comment: >
  
  >That sawed off shotgun case ruling you mentioned completely dismissed the idea the amendment had to do with anything other than a well regulated militia.
  That's not true. It linked a sort of test to a regulated militia, but the Court in Miller did not wrestle with a collective right versus an individual right that the debate (now moot) about the Second Amendment centers on.
context: Can you help me understand the other amendments on which we Americans all agree? I am pretty certain that our legal scholars spend day on and day out struggling with the interpretation of the law. Not one point in the Constitution is above debate. It is why we have the processes and protections we have.
  This is one of the greatest benefits and challenges with the system we established and the process we have followed for 246 years, give or take. It isn't easy and it isn't convenient. It isn't pretty, and it definitely is subject to being unfair but it is our way. >
  
  The bill of rights is clear.  The difficulty is transferring broad freedoms to modern times.  
  After the revolutionary war, there were privately owned warships.  Which were the pinnacle of military technology at the time.  The second amendment has to be toned down from that level of freedom, as no one wants SpaceX to build ICBMs. >
  
  
  as no one wants SpaceX to build ICBMs.
  
  An ICBM is basically a lifting body with reentry capability. So yeah, we absolutely want SpaceX to build those - that's their entire purpose.
  The whole space race was basically the US and Soviets showing off rocketry capabilities because a warhead that doesn't go where you want isn't worth anything.
  Welcome to the world of dual-use technology and why economic sanctions and nonproliferation efforts are so complex. >
  
  I'm not trying to split hairs, I was trying to point out dual-use. We want SpaceX to build and operate lifting bodies that can reenter, which only really differ from ICBMs in the payload. If your point is that we don't want SpaceX to have nuclear warheads to put on top of its lifters, sure, but that's a control of the warheads, not the rockets.
  And yeah, a nuke is "valuable" in a money sense, but in the context of the Space Race/Cold War/MAD, a massively inaccurate delivery vehicle can't operate as an effective deterrent and so is largely strategically worthless. That's more what I was trying to get across. >
  
  This question assumes that US citizens agree on the other Amendments. 
  Just some examples:
  10th and 14th Amendment- Is it a state issue or is an individual right incorporated under the 14th Amendment
  9th Amendment- A massive legal mind field no judge has ever wanted to use to base a decision on.
  1st Amendment- Should this be covered under the first Amendment or is it obscene under the Miller test. >
  
  It's worth mentioning that the US isn't exactly free from discussions about the exact boundaries of what the -other- amendments mean. We have discussions about what kind of behavior qualify as speech, what kinds of regulations infringe on speech, what kind of regulations constitute infringement on freedom of religion, what kind of information gathering constitutes a search, what circumstances evidence is admissible if obtained without a warrant, what kind of regulations constitute a "taking" and thus entitle someone to compensation, exactly what kind of punishments are "cruel and unusual", exactly how lousy a lawyer can be without denying the accused the right to representation at trial... you name it, there's a fuzzy boundary somewhere. We even had a third amendment case not too long ago!
  The reason that the 2nd Amendment gets as much press as it does, leaving aside the fact that it's very different from how most governments see the issue, is that there was an extended period in the US in which -no- cases dealing with the constitutionality of weapons law reached the Supreme Court. Between a single case about sawed-off shotguns in the 1930s and the Heller decision, there was nothing; no decisions, no footnotes, no opinions, no dicta, no dissents. The court simply never picked up those cases to begin with.
  US jurisprudence changed immensely in that time period. There were a lot of fundamental changes about what kinds of laws that the government could enforce, or could not enforce. So a lot of the activity you're seeing now is the effect of the court saying "yeah, since we applied a lot of these legal principles everywhere else, we probably oughta apply them to the right to bear arms too, huh?" But a lot of those principles cut directly across the policy that some people want - if you want to ban guns, saying "yes, state and local governments are bound by the 2nd amendment just like they're bound by the other amendments" is a massive "screw you!" issued by an unfriendly court.
  That's really the source of the disagreement. A lot of people believe that you don't have a right to own and carry arms, no matter what the language in the 2nd Amendment says, in the same way a lot of people believed that it was perfectly rational to discriminate against blacks despite the language in the 14th. >
  
  Ironically, there were no 2nd Amendment cases because it was just accepted as obvious that the amendment only had to do with protecting state militias because those are literally the first words of Amendment. That sawed off shotgun case ruling you mentioned completely dismissed the idea the amendment had to do with anything other than a well regulated militia. It wasn't until 2008 that the court "discovered" the amendment actually protected an individual's right to weapons.
  That discovery was the culmination of a decades long propaganda campaign funded by the NRA and other right wing ideology factories (aka "think tanks"), themselves funded by gun manufacturers. They hired the best "Conservative" legal minds to effectively erase the whole "well regulated militia" stuff which might allow for laws that hurt the manufacturer's profit. This, combined with the paranoic and dystopian propaganda campaign designed to convince people that shadowy dark figures are coming for their guns and children, have been incredibly effective at changing the popular understanding of the amendment.