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from the founding-fathers-didn't-have-tazers dept.
Massachusetts' ban on the private possession of stun guns—an "electrical weapon" under the statute—does not violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the state's top court has ruled.
The decision says ( http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/stungunMA-ruling.pdf ) (PDF) that the US Constitution's framers never envisioned the modern stun-gun device, first patented in 1972. The top court said stun guns are not suitable for military use, and that it did not matter whether state lawmakers have approved the possession of handguns outside the home.The court, ruling in the case of a Massachusetts woman caught with stun gun, said the stun gun is a "thoroughly modern invention" not protected by the Second Amendment, although handguns are protected.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday March 11 2015, @04:44PM
This ignorant and illiterate argument? Really?
Lets just keep the argument simple here on a dead thread. Do you know the difference between an army and the militia? The men who wrote the 2nd Amendment did. The militia is every able bodied male capable of bearing arms, expected to appear when called armed and trained to defend their homeland. An army is a permanent military force trained and armed by the State. The Founders knew armies to be dangerous to liberty while a well regulated (not so much regulated in the modern sense, a dictionary is your friend) and well armed militia was both a defender and a friend of a Free People.
But if you were taught English in school you also know the expository clause doesn't limit the very clear final phrase. Also finally, remember that the entire Bill of Rights must be read in the sense they were proposed and ratified, as additional limitations on a Federal Government that some thought had been given too much power in the original Constitution. The status quo at the time was the possession of arms was universally agreed to be a basic human right and there is zero historical evidence that anyone who wrote the 2nd Amendment or that a single legislator who voted to ratify it meant to in any way limit the inherent Right of Free Men for self defense, a Right that goes back into English Common Law a long way before the Revolution. If you read the 2nd in the same way as the other nine, as limits of the power of the Federal Government to infringe the Rights of the People, there is only one way to interpret it.
Please spend the hour or so needed to go actually read the SCOTUS's actual decision in Heller, it is an argument ender unless you are a Progressive and thus heedless of any argument because you simply reject the premise of the argument, that we are living in a Constitutional Republic and the Rule of Law.