Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg on the Second Amendment (and Heller a bit)

[NNadir]

20. If the Second Amendment said what the NRA thinks it said...

...why would individual states need to add this right to state constitutions cited in your example?

The 1792 constitution of Kentucky almost certainly had slave clauses in it as well. The search for "original intent" is silly, particularly as the Constitution itself was very controversial even during its framing.

Benjamin Franklin, in many ways the inventor of the United States, remarked at the end of the Constitutional Convention, noting a decorative sun on the back of the chair in which the President of the Convention, a fellow named George Washington, sat, (I paraphrase) "For the entire length of the convention, I have been trying to decide if the sun on the back of the chair was rising or setting on the American nation. I have decided it is rising."

Franklin said so even though he was painfully aware of the imperfections of the document. He himself in approving the constitution had to compromise with his deeply held abolitionist sentiments.

He was a rationalist. The people who hold up the Second Amendment as a law handed down by God are, frankly, irrational nuts.

It doesn't matter what the framers had in mind, even though I personally think that the militia was what the second amendment was about, since they were mere human beings, and not gods, living in a primitive time. If the Second Amendment means that assholes can walk into a movie theater dressed as Batman and blow people away, or that an asshole can assault and kill school children and their teachers in their classrooms in public elementary school, it's a pretty fucking bad law and needs to be repealed.

Your analysis is, in any case, not quite on the level of Lincoln's Cooper Union Address.