The Hawaii Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion on Wednesday declaring that its state constitution grants individuals absolutely no right to keep and bear arms outside the context of military service. Its decision rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, refusing to interpolate SCOTUS’ shoddy historical analysis into Hawaii law. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the ruling on this week’s Slate Plus segment of Amicus; their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The modern use of “regulated” isn’t the same as it was then.
Regulation had to do with training and equipment. The idea was that militias, as opposed to a standing (“Regular”) army, weren’t always trained and armed when they were called to arms. The idea of a “well-regulated militia” was for civilians to already have weapons and understand their use if they were needed.
So a requirement for a well-regulated militia is for civilians to have the right to own and use weapons.
Is it antiquated? Maybe. But saying that “well-regulated” militia was meant to limit access to firearms is an argument based on either ignorance or dishonesty.
Well not quite. Well regulated did also include training and they did not consider the average person to be well trained enough to qualify for the phrase.
It’s both. Without weapons with which to train, a well-regulated militia made up of ordinary civilians isn’t possible.
It’s saying, with a weird comma out of place, that civilians can be armed so that a militia is possible.
False, George Mason quote “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.” George Mason wrote a draft of what became the second amendment
Well yeah, a militia is a bunch of armed people with a goal.
A well regulated one knows how to use those weapons effectively, and as a group. In my opinion the law as it stands falls short of the mandate: The US should provide public weapons training and make sure its citizens know what the hell they’re doing. That might actually save a few lives that are currently lost to accidents.
The USA should just do what many other countries do: universal compulsary military service for a time during early adulthood. That’d meet the mandate.
We have the man who wrote those words expanding upon them to say what he meant, and you’re still saying “actually he meant something else.”
I’m saying the words that made it into the bill of rights he championed explicitly say more than that, probably because it was written by James Madison and then cut down by Congress.
Yeah that’s one of the pitfalls of the historical argument. There was more than one writer, and founding father. They absolutely did not agree on how widespread guns should be. However the term “Well Regulated Militia” was in common use to describe militias with extensive training to fight in the line and not just skirmish or be an extra force on the side. Alexander Hamilton states you cannot be a “Well Regulated Militia” training once or twice a year.
So it seems a bit disingenuous to now say it’s everyone and there’s no training or anything they would consider Regulation involved.
Aren’t there already limits on what firearms people can have? Also, if understanding their use is a requirement then why isn’t training necessary to purchase one?
Aside from the fact that “training” takes many forms, what the law is saying is that, at a bare minimum, people need the right to keep weapons so that it’s possible to form a militia. If you take a random person who has never owned a weapon and throw one in their hands they won’t even know how to hold the damn thing.
If you spend any time at a gun range, the absolute scariest people are adults who have never handled a gun before. Without the right to own private weapons, if a civil defense situation were to arise and weapons were handed out, that would be everyone. As a national defense strategy, it’s pretty awful.
So they made a law guaranteeing the rights for civilians to own and train on weapons.
As I said, we’re not in any real threat If the British invading these days, but if we’re talking about the original language there it is.
Training would not take many forms if they federally mandated a set of training guidelines.
We do have a national training organization dating back to the 1800s established by the federal government.
It’s called the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice and Firearms Safety, but is better known as the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Millions of gun owners participate in it in one form or another - including training and competition.
It is NOT required for owning a firearm, though participation is mandatory to buy a surplus military weapon (civilian-legal weapons only) from the government.