How should I proceed?

[Prophet]

It is a poor analogy.

I won't dispute the fact that the subjects are not the same in most ways. However, I believe it to be an interesting argument in that it forces one to look not at the subject but how the arrangement of the wording applies to the subject.

 

[lechiffre]

for over 10,000 years it was belived that the world was flat.......come to find out, all those quotes about the earth being flat were not true.......up until the 14th century, educated men thought the earth revolved around the moon, and in America women were not given the right to vote........what do you make of that????????

step one:

convince him you are right and he is wrong about guns.

step two:

convince him he is wrong about it ever being a common belief that the earth revolved around the moon

 

[wishin]

There's been a lot of good advice given already and I can't add anything further, other than to compliment you on your obvious intelligence and for being an advocate of RKBA. I'm sure your parents are proud of you.

 

[Occam's Razor]

Occam's Razor it is not, lol. It is a poor analogy at best.

..........You don't need weak analogies involving other constitutional rights to educate him about his Second Amendment individual right to keep and bear arms. Take a close look at Heller, and then let us know what you think.

This isn't about what I think. I think 2A means exactly what it says. The person that the OP was debating apparently thinks otherwise. If, as you said "The majority in Heller soundly rejected many of your friend's arguments, and you simply need to use the findings and holdings in Heller to refute his arguments." then the debate would have been over, so it would seem the findings and holdings of the Heller decision were not in fact the only things needed to refute his arguments. Some people don't pay attention to trivial things like facts when their minds are already made up. Sometimes you can get your point across better by asking someone questions than you can by making statements to them.

 

[Fremmer]

Or sometimes you can simply read a United States Supreme Court case to educate someone about what the Second Amendment means. Which is preferable to using a poor analogy to justify the Second Amendment. Heller specifically addresses the Second Amendment, and the words (and history) of the Second Amendment are clearly analyzed and explained.

Edited to add: although if his mind is already made up, it doesn't make much sense to spend much time and energy trying to educate him.

 

[Occam's Razor]

Edited to add: although if his mind is already made up, it doesn't make much sense to spend much time and energy trying to educate him.

That we can certainly agree on.

 

[shield20]

Since he is SO fond of using 'law' to (try to) make his case, give him this one:

Public Law 109–92
109th Congress
An Act
To prohibit civil liability actions from being brought or continued against manufacturers,
distributors, dealers, or importers of firearms or ammunition for damages,
injunctive or other relief resulting from the misuse of their products by others.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Protection of Lawful Commerce
in Arms Act’’.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS; PURPOSES.
(a) FINDINGS.—Congress finds the following:

(1) The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
provides that the right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed.
(2) The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
protects the rights of individuals, including those who
are not members of a militia or engaged in military service
or training, to keep and bear arms.
...

All he needs to know...a public act explicitly saying the people have the right to arms, and that the 2nd amendment secures that right...Approved by our representatives and signed into Federal LAW in 2005.

 

[basicblur]

From a group e-mail I sent out a while back

Hope some of this might help?

It might be nice to point out Nelson Lund's take on the 2nd Amendment, which is one of the simplest, most accurate I've seen (I usually see only paragraph 2 and 3 quoted).

From Professor Nelson Lund of George Mason University-perhaps our foremost Constitutional scholar on the Second Amendment.
Below is taken from the link-in the "The Original Meaning of the Second Amendment" section of his article.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/LegalIssues/wm1851.cfm

The text of the Second Amendment does not imply that the right to arms is confined in any way to militia-related purposes. The most significant grammatical feature of the Second Amendment is that its preamble ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...") is an absolute phrase. Such constructions are grammatically independent of the rest of the sentence and do not qualify any word in the operative clause to which they are appended. The usual function of absolute constructions is to convey some information about the circumstances surrounding the statement in the main clause.

Another very significant grammatical feature of the Second Amendment is that the operative clause ("...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed") is a command. Because nothing in that command is grammatically qualified by the prefatory assertion, the operative clause has the same meaning that it would have had if the preamble had been omitted or even if the preamble were demonstrably false.

Consider a simple example. Suppose that a college dean announces: "The teacher being ill, class is cancelled." Nothing about the dean's prefatory statement, including its truth or falsity, can qualify or modify the operative command. If the teacher called in sick to watch a ball game, the cancellation of the class remains unaffected. If someone misunderstood a phone message and inadvertently misled the dean into thinking the teacher would be absent, the dean's order is not thereby modified.

****************************************************

It also might be nice to show how some (far?) left folks like Eugene Robinson have finally admitted the 2nd means what it says, even though over the years he's been one those making the rounds advocating gun control/anti-2nd Amendment stances.

Of course he's only half way there-he's wrong about the "deadly consequences".

Deadly Consequences -- But the Right Call
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, June 27, 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/26/AR2008062603656.html?sub=new

Below are a few points from his article-'course he knew all this even while he was making the rounds pushing gun-control-just as I suspect most proponents of gun control do.

This case, for me, is one of those uncomfortable situations in which my honest opinion is not the one I'd desperately like to be able to argue. As much as I abhor the possible real-word impact of the ruling, I fear that it's probably right.

I realize that the now-defunct D.C. law was unusually comprehensive and restrictive and thus, in the legal sense, offered a bull's-eye for the pro-gun lobby. I also know that the law was easy to attack on grounds of efficacy: Given all the handgun killings in the city, was the ban really having any beneficial impact?

The big problem, for me, is the clarity of the Second Amendment's guarantee of the "right of the people to keep and bear arms." The traditional argument in favor of gun control has been that this is a collective right, accorded to state militias. This has always struck me as a real stretch, if not a total dodge.

I've never been able to understand why the Founders would stick a collective right into the middle of the greatest charter of individual rights and freedoms ever written -- and give it such pride of place -- the No. 2 position, right behind such bedrock freedoms as speech and religion.

 

[stickhauler]

In truth, the phrase "a well regulated militia" refers more to the actual weapons involved in a militia. The founders thinking was that in a battle, if weapons were of similar caliber, if one militiaman ran out of ammo, he could borrow from his fellow militiamen. Or that's the reading I got from writings and debate of the founders printed in "The Founder's Second Amendment" by Stephen Halbrook anyway.

Many anti's argue that the 2nd amendment applies only to militia use, and does not allow for sport shooting or hunting purposes. Those uses were not addressed in the amendment because people of that day participated in such activities as a matter of course, many families entire diet came from game animals they harvested, and vegetables they grew themselves.

 

[Autolycus]

Originally posted by Locnar:
This is a very typical liberal arguing tactic I call the "shotgun approach." Throw out a ridiculous number of opinions, none of which are backed up by fact, and assume that, since you can only argue against one at a time, you have quietly submitted to the others. Once you have nailed him down on one, he jumps to another, completely abandoning his original argument. The truth is not in "the law," the truth is in the interpretation of the constitution, (even then its sketchy. Jim Crow laws, were after all, considered constitutional for a time). However, the Supreme Court has upheld the INDIVIDUAL'S right to own a firearm.

I would like to know how this is a liberal argument? Seriously? I think this is just an underhanded approach to bashing liberals.