The Second Amendment in the American Bill of Rights

A survey making the email listserv rounds, apparently sponsored by USA Today, asks: "Does the Second Amendment give individuals the right to bear arms?"

The 2nd amendment in the American Bill of Rights reads, "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 does not explicitly give individuals the right to arms. “The People” have this right. (Capitalization of “People” was not in the original draft, but was added to the version distributed to the states.) At best, this is ambiguous, since “people” can be taken to mean individuals, or a government “of the people, by the people and for the people”. The introductory phrase “...well regulated Militia...” seems to lean the whole amendment towards the latter interpretation but, of course, this has been debated ever since it was passed. "well regulated " could also imply restrictions on citizens' right to bear arms, i.e., gun control. In 1791, there was no national army; America won independence with an aggregation of state militias, the raising of which would have been nearly impossible had not a great majority of individuals already had their own weapons. Therefore, for all practical purposes, it can be argued (and has been!) that the amendment implies the right of individuals to bear arms. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say it. Since it is ambiguous, and since the USA Today question asks about rights of individuals, which are not mentioned in the Amendment, I think a strictly literal answer would have to be no. I noticed, however, that 97% of respondents disagreed with me.

From Wikipedia: " One aspect of the gun control debate is the conflict between gun control laws and the alleged right to rebel against unjust governments. Some believe that the framers of the Bill of Rights sought to balance not just political power, but also military power, between the people, the states and the nation,[44] as Alexander Hamilton explained in 1788:

“[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude[,] that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens.[44][45]
“Some scholars have said that it is wrong to read a right of armed insurrection in the Second Amendment because clearly the founding fathers sought to place trust in the power of the ordered liberty of democratic government versus the anarchy of insurrectionists.[46][47] Other scholars, such as Glenn Reynolds, contend that the framers did believe in an individual right to armed insurrection. The latter scholars cite examples, such as the Declaration of Independence (describing in 1776 “the Right of the People to … institute new Government”) and the New Hampshire Constitution (stating in 1784 that “nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind”)."

Anyway, I’m about to pass my (registered) .444 Marlin lever-action with the gold-plated trigger to my son, since he finally got around to getting a federal license to own one. Not owning it yet didn’t preventing him from using it to kill a bear that had eaten 4 of his goats and was threatening my wife and granddaughter two years ago. And had he not, I had it in the sights of my (also registered) .308 at that moment anyway.