I am currently most of the way though Thom Hartmann’s book “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment”. It is an eye opener. Anyone who has an interest in gun control needs to read it.
Anyone who doubts that langue changes very significantly over time just needs to read “Tom Sawyer.” If that is no problem, try Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”
In the context of the time, a militia was a citizen vigilante patrol used mostly to keep the slaves enslaved. Free States did not rely on militias, slave states did! So the amendment could be updated in modern language to read:
Well organized vigilantes being necessary to the security of a Slave State, Congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to own and bear arms.
Or more bluntly,
A well organized slave patrol being necessary to the security of whites living in Slave States, congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the white people to own and bear arms.
Or maybe:
A well organized slave patrol being necessary to the security of rich white people living in Slave States, congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to own and bear arms.
Or maybe:
A well organized slave patrol being necessary to the security of rich white people and their overseers living in Slave States, congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to own and bear arms.
Or in more honestly updated language:
A well organized slave patrol being necessary to the security of rich white people living in Slave States and their henchmen, congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to own and bear arms.
This amendment should have been rendered moot by emancipation. That is was not, is still costing us lives. Its continued application to the common man is pure insanity.
I live in Upper Michigan’s deer hunting country. As a young man teaching in a rural school 40 years ago, I was the only adult male in the building on the opening day of deer season. I know these people would fight tooth and nail to keep their deer rifles. Opening day is virtually a UP holiday. But we don’t need to take away their hunting rights to reign in the insanity of an interpretation of the second amendment fabricated whole cloth from thin air with no root in historical context.
In light of how police have recently tolerated armed white people and shot black people for being armed, or from fear that they were armed, things are too eerily close to original intent for me.