gave a qualified right to keep and bear arms, but it was for one purpose only – and that was the purpose of having militiamen who were able to fight to preserve the nation.