How would life in the USA be diffent if there had never been a 2nd Amendmanet?

[Dilettante]

I think it's impossible for people who have lived free their whole lives to know what it's like to acquire your freedom.
IMHO the best we can do is to make sure that our young people have lots of contact with people who haven't always been here.
Make sure your kids spend some time with war refugees, or people who lived under totalitarian states at one time (old USSR, Iran, etc.)
If you don't know anyone who fits that description, maybe you know someone from a country that's not totalitarian, but still "messed up" in ways, like Mexico or India.
Even people from Europe or Canada often have good reasons why they prefer it here!

 

[Mad Man]

"The Embarrassing Second Amendment" (Sanford Levinson. Yale Law Journal, 1989), begins:

One of the best known pieces of American popular art in this century is the New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg presenting a map of the United States as seen by a New Yorker. As most readers can no doubt recall, Manhattan dominates the map; everything west of the Hudson is more or less collapsed together and minimally displayed to the viewer. Steinberg's great cover depends for its force on the reality of what social psychologists call "cognitive maps." If one asks inhabitants ostensibly of the same cities to draw maps of that city, one will quickly discover that the images carried around in people's minds will vary by race, social class, and the like. What is true of maps of places--that they differ according to the perspectives of the mapmakers--is certainly true of all conceptual maps.

To continue the map analogy, consider in this context the Bill of Rights: is there an agreed upon "projection" of the concept? Is there even a canonical text of the Bill of Rights? Does it include the first eight, nine, or ten Amendments to the Constitution?[1] Imagine two individuals who are asked to draw a "map" of the Bill of Rights. One is a (stereo-) typical member of the American Civil Liberties Union (of which I am a card-carrying member); the other is an equally (stereo-) typical member of the "New Right." The first, I suggest, would feature the First Amendment[2] as Main Street, dominating the map, though more, one suspects, in its role as protector of speech and prohibitor of established religion than as guardian of the rights of religious believers. The other principal avenues would be the criminal procedure aspects of the Constitution drawn from the Fourth,[3] Fifth,[4] Sixth,[/URL=http://guncite.com/journals/embar.html#fn5][5][/URL] and Eighth[6] Amendments. Also depicted prominently would be the Ninth Amendment,[7] although perhaps as in the process of construction. I am confident that the ACLU map would exclude any display of the just compensation clause of the Fifth Amendment[8] or of the Tenth Amendment.[9]

The second map, drawn by the New Rightist, would highlight the free exercise clause of the First Amendment,[10] the just compensation clause of the Fifth Amendment,[11] and the Tenth Amendment.[12] Perhaps the most notable difference between the two maps, though, would be in regard to the Second Amendment: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." What would be at most only a blind alley for the ACLU mapmaker would, I am confident, be a major boulevard in the map drawn by the New Right adherent. It is this last anomaly that I want to explore in this essay.

What is really interesting is footnote #1

[1] It is not irrelevant that the Bill of Rights submitted to the states in 1789 included not only what are now the first ten Amendments, but also two others. Indeed, what we call the First Amendment was only the third one of the list submitted to the states. The initial "first amendment" in fact concerned the future size of the House of Representatives, a topic of no small importance to the Anti-Federalists, who were appalled by the smallness of the House seemingly envisioned by the Philadelphia framers. The second prohibited any pay raise voted by members of Congress to themselves from taking effect until an election "shall have intervened." See J. Goebel, 1 The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States: Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801, at 442 n.162 (1971). Had all of the initial twelve proposals been ratified, we would, it is possible, have a dramatically different cognitive map of the Bill of Rights. At the very least, one would neither hear defenses of the "preferred" status of freedom of speech framed in terms of the "firstness" of (what we know as) the First Amendment, nor the wholly invalid inference drawn from that "firstness" of some special intention of the Framers to safeguard the particular rights laid out there.

[2] "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ... or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." U.S. Const. Amend. I.

[3] "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." U.S. Const. Amend. IV.

[4] "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life and limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ...." U.S. Const. Amend. V.

[5] "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense." U.S. Const. Amend. VI.

[6] "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." U.S. Const. Amend. VIII.

[7] "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." U.S. Const. Amend. IX.

[8] "[N]or shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." U.S. Const. Amend. IV.

[9] "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." U.S. Const. Amend. X.

[10] "Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise thereof [religion]...." U.S. Const. Amend. I.

[11] See supra note 8.

[12] See supra note 9.

FYI: The "original" second amendment -- which was proposed in 1789 -- was finally ratified as the 27th amendment in 1992 (3 years after "The Embarrassing Second Amendment" was published).

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

Back in the mid-1990s, Cliff May ( when he was an associate editor of the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News) wrote a column about the "differences between liberals and conservatives." One of the items was something like, "Conservatives believe the heart of the constitution is the second and tenth amendments. Liberals believe it is Roe v. Wade."

 

[amprecon]

Without the 2nd Amendment? There would be alot of outlaws.

I don't believe we would be the country we are today. Sure, during the early years of this country alot of people wouldn't have cared whether it was lawful or not, they would've done what they needed to survive. As we became more "civilized" and the need for such defense and food gathering was not as apparent, there is no doubt the government would have banned them outright, especially during the roaring 20's.

I thank God that I was born in a country whose founders had such clear foresight to include in their creation of a new "limited power" government, a document acknowledging and enforcing basic human rights.

For those great men, with all the opportunities for immense powers, to have the humility to acknowledge that all men are equal and subject to a higher power other than man is truly a testament to their character.