The Washington D.C. Gun Ban

[Sailor Steve]

Arguments like the one in the article come under the heading of:
Casuistry
Caviling
Equivocating
Niggling
Nitpicking
Pettifogging
Prevaricating
Quibbling
Trivializing

Originally Posted by MadMike

The second amendment is part of the Bill of Rights, it doesn't give rights to a "state militia" nor National Guard, it gives rights to "the people".

Yours, Mike

Wrong on one count. The Bill of Rights doesn't 'give' anything. It's there to guarantee rights presumed to be inherent to our nature as reasoning human beings. Saying the Constitution 'gives' us rights is the same as saying the government has rights to give. Government has no rights.

"The policy of the American government is to have its citizens free, neither resisting them nor aiding them in their pursuits."
-Thomas Jefferson

Arguments for and against guns and/or gun control miss one of the main theories behind the American ideal, that the government exists by the will of the people, not the other way around. Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend James Madison, the 'Father of the Constitution', that he would not give his support to the new government unless it was modified to include a listing of the people's rights. Madison was opposed to any bill of rights, believing that any listing was sure to leave something out, and future legalists might use that to say "See, they didn't mention this one, so they didn't mean for it to be there." Encompassed within that idea was the equally appalling possibility that some future legalist might also say "They didn't mean this, they meant that."

Madison stood alone in his opposition to the Bill of Rights, and was finally forced to give in to the majority. They did include the Tenth Amendment, which guarantees that any rights not listed belong to the States and the People, not the Federal Government. Unfortunately this means that, theoretically, individual states and, yes, cities, have the power to abrogate rights as they see fit. The Constitution has been amended to grant the Federal Government the power to keep the states from denying rights guaranteed to the whole people by the Constitution, and that's where the arguments come from: what power goes where.

I can see the need for ongoing arguments about power; it's when they start talking about what 'rights' are 'granted' by the Constitution that, to my mind at least, they wander further and further from what the framers intended.