by Lincoln Memorial University’s Duncan School of Law held a Second Amendment Symposium on January 18th in Knoxville, Tennessee. I would have loved to attend this but I was leaving the next day for the SHOT Show. The symposium featured scholars who represented both the standard model and the collective rights model of the Second Amendment. Representing the standard model were Clayton Cramer, Stephen Halbrook, David Kopel, and Dave Hardy. The representatives of the collective rights model were Carl Bogus and Robert Spitzer.
Dave Hardy’s presentation has been published to YouTube. While the audio isn’t the best, it is still worth listening to if you are interested in the history of the Second Amendment and what the Founding Fathers intended when they added it to the Bill of Rights.
Dave writes of his presentation:
The theme is that Second Amendment had two independent purposes; one does not control the other. The militia phrase is indeed militia-centric, and the right to arms clause is focused on an individual right. James Madison and the First Congress were trying to satisfy two different constituencies, one of which wanted to protect the militia, the other of which wanted to guarantee an individual right to arms. They chose to appeal to both. This means that the individual right guaranteed is not one only for militia use; they were two separate ideas, and one is not a restriction on the other, anymore than the First Amendment’s guarantee of a right to religious exercise means that its freedom of the press only protects books on theology.
It will be interesting to read the papers that will come out of this symposium. I have an email in to the LMU Law Review asking when they will be published. I’ll update this when I get a response.
How much did it cost us to have a leading proponent of the collective rights theory be named Bogus?
That has always amused me as well.
There is a video on YouTube called "The History of the Second Amendment" that looks at it from the same standard model. He went back and looked not only at the writings such as The Federalist Papers but what the writers at that time were basing there writings on. He looks at the legal and word dictionaries Madison and all would have been familiar with back then. You will not find this on the MSM or even in most classrooms today. If you like the video share it widely. The biggest problem we have today is willful ignorance. We fight that with education.