Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT
Again, when some of the founding fathers were on the board of governors at the University Of Virginia, they passed a rule saying no guns were allowed on campus. They didn't say you could have a gun as long as you weren't threatening someone...they said you could not possess a gun on campus at all. The founding fathers apparently did not believe that such a ban was a violation of the second amendment.
As explained to you, the Founders did not consider that the Bill of Rights applied to the individual states. At the time, the individual states were sovereign entities. Actually, they were considered separate "countries." And those countries agreed to a compact with each other for the purposes of mutual protection and free trade economic relationships. They were jealous to protect their own ability to govern themselves, and were fearful of a central power dictating to them what they could or could not do and which could tax them at will, as the British were trying to do and which inflamed the Revolution in the first place.
The struggle in the Constitutional Convention was to make their compact strong enough to work as they intended it to, but not to be so strong that it could willy nilly dictate to, or tax, the states. On the contrary, writing the Constitution was an act of the sovereign states dictating to the federal power which they created. That Constitution gave the central government certain powers, as enumerated in their final Constitution. And it constrained the federal government to, and only to, those powers. Any remaining power of government rested with the states and their citizens to construe. Each state had its own constitution.
The Constitution they created was intended to apply to the federal government. The Supremacy clause that you previously alluded to gave federal law supremacy only within the limited powers that their Constitution allowed. The Supremacy clause did not give the central government supreme power over the separate states. On the contrary, the states retained most of the powers, the "vast residuum" to which Madison referred. The states have tremendous power, constitutionally, over the federal government, if they chose to assert it. The difficulty is getting 3/4's of them to agree on wielding that power. The states have the power to dissolve the federal government and go on their separate ways or form a new compact.
A small example of state power vs federal in current politics is the formation of sanctuary cities. The federal government cannot ban them. It can only threaten to hold back federal funds to those cities. But federal funds to cities or states is another can of worms. Federal funds are used as a carrot/stick to dictate to states in ways they have no constitutional authority to do.
In short, I'm getting to verbose as usual, Madison and Jefferson didn't apply the 2nd Amendment to the states, only to the central government.
I'm not someone who thinks the constitution is a living, evolving document. I prefer to think of what they meant, at the time it was crafted. The evidence seems compelling to me (we can disagree obviously), that they felt that certain restrictions in the name of public safety, are well within the intent of the second amendment.
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The Founders didn't restrict the states by the 2nd Amendment. States had their own constitutions which applied to and were supported by their citizens. So, whatever gun control the states wanted to apply would have to be decided by permission of their citizens. So, if the board of governors of the university wanted to disallow guns on campus, Jefferson and Madison would have thought they had the right to do so, any objections they might have had notwithstanding. If you think that meant that Madison and Jefferson also meant the federal government could also control private ownership of guns, you are wrong. Such a notion is not, as you put it, well within the intent of the 2nd Amendment.
If one could construe that any state action would somehow be evidence that the federal government had the same power, and that the federal government was supreme in its own powers, then there would be no such thing as state sovereignty. There would be no need for state constitutions or criminal statutes or civil codes. There would, in effect, be no need of separate states. And we would have long ago dissolved them and become one State, with unlimited power.
That, BTW, is the Progressive ideal.