I think that’s pretty much the only way you can make that work? I’m against gun ownership, but I feel like you really need to stretch things to read that any other way than ‘people shall be allowed to own their own guns’

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jebarker 5 days ago | parent [-]

I almost don’t want to respond since this is well trodden ground, but I would say that “a well regulated militia” casts doubt on the individual gun ownership interpretation. You have to decide who the militia exists to fight and therefore who should regulate them. It’s obviously not obvious though.

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conartist6 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

We know who the militia existed to fight.

The term "well-regulated milita" predates the constitution and traces back to the days when white people were often a substantial minority compared to the populations of enslaved black people they lived among.

On St Croix where a young man named Alexander Hamilton grew up, the ratio was 1 free person to 8 slaves, so the well-regulated militia was to assemble at the fortress if they heard a blast of the cannon: they were required to come with their weapons in order to put down a slave revolt.

Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.

It's also probably worth mentioning that "people" in "the right of the people" certainly excluded slaves from the right to own weapons, making the text even more burdened by its own history

My point is: what the founders understood was that some gun violence was the unavoidable cost of maintaining the system of slavery, itself a system of formalized/normalized political violence.

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Aeolun 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I dunno, this one is a whole lot less open to interpretation than the first sentence

	▲	jebarker 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not. "The people" is a collective term, so this unambiguously says that collectively the people have the right to keep and bear arms, i.e. as a group. For example, maybe this guarantees that a well regulated militia of the people has the right keep and bear arms. An example of a less ambiguous statement would be: "the right of all individual people to keep and bear arms".