"Congress has NO power to disarm the militia "

[Dusty Balz, SASS#46599]

Tench Coxe
The mover behind the Second Amendment.
What did he mean?

Read his words below:

The power of the sword, say the minority..., is in the hands of Congress. My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for The powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty.

The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible.

Who are the militia?

Are they not ourselves?

Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom.

Congress has no power to disarm the militia.

Their swords and every terrible implement of the soldier are the birthright of Americans.

The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments but where, I trust in God, it will always remain, in the hands of the people.

• The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

[Blackwater 53393]

A Fing MEN!!

[Subdeacon Joe]

The right of the citizen to keep and bear arms has justly been considered the palladium of the liberties of the Republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and the arbitrary powers of rulers, and will generally -- even if these are successful -- enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

STORY, CHIEF JUSTICE JOSEPH, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 1833

... to prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm ... is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege.

WILSON V. STATE, 33 Ark. 557 (1878)

 

"Constitutional rights may not be infringed simply because the majority of the people choose that they be." (Westbrook v. Mihaly 2 C3d 756)

and, the following shows that the debate is over, it's settled law:

"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."

: Robert H. Jackson, US Supreme Court Justice West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)

All the enumerated rights are off the table.

[Subdeacon Joe]

Oh!

And 9^th Circuit Judge Kozinski’s masterful dissenting opinion. http://gunsonthestreets.com/wp/2012/05/silveira-v-lockyer-judge-kozinskis-dissenting-opinion/ In part:

 

“My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel’s mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:

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 sheer ponderousness of the panel’s opinion—the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text—refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel’s labored SILVEIRA v. LOCKYER 5983 effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it—and is just as likely to succeed.”

Kozinski grew up in Communist Romania. He knows what he's talking about.