A Bit of Second Amendment Debate

I was cruising Yahoo! Answers today, as I tend to do when I get even I understand that my fantasy baseball obsession is bordering on unhealthy, and stumbled across the following question.

Why do gun control advocates always bring up hunting and/or "sport" when talking about gun rights?

I keep looking through the 2nd amendment, and I don't see anything about "hunting" or "sport" mentioned.

Maybe by "sport" they mean "violent overthrow of a tyrannical government"?

Where do they get the idea that the 2nd amendment is there to protect our right to hunt, or for "sport"?

This is a valid question. The text of the second amendment is quite amu ous (ambiguous, lol) when one insists on confining its intention to a narrow specificity. When interpreting the amendment, one must take into account the circumstances of the founding fathers.

We must bear in mind (as well as arms) that the framers of the constitution were the leaders of a violent revolution, unprecedented in its era. Therefore, the foremost goal of each word written by our initial leaders was to ensure that government remain limited at all costs.

In this sense the question is spot on. The primary purpose of the amendment is to prevent, or in the case of its establishment, reverse tyranny. The 2nd Amendment is crucial as a guarantee that government would be held accountable if it were ever to overstep its logical boundaries by declaring illegal, unadvisable wars, essentially nationalizing the financial and automotive industries by privatizing profit and socializing loss, instituting ludicrous restrictions on substance use among other personal choices, and using national security as an excuse to pulverize all reasonable conceptions of privacy. This is all purely hypothetical, of course. ;)

Regardless, the amendment's diction suggests that providing the public with a means to check the government was its intent.

Today, however, conservatives and bumper stickers insist that the amendment should hold an entirely different meaning. Instead of seeing the ownership of guns as the assurance of a capable militia, most ardent supporters of the provision believe that they are meant for personal protection, or as the question states, recreation.

Here's the reality. I'd love to say that the second amendment was written to grant every individual the right to bear arms for whatever reason they choose. But it wasn't.

Wait! NRA cardholders, don't delete us from your blogroll just yet! The rest of the reality is that any government which abridges the right of its citizenry to own or operate arms in a peaceful manner is excessively authoritarian. Yes. Exactly, that makes them tyrannical. What did we learn earlier about tyrannical governments?

That's right. The statists can't win this one. Either the government allows all citizens to bear arms via the second amendment, or, by its own decree, it has declared itself fit to be overthrown. So a technicality invalidates the most popular interpretation of the second amendment, but, by an entirely different premise, that interpretation's conclusion is correct.

ous (ambiguous, lol) when one insists on confining its intention to a narrow specificity. When interpreting the amendment, one must take into account the circumstances of the founding fathers.