The 2nd amendment is an invalid argument against american gun control

Interpretation of the amendment "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." Above we can all read the second amendment. There is some ambiguity of the language. For example, is the right of arms separate from the militia or is it only applicable to those in the militia? Language is the means we use to communicate ideas and often the flaws of our language can harm the delivery of our ideas. What is important is what the founders were trying to communicate and this is what we should be trying to figure that out. This applies to interpretation of any legal text. So when interpreting this amendment, instead of choosing one that happens to best correspond to your political beliefs by some strange literary machination, lets try instead of determine in a strait forward manner what the founders meant and then determined how that can be applied to today's government and nation. What the Founder's Meant In order to determine this, lets see what their opinions were on this topic: "I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." George Mason Co-author of the Second Amendment during Virginia's Convention to Ratify the Constitution, 1788 (1) "To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." Richard Henry Lee American Statesman, 1788 (1) My source shows a whole slew of quotes from the time that shows that the founding fathers believed that every person should have the right to bear arms. The militia was interpreted to be the whole of the American people. Militias and the Right to Arms The amendment begins with the statement that we have a militia. It ends with the statement that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be infringed. This last part sounds like a moral principal and there is no indication that it is limited to militias from the text itself. So my opponent is reading in its dependence on the militia based on its coming after the militia section even though it never references the militia directly. From what we know of the time people strongly believed in the right to bear arms independent of the militia (or believed that the people were the militia) and so that is what they meant when they say that this right cannot be infringed. If my opponent is going to read in the right to bear arm's limitation to the militia then he should provide some quote from the time the amendment was written that indicates the writers or at least some people thought that way. Non-Militia Guns Regulation My opponent argues that all arms that are not associated with a militia can be regulated. However I previously showed that there is no dependency between the right to arms clause and the militia clause. So this reasoning is invalid. Limitations on the Right Not all rights are unlimited. For example, we don't have the right to scream "fire" in a theater. We can be sure the right to bear arms is unlimited because it expressly says that it cannot be infringed. To infringe means to restrict or encroach upon. This means that government cannot even touch anything about the people's right to a weapon. Weapon Type Does the amendment mean that the right to bear any type of arm cannot be infringed or does it only mean that having at least one arm cannot be infringed (thus allowing restriction on weapon type)? If the government could infringe on arm type then the second amendment could ban all arms except really weak ones like knives or 16th century muskets. This would make the amendment meaningless because these weapons were weak. Therefore it is unlikely that the founding fathers meant the amendment to allow infringing on the type of weapons. So this clause meant to keep the government completely out of the people's keeps and carrying around weapons. The Supreme Court The court is partisan. The conservatives tend to allow conservative policies and the liberals tend to do the opposite. So its opinions depends on it's members' politics. This means that it's opinion alone does not determine correct interpretation of the Constitution. 1: http://cap-n-ball.com...