No. of Recommendations: 1
General response. It is an old argument and one of the original arguments making the 2d a collective right - or some people think a right of the state(minority).
They traced it back to the English Bill of Rights 1689, and it does talk of rights and liberties and then allows Protestants arms as allowed by law, as it transferred whatever right the King though he had to regulate guns to Parliament. But if you look at the English, it isn't much of a right.
Another argument is that infringed didn't have the meaning of encroached back then, it meant to break or violate:
'Infringed or Abridged'
The freedom of opinion is one of the inalienable rights of
man, and one of the great gifts of his creator; it is a privilege
which no human power ought to infringe, and no state of
society unnecessarily to abridge.
Alexander Hamilton, 18121The first amendment is stronger than the second amendment. This
point sometimes gets lost in the public discourse, especially when an all-
or-nothing interpretation of the second amendment is being boosted. But
as Alexander Hamilton understood, there is a key difference in how the
two amendments are worded.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a
redress of grievances.2
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.
In the first amendment, Congress may not even abridge'lessen'the
freedoms of speech, press, and assembly. In the second amendment,
Congress may not go so far as to infringe'break or destroy'a right to
bear arms.
The key difference is the difference between the word abridge and
the word infringe. Anyone who looks up the words in English dictionaries
used in 1789'and for centuries before 1789'can find what the framers
would have found. For all the centuries leading up to the Constitutional
Convention in 1787 and the first federal Congress in 1789, the English
word infringe meant to break, to violate. It still does; we still call 'breaking
the law' and 'violating copyright' infringements. The word abridge meant
to limit. It still does. A difference in degree can become a difference in
kind, and abridgement severe enough could become infringement, but it
is essential to understand that to abridge something'a power, a privilege,
even a right'was qualitatively different in 1789 from infringement.
The difference is that we can abridge a right without infringing it. As
the framers understood, human rights have human limits. A society can 11
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