The Second Amendment a bio .

Blaming the NRA in this case recently has not covered up our nations
"bloody history " of violence .

AMENDMENT II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

WE have often underestimated our constitutional liberties . Over the years , and primarily the past 100 years our nation has changed to a degree . What has stood still is our American fascination with guns that  has a long history of "bearing arms"  for other reasons that have anything to do with hunting deer . America has fallen asleep as I have said before . We have always had a violent edge to our society . How could we forget that in the last century during the 1920's there has been a violent wave of mass killings or-castrated buy gangsters during prohibition . Like the St Valentines Day massacre .  In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings  it seems a little to late for me to think that ** President Obama is jumping to curb violence . Take Oakland Ca  for instance recently there have been drive by shootings with "legal" guns that already has killed over a hundred people this year . The Police in that American city are out gunned by criminals who carry military style  weapons bought and sold in American gun shops .

Getting back to the subject on the 2nd Amendment . For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. #  The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon. On Sunday, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer went on CBS’s Face The Nation and argued that people who support gun control “have to admit that there is a Second Amendment right to bear arms”.Schumer’s effort to reach out to the gun-rights community may be well-intentioned, but it is also deeply ironic. If the nation truly embraced the Second Amendment as it was originally written and understood, it would be the NRA’s worst nightmare.   Constitutional scholars understand that the term "militia" is defined as "non-professional soldiers / armed body of citizens." It was with just such an army that we fought off the greatest military power in the world! The idea was also that, during times of peace, no standing army would be required. The "militia" would take their guns and go back to their farms, shops and homes until "called up" for the next emergency.  The NRA recently made a statement In a press conference Friday, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, said that children had been put in danger by “laws for gun-free school zones” and by having “unarmed principals.” (“How have our nation’s priorities gotten so far out of order?”) At what might have been a moment of humility for the organization, he said that people “driven by demons” were among us, along with a “much larger, more lethal criminal class,” and that the only way to stop them was with guns—with “armed security in every school” and a “National Model School Shield Program” to be developed by the N.R.A. Well the NRA seems to be thinking back to the old west here . Where else does all this lead? Will we evaluate teachers not only on their students’ test scores, but on target practice, with merit pay for mastery of semi-automatic weapons? Mourners at the funeral of the next Vicki Soto shouldn’t have to whisper about her aim. Or is the only good teacher the teacher who keeps a Glock in her purse, and knows how to use it; or the one who has a second gun on her so that when some troubled eighth-grader grabs the classroom weapon she can shoot down her own student? Perhaps we’d be told then that he wouldn’t have done it if he knew that everyone else at recess had a gun. Do we picture our students becoming regimented gunmen themselves, or rather gun-children, with weaponry a normalized part of the high-school, then middle- and elementary-school curriculum—child soldiers for the Second Amendment?

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

 #  During the War of 1812 the United States army was made of of enlisted able bodied men who were 13 to 60 year old's who part of  "   militias"  carried their weapons and went off to fight ,Militia units from Maryland were called to defend Washington and Baltimore during the War of 1812. In 1813 and 1814 several companies were formed in Washington County. One of the muster rolls (or rosters) of men of the Company of Captain John Miller from Sharpsburg has survived, and can be seen at the Washington County Historical Society. Miller formed a company which was part of the 2nd Regiment under Lt. Col. R K. Heath. Edward Wright notes that four days were allowed for travelling to Sharpsburg, though this is not included on the muster roll itself.

**Mr. Obama’s record on gun control faces new scrutiny after his call for action in the wake of Friday’s Newtown, Conn., school shooting, which advocates of new restrictions on gun ownership say should be a wake-up call for Congress and the White House to act.

During the president’s first visit to Mexico in April 2009, Mr. Obama tried to prove that the U.S. was serious about reining in guns and ammunition flowing to Mexico, which Mexican officials contended was fueling the cross-border gang violence of the bloody drug trade.

After a meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Mr. Obama announced his support for a long-stalled inter-American weapons treaty and said he would urge the Senate to ratify it.

The regional treaty, adopted by the Organization of American States, was signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1997 but never ratified in the Senate.

Mr. Obama at the time pledged to revive efforts to ratify the treaty “to curb small-arms trafficking that is a source of so many of the weapons used in this drug war.”

But the headline came and passed without a tangible push from the White House to urge the Senate to take up the treaty. It remains unratified.

Later that year, after the mass shootings by a U.S. Army major at Fort Hood, Texas, Mr. Obama grieved with victims and their families.

“This is a time of war, and yet these Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle,” he said. “They were killed here, on American soil in the heart of this great American community.”

But Mr. Obama’s eloquent words and delivery did not lead to any major changes in administration policy on mental health services or inspire a national debate on gun violence.

In January 2011, after the shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., that took the lives of six people and wounded then U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and 12 others, Mr. Obama got more specific, promising to launch a national discussion on gun violence to put an end to the slaying of innocent civilians.

In an op-ed column Mr. Obama penned for the Arizona Daily Star in March 2011, the president used some of the same language he did during remarks at a Sunday night vigil for families of victims of the Newtown shootings.