David C. WilliamsThinkers

The 2nd Amendment is firstly, a right that belongs not to individuals but to a militia, or a 'body of the people'... that is, a culturally united, institutionally yoked into a universal militia, and subject to state orders.

The 2nd Amendment is instituted to ensure that the body of the people is prepared to resist a corrupt central government, not merely 'the individual as such', but the 'body of the people' shall have the right to keep and bear arms.

The 2nd Amendment is not in reference to a chance decision of every citizen to arm themselves, but rather it is an insistence that the state should muster the militia, train it, and oblige every citizen to own a gun.

The 2nd Amendment is only a guarantee to individuals insofar as they are part of a united & consensual people so that their uprising can be a unified revolution.

The 2nd Amendment is a right stating that just as every freeman has a right to the use of the press, so he has to the use of his arms.

The 2nd Amendment gives the right to arms to the body of the people in militia. The state governments may legitimately help but not block a true revolution. If the state governments cooperate with a tyrannical federal government, the militia still has the right to conduct a revolution against the latter.

The 2nd Amendment grants rights to 'the body of the people' which is an entity that does not exist in our modern distinction between government and individual. This creates a problem in that, because the amendment does not give a right to individuals because random clusters of individuals can perpetrate only rebellion and civil war... only a unified entity like the body of the people can make a true revolution.

The 2nd Amendment necessarily alludes to an underlying right to revolution so one must ask whether that right is conceived of as a group right or an individual right.

The 2nd Amendment requires a universal militia but does not assure its existence (because the framers were not willing to themselves undergo the sacrifices involved in universal service).

The 2nd Amendment is a right whereby private gun ownership was uncommon until the late nineteenth century, thus discrediting an individual rights reading.

The 2nd Amendment is a right whereby the emphasis at the time of the drafting, was not on whether the arms were ones own, but rather, fearing that congress might block the states from providing them, that were simply a case that the militia be armed.

The 2nd Amendment is a right whereby whenever government means to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.

The 2nd Amendment is a guarantee which, if read not as two distinct clauses with different meanings, but as a consistent whole, we come to see that the sociopolitical world was not reducible to individuals and the state.

The 2nd Amendment is a right whereby, rather than being two separate clauses, the ''people' and the ''well-regulated militia' refer roughly to the same thing: The body of the people, which is reducible to neither the mass of individuals nor the state.