This might not be a popular stance with some. However, the Bill of Rights was written very carefully to keep the verbiage so simple that a simpleton could understand it. Especially when compared to other constitutions.
But then you get the lawyers involved and since they have to spend more and more time learning to be and stay a lawyer, they feel they have the right to even interpret such a simple thing as the Bill of Rights.
" . . . shall not be infringed" in the Second Amendment is as plain as day as the day is light. But these days there isn't hardly a single person alive at all that hasn't lived with some form of increasing infringement on our gun rights. The NFA was passed in 1934 and challenged in 1939 in US v Miller.
Too bad Miller chickened out of the SCOTUS proceedings. The lower circuit court had already ruled in his favor, but he just didn't have the funds or the nerve to face the Governments' appeal to the Supreme Court. Therefore the court basically gave a defaulted judgement to the .gov and now the NFA stands.
It is interesting to note that the Harrison Narcotics act was cited as part of the SCOTUS decision in Miller.
Me personally, I know that there were criminals abound, mental illness too at the time of the writing of the Bill of Rights. So why, if we're supposed to let the .gov decide who the Second Amendment actually applies to, why wasn't the Second Amendment written to reflect that?
Because they did not want the .gov to have any say whatsoever. Once you let the state decide, it's a downhill slippery slope. And history proves that over and over through out the thousands of years of civilization.
This story is funny to me since we all know how much the Ninth usually hates guns, hell they upheld the CA ban on magazines, but here we are today:
"LOS ANGELES (CN) — A Ninth Circuit panel Thursday ruled that a blanket prohibition on convicted felons possessing firearms violates their Second Amendment rights, at least when it comes to nonviolent offenders who served out their sentence.
"“We do not base our decision on the notion that felons should not be prohibited from possessing firearms,” Bea wrote, noting that as a matter of policy the blanket prohibition may make a great deal of sense. But, citing preceding decisions, the judge said “the very enumeration of the Second Amendment right in our Constitution takes out of our hands the power to decide for which Americans that right is really worth insisting upon.”"
Ninth Circuit finds that convicted felons also have Second Amendment rights
