Gonna leave this here. It's a video just short of 50 minutes long

[flamin lib]

and I found it interesting and educational. Dr. Saul Cornell is a legal historian and author of two prize winning works on American legal history.

Comment on it if you choose, I find that it stands well without my input.

[jimmy the one]

1. saul cornell

FL: and I found it interesting and educational. Dr. Saul Cornell is a legal historian and author of two prize winning works on American legal history.

I sent him an essay I did once on certain historical portions of the heller amendment, basically how scalia had perverted some historical figures and perverted what they said about 2ndA - like jos story, wm rawle, st george tucker, & ben oliver. As well as remarks from a british consortium of historians who noted that scalia had misinterpreted the English 'have arms' decree of 1689 - that it was not an individual rkba, but pertained to militia.
I've read much of Saul Cornell & consider him an expert on proper interpretation of 2ndA. Needless to say, he's despised by the gun lobby & nra etc..

Comment on it if you choose, I find that it stands well without my input.

You betcha (erk, backhanded compliment!). I can only watch about 20 mins today, will finish later this week. But a few comments on his early talk about militias, that there was no such thing as an assault rifle in 1776 rev-war.

[OakCliffDem]

3. The Second Amendment does not mention 'assault rifle'

The Second Amendment does not mention the 'rev-war' either.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

4. Are you asserting that an 'assault rifle' should not...

...be included in the group of objects considered "arms"?

[OakCliffDem]

5. No, I am ridiculing the old "only flintlocks allowed" canard. n/t

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

6. I know there's folks that say that but...

...do you think anyone really believes it?

[hack89]

2. He does not believe that the 2A is solely about the right of states to maintain militias

Here is a review of his book "A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America" that lays out very nicely the history of gun control theories in America

Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias. Now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong.

Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, shows that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right—an obligation citizens owed to the state to arm themselves so that they could participate in a well regulated militia. He shows how the modern "collective right" view of the Second Amendment, the one federal courts have accepted for over a hundred years, owes more to the Anti-Federalists than the Founders. Likewise, the modern "individual right" view emerged only in the nineteenth century. The modern debate, Cornell reveals, has its roots in the nineteenth century, during America's first and now largely forgotten gun violence crisis, when the earliest gun control laws were passed and the first cases on the right to bear arms came before the courts. Equally important, he describes how the gun control battle took on a new urgency during Reconstruction, when Republicans and Democrats clashed over the meaning of the right to bear arms and its connection to the Fourteenth Amendment. When the Democrats defeated the Republicans, it elevated the "collective rights" theory to preeminence and set the terms for constitutional debate over this issue for the next century.

The 14th amendment argument is interesting - remember at the time the Democrats controlled the South post-reconstruction and were vehemently anti-black. Cornell argues that the modern collective right theory is rooted in the desire to disarm free blacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_South