No. of Recommendations: 6
^^There's apparently been more research done on the meaning of "bear arms" "back in the day". It's a field called corpus linguistics.^^
You have to look at the history first and then utter the words completely living in that context, in order to find the meaning. Our national mythology encourages Americans to see the Second Amendment as a result of the Revolutionary War. But if you want to go back, the original meaning was completely unrelated to that. Dunbar-Ortiz is a good researcher on the subject. He reckons it relates to priorities even in the centuries before 1776 - the individual white settler was then understood to have a right to bear arms participate in near-constant ad-hoc, self-organized violence against Native Americans. The colonists' use of guns was brutal. Based on work by military historian John Grenier, Dunbar-Ortiz describes how early colonists practiced what they called "the first way of war" or "savage war". Unlike war between "advanced" European nation-stations, in this mode of warfare Anglo settlers organized "irregular units to brutally attack and destroy unarmed Indigenous women, children, and old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks." We change the meaning of words over time, similarly as we change the interpretation of the Bible to wash out all the violence and craziness, but if you want to take the constituion literally to intended meaning you have to go back in the history. If they were living today they wouldn't want people carrying guns around given the lack of natives - we have already killed all of them - but the wealth in hands of the few worthy of it, is very much alive and well. Freedom of speech has completely disappeared - we can talk, but no-one listens - no-one has the capacity to speak on the TV at will, and at length, and if you say the wrong thing you are never invited back.
