Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

2nd amendment

My Positions

  1. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right to bear arms only in the context of a well-regulated militia.
  2. The modern reading of it as an individual right to own firearms for private purposes is a recent judicial invention, not the original meaning, and I reject it.
  3. Even if the individual-rights reading were correct, a constitutional provision written in 1791 for a society of muskets, no standing army, and a frontier is not a sound basis for firearms policy in 2026, and the proper response would be to amend it.

Notes

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

  • The amendment's own text states its purpose. The prefatory clause ("a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State") explains why the right exists, and the operative clause should be read in its light. A right granted so that the militia can function is not obviously a right to keep an AR-15 for personal use.
  • For most of U.S. history, the courts read the amendment as related to militia service. In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court upheld a federal restriction on sawn-off shotguns on the grounds that such a weapon had no "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia". This remained the governing interpretation for seventy years.
  • The individual-rights interpretation became dominant only with District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), in which the Supreme Court, by 5–4, reinterpreted the amendment to protect individual gun ownership unconnected to militia service, for the first time in its history. McDonald v. Chicago (2010) extended this to the states, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) extended it to carrying weapons in public and required that any regulation be consistent with the "historical tradition" of 1791. Each of these was a significant departure from earlier readings, and each was decided along ideological lines.
  • Former Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Nixon, described the individual-rights reading in 1991 as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime".
  • The "militia" of 1791 was the body of able-bodied male citizens, organised and armed by the state, in the absence of a standing army. The United States now has a standing army, and the organised militia is the National Guard. The historical condition that gave rise to the amendment no longer obtains.
  • The argument that an armed population is a check on tyranny does not survive contact with the modern state. A population armed with rifles is no check on a government with aircraft, armour, and artillery, and the populations that have actually resisted modern tyrannies have done so through institutions, courts, a free press, and mass non-cooperation, not through private arsenals. Meanwhile the private arsenals are used, overwhelmingly, on the citizens themselves.

Personal Context

  • I have never lived in the US.
  • I have fired firearms.
  • I have been a member of licensed gun clubs.
  • I have fired guns at licensed events in the UK.

Also see