Another superb Judith Mirville post below:
Judith Mirville: The Second Amendment was written in view of defending the young Republic in sparsely populated counties where you could be attacked by foreign marauders (it then included slaving marauders from Muslim North Africa as the country was still too poor to afford a real combating coastguard) without other recourse than your own fighting capacity. It was never meant to defend your individual property against the general citizenry, otherwise it would have been seen by all as tantamount to a return to feudalism, by definition.
The second amendment specified that anywhere there was sufficient official protection from foreign enemies and outlaws the individual bearing of weapons was not to be tolerated as a way of life and should be subject to about the same restrictions as in any civilized country of the Old World.
Switzerland decided about individual bearing of arms for the same reason : most of the land was mountainous wilderness where official authority was not available and was to be provided by inhabitants taking turns to patrol. Switzerland being in Europe, it could not escape defining even stricter norms of arms control for its citizens than the neighboring countries : you are entitled only to keep and bear weapons in as much as you do it as a soldier of your country, albeit on a part-time basis, and as soon as you tote one, you tote it in conformity with precise military orders.
I do favor an enlarged body of weapons-toters, so as for any wacko shooter to be sure that in case he starts his rampage his fire is most likely to be answered in kind, but anybody bearing arms according to the second amendment should do it as a voluntary US soldier, subject to military penalties as soon as he doesn’t obey the local military command as to the proper use of his military material. Any citizen should be granted the right to ask any weapon tote his voluntary soldier’s particular identity and particular reason to bear it (like acting as a voluntary vigilante in a drug lord ridden ghetto) in the same way he is entitled to ask any policeman’s uniform bearer his identity as a policeman.
I for one am thinking that America is now dividing into two : those for whom the first amendment about free speech and free expression is the only real sacred one, which includes the right to express oneself without any chance to be hit by stray bullets from frustrated control freaks ans therefore gun control, and those for whom the second amendment only is sacred, which includes your sacred rights to use your gun to suppress voices you claim as Unamerican or dissident.
