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Health & Fitness

Interpreting the Second Amendment

The insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment is error and approaches treason.

The second article of amendment to the United States Constitution says: "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."

The Constitution also says: "Congress shall have power ... to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 15).

The Second Amendment was never intended for us to rebel against the American government. As Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, "It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination."

The Second Amendment has to be interpreted in the light of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.  It was meant to arm militias, by arming the citizenry, for defense from invasion and rebellion and to see to it that national laws are enforced.  Service in the militia was compulsory (Second Militia Act of 1792). If the Founders had intended the Second Amendment to be for resisting the national authority of the federal government, as some today say they did, then the Founders never would have given Congress constitutional power in Section 8 of Article I to summon the militia for suppressing rebellions.

The Second Militia Act of 1792, passed within six months of the adoption of the Second Amendment, gives us a perfect illustration of what the Founders intended by the Second Amendment: "[W]henever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act, the same being notified to the President of the United States, by an associate justice or the district judge, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia of such state to suppress such combinations" (Article XI, Section 2).  Such a provision in legislation closely following the adoption of the Second Amendment also shows us what the Founders did not intend with the amendent.

The position that the Second Amendment was intended for resisting and attacking the federal government of the United States is not borne out by the relevant facts of official documents.  The assertion that it was intended for such is both anarchical and inimical to public safety.  It approaches treason, as defined by Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution: "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." 

Using guns to fire upon the visible presence and authority of the United States government, even when a large group of people are convinced that it's in the wrong, is warring against the country because our government is the nation.  It's treason.  There is no United States of America without the government; otherwise there would just be a landscape with lots of unruly people in it.  The only legal ways for citizens to oppose the federal government is to protest and vote in subsequent elections for new leadership, representation and constitutional amendments or else sue it.

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