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Old March 1, 2009, 10:10 AM   #38
zukiphile
Senior Member
 
Join Date: December 13, 2005
Posts: 4,453
Quote:
Yes, the militia of 1789 no longer exists.
The press and state sanctioned churches of that period have passed, but this doesn't mean that COTUS rights have an expiration date.

The trope that revolutionary militias no longer exist ignores both the law and the meaning of the word.

More importantly, the idea that we do not benefit from the liberty of the 2d Am. simply because we have other liberties as well ignores the frailty of written constitutions. Unless the affection for freedom is the genuine constitution of a people, the written form of their constitution will not matter. The purpose of this civil liberty is understood best by people who've been deprived of it, like those who wrote the 2d Am.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.
Or, as Mao more pithily wrote:

Quote:
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
No student of history can regard the state as purely benign. Our system recognises this, and provides many ways to oppose the power of the state, including the vote, the press and access to courts. While calling for insurrection here and now is strictly the province of what nearly all of us would regard as kooks, the impulse to divest people of any of the BOR should be recognised as illiberal.
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