A distinction that I am sure was much discussed in the ratification debate, only it seems to have been somehwo omitted from, by Library of America set, The Debate On The Constitution. . . .
Although the
> "Framers" of the Bill of Rights were not the
> original Philadelphia
> writers of the text but the popular masses
By your stipulation? The ratifiers were the propertied elite who were permitted to vote, excluding the rabble you call the popular masses. More narrowly, the technical ratifiers were the state legislatures. The framers were the people who wrote the language. That is what framers means when anyone else talks about it. Some of the Philadelphians wanted to include a BoR, mosttly from the idea that they thought that protection against an overly strong central government was a Good Thing, and not so much because peasants with pitchforks forced the idea down their throats. Others didn't, they won in Philly, but in state legislatures and their constituencies foeced the framers properly so called to go back to the minority (in Philly) view.
who
> insisted on
> inclusion of those guarantees of their rights, this
> makes no difference.
> The Constitution would never have been ratified if
> the people
> even suspected that it gave them not individual but
> governmentally defined "collective" rights, nor that
> their right
> to keep and bear their firearms would disappear in
> favor of their "right"
> to enlist in a governmentally regimented military
> force.
You know this how? I think the evidence is quite the opposite. The state legislatures voted, with the support, one presumes, of their constituences, for a BoR which included an amendment in which the right to bear arms is stuck in a subordinate clause, qualifying the need for a well-regulated state militia.
Anyway, this is not the area of my expertise. Whatever the ratifies may have intended, whatever they would or would not have voted for if they had ever thought whatever, and however we know that, the law they voted for gives us on the plain text it a right to bear arms in the context of a well-regulated militia.
You see why Judge Easterbrook and I love textualism? It makes life, or anyway law, _so_ much easier. This original intent stuff is for the birds. Judges aren't historoans, and historians aren't even ever supposed to agree about questions like this. The law is the text enacted or (here)ratified by the authoritative bodies. If it is clear, you enforce/obey it, or try to change it by whatever means. You don't have to worry about what was in people's heads.
jks
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "When we read on a printed page the doctrine of
> Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems mystical,
> mystifying, even
> downright silly.
>
> When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of
> Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently
> true." (N.
> Weiner)
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