Thread: Sad happenings in the UK

There was an article in the Canadian newspaper, "The Globe and Mail", that presents a case that the, "right to bear arms" was in fact never a part of the US Constitution, that it is only recently that the idea that "individuals", rather than the "collective" have the right to arm themselves individually.

I don't purport to be even vaguely familiar with the American Constitution, but I'd thought I'd share this article as food for thought/discussion. I'll cut and paste one small section and provide a link to the article. I found it interesting, but have no context in regards to it.

Here's the link to the article:

How U.S. gun ownership became a ‘right,’ and why it isn’t - The Globe and Mail

And here's a soundbite from it - certainly interesting...

"Until 2002, every U.S. president and government had declared that the Constitution’s Second Amendment did not provide any individual right for ordinary citizens to own firearms. Rather, it meant what its text clearly states: that firearms shall be held by “the People” – a collective, not individual right – insofar as they are in the service of “a well-regulated militia.”

There had not, up to that point, been much ambiguity about this. “For 218 years,” legal scholar Michael Waldman writes in his book The Second Amendment: A Biography, “judges overwhelmingly concluded that the amendment authorized states to form militias, what we now call the National Guard,” and did not contain any individual right to own firearms.

The U.S. Supreme Court had never, until 2008, suggested even once that there was any such right. Warren Burger, the arch-conservative Supreme Court justice appointed by Richard Nixon, in an interview in 1991 described the then-new idea of an individual right to bear arms as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Acually I must disagree with Saunders. I am 57 and when I was younger everyone believed that they had the individual right to protect themselves with firearms as they do today