Let's say there was no second amendment;
Quote:
9: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
10: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Either way you don't have to be a historian with a degree to know the intention of the Founders, the philosophy they followed, and how they interpreted natural rights and individual rights.
Alright then; Amendment 9 is for unenumerated rights; it says that the Founders couldn't think of everything, and if they could they could not put it into a readable document. However they did think of some things, and did place them in the BoR. The intent of the 9th is that government cannot deny a perceived right on the SOLE basis that it is not enumerated. Therefore, your right for instance to be fairly compensated for your work, though not enumerated in the Constitution or its Amendments, cannot be denied on only those grounds. It may be defensible to deny you that right by using another argument (I doubt it), but government must have another good reason to deny you that right, or to allow others to deny that right to you.
Amendment 10 states that powers not expressly given to the Federal government or denied to the States are powers the Federal government cannot have; either the States or the people have them. The states therefore, by their own laws, CAN reserve the power to regulate the ownership, purchase, sale, transfer and carry of arms, and in the absence of a Second Amendment, could ban them entirely. The Tenth Amendment is not incorporated by the Fourteenth (meaning its limits are applied also to State governments) because it defines powers in relation to all three groups; the people, the States, and the Federal government. To incorporate the same limits on state power as that of the federal government is contrary to its purpose of
granting states' rights to govern their people.
Therefore, if the Second Amendment did not exist, states could very easily and legally enact outright bans on all firearms in the interest of public safety even if the Federal government were banned from doing so by the Tenth Amendment. They cannot, because you have the Second Amendment; laws that prohibit any form of carry in public, or prevent the keeping of firearms in a useable state, are unconstitutional and should be challenged and overturned. That does not mean States do not have the power to regulate firearm ownership, or to collectively give back to the federal government the right to do so. They can therefore very enforceably regulate possession of firearms in the interest of public safety as long as you still have a means to own, carry and use a gun. If you can buy a gun, can keep it in a ready state in your home and/or carry it on your person, and can use it to protect yourself, your family, your property and your country, the letter of the law of the Second Amendment is obeyed.
The Second Amendment, because of everything else the government, both Federal and State, has the responsibility to do, is not as clear cut as a strict reading of just that Amendment would indicate. The purpose of the government in the United States is described in the Preamble: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense,
promote the general Welfare,
and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Those in bold are at odds; gunfire by its very nature disrupts domestic tranquility and decreases the general welfare, as does the death and destruction that the use of guns and other weaponry causes. It is therefore argued that unfettered access and use of weapons is contrary to welfare and tranquility even if any restriction on gaining access to weaponry diminishes liberty. You gotta choose; you cannot have the extreme of everything the Constitution was written to protect, because the extreme of any one thing will by its very nature infringe on something else. You have to strike a balance, and for better or worse that is exactly what government tries to do, even if they are misguided or outright wrong in HOW they try to strike a balance.
