General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Republicans Allow Potential Terrorist Buy Guns Legally?!?! [View all]CajunBlazer
(5,648 posts)...which has the most ambiguous language in the entire constitution. There are equally valid interpretations of the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution. In fact for 218 years, Supreme Court Justices and other judges overwhelmingly concluded that the amendment authorized states to form militias, what we now call the National Guard.
Then, in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upended two centuries of precedent. In the [Heller case], an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the Constitution confers a right to own a gun for self-defense in the home. So the NRA supports only one very interpenetration of the 2nd Amendment. It is interesting that the NRA has the Second Amendment inscribed in their lobby, but with the militia clause removed.
There were many groups down though history that supported various interpretations of various sections of the constitution. For instance, several group Southern groups before the Civil War claimed that the Constitution projected the their right to own slaves.
After the war the KKK and other groups like the Red Shirts claimed that the 13th Amendment was illegal and contested the right of the federal government to tell them how they should conduct their state governments in the South.
I guess if we stand on our head and twist our tongue a bit like you did, we could also call the KKK a civil rights group.