Was the 2nd amendment for individuals?

[Trailboss]

The Bill of Rights were written to protect the rights of the individual, why would the authors suddenly decide that only the 2nd amendment protected state's rights? The Federalists Papers provide insight to the thinking behind the authors, and the Supreme Court continually rules that the 2nd Amendment protects individual rights, not state militias.

Before the Revolutionary War began, the formal state militias were loyal to the crown. The American Revolutionary army was raised to fight the loyal Tory's and the British Regular Soldiers. The American militia were all the non-Tory, privately-armed citizens who maintained adequate arms and ammunition ("well-regulated" has been logically argued that it meant adequately-supplied in the vocabulary of the time) and able to respond to a call to arms on a minute's notice (hence the term Minutemen).

 

[Magdump]

It’s not about gun control. It’s about disarming we the people. Specifically, we the law abiding people.

 

[bigsk]

A little research into the drafting of the Bill of Rights indicates the intent being protection of the rights of “We the People”.

Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which were adopted as a single unit on December 15, 1791, and which constitute a collection of mutually reinforcing guarantees of individual rights and of limitations on federal and state governments.

The Second Amendment was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, according to College of William and Mary law professor and future U.S. District Court judge St. George Tucker in 1803 in his great work Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as the “true palladium of liberty.” In addition to checking federal power, the Second Amendment also provided state governments with what Luther Martin (1744/48–1826) described as the “last coup de grace” that would enable the states “to thwart and oppose the general government.” Last, it enshrined the ancient Florentine and Roman constitutional principle of civil and military virtue by making every citizen a soldier and every soldier a citizen.

James Madison produced an initial draft of the Second Amendment as follows:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

The committee of the House of Representatives that considered Madison’s formulation altered the order of the clauses such that the militia clause now came first, with a new specification of the militia as “composed of the body of the people,” and made several other wording and punctuation changes.

As resolved by the House of Representatives on August 24, 1789, the version of the Second Amendment sent to the Senate remained similar to the version initially drafted by James Madison. The provision at that time read:

“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the People, being the best security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

The Amendment would take what would become its final form in the Senate, where the religious-objector clause was finally removed and several other phrases were modified. For instance, the phrase referencing the militia as “composed of the body of the People” was struck, and the descriptor of the militia as “the best security of a free State” was modified to “necessary to the security of a free State.”

The final language of the Second Amendment was agreed to and transmitted to the states in late September of 1789

 

[MikeBurke]

Founding Father, George Mason, was instrumental in the creation of the Bill of Rights, some refer to him as the Father of the Bill of Rights.

His thoughts on the militia:

I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.