How do you rank second amendment rights?

[DanTex]

75. Well, I'm glad you came out and flatly denied that 2A was intended to prevent the...

...federal government from disarming militias. Because now anyone with an iota of historical education can simply stop taking anything you say seriously. Very convenient... thanks!

For example, from your hero Scalia: "It is therefore entirely sensible that the Second Amendment ’s prefatory clause announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia." (And BTW, the 14th amendment was written some 80 or so years after the BOR, something to keep in mind when trying to use the 14th to draw inferences about the intent of the 2nd -- I guess they forgot to tell you that in gunner academy).

Anyway, what you keep ignoring is the philosophical question, which is what my last two posts were actually about. Like I said, I am not impressed by the ability of pro-gunners to concoct mangled legal interpretations to support their political views. I understand that, both de facto and de jure, what Scalia et al say is the official constitutional interpretation of the USA, so in that very narrow sense, you are finally right about one thing!

But the underlying philosophical issues don't depend on who happens to be sitting on the supreme court, or even what it says in the constitution. And this always trips up the pro-gunners. Because part of pro-gunner indoctrination involves memorizing long lists of talking points about the second amendment. But when asked to actually give a philosophical justification for why gun ownership should be considered a fundamental civil right, alongside things like free speech and fair trials, beyond "becuz its in da constatooshun", you just get blank stares.

At the time of the BOR, standing armies vs militias was a significant issue (along with peacetime quartering of troops in private homes), so it is not difficult to see why RKBA was elevated to the level of a constitutionally protected right. But, today, things are different, of course, and militias and quartering of troops are non-issues. The third amendment is basically obsolete, as would the second be if not for right-wing gun extremists who have managed to twist 2A into a requirement that the US must endure levels of gun violence and homicide that the rest of the civilized world would find completely intolerable.

But, regardless of what the framers thought, or how Scalia decides to interpret it, the most important point to me is that, gun ownership, in today's world, has nothing to do with maintaining and participating in a functioning democracy or a free civil society. A gun is an object, which can be both useful and dangerous, and it should be regulated as such, without all the hyperbolic talk of "freedom" and "tyranny". As I pointed, there are plenty of free, prosperous, democracies in the world with rational gun laws (almost all of them, in fact), and the people in places like the UK and Canada would simply laugh if you suggest that thousands of them should die every year for the sake of "gun rights".

Now, like most pro-gunners, I assume that you are a hardened American exceptionalist whose interest horizon ends at the border -- this is why you keep bringing up the fact that the same majority that believes creationism should be taught in public schools apparently agrees with Scalia about the second amendment. But it is worth repeating that, as with the idea that universal healthcare is some kind of slavery, from a more global perspective, the "gun rights" obsession is a phenomenon largely restricted to right-wing Americans.

And the reason that pro-gunners insist on elevating gun ownership to the level of a civil right, is that the NRA line can't possibly survive any kind of rational cost-benefit analysis. If we look at the amount of good that comes from overly lax gun laws in terms of self-defense, recreation, etc., and then weigh it against the negatives in terms of death and violence, it's not even close. It takes just a few seconds of comparing the US gun violence situation with other nations to figure this out.

The problem, though, is that, there is no plausible reason that gun ownership should actually be considered some kind of fundamental civil right that is inherently more valuable than public safety. The right to free speech, or fair trials, these are fundamental rights that are worth sacrificing some safety over, because they are essential to a free democratic society. But gun ownership? Please...