Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT
The second amendment is not absolute, the same guys who wrote it also founded the university of virginia and banned weapons on campus. So it clearly wasn’t intended to be absolute.
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A couple of problems with your statements. First, "weapons" (would that have included knives and swords?) were not banned. There was no infringement on the right to own arms. Nor, really, on the right to bear them as was meant by those who wrote the Constitution. They were banned solely on campus. Property owners have the right to ban most things, including arms, from being brought onto their property. It was never understood that the right to own and bear arms meant that the owner could use them to intimidate, threaten, or murder people. There were other laws and rights (including property rights, to life, etc.) that would curb how and where you could use and bear your weapons. It was understood that the right to own arms was for self defense (including, especially, defense against a tyrannical government) or for peaceful means to kill game for food or sport. Any absoluteness would be embodied in the PURPOSE for the right to own and bear arms. Your Virginia example does not infringe on the 2A in that respect.
Which leads to the second and greater problem with your statements. When you make an open-ended judgment on the lack of absoluteness of the 2A, you invite the total eradication of it. If you say that it is absolutely not absolute, you are not showing in what way it cannot be infringed, or even eliminated. If there is no absolute quality in the 2A, if it is subject to infringement by any supposedly rational or "reasonable" objection, it then lacks any unassailable power to exist.
To say that the 2A is not absolute is Progressive verbiage which is exactly intended as a step and rationale for eliminating it. This notion that there are no absolute rights is precisely a basic premise of Progressivism in which rights have no basis other than a grant from government.
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