When was second amendment written

The plaintiff in McDonald challenged the constitutionally of the Chicago handgun ban, which prohibited handgun possession by almost all private citizens. In a decisions, the Court, citing the intentions of the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment, held that the Second Amendment applies to the states through the incorporation doctrine.

However, the Court did not have a majority on which clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the fundamental right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense. While Justice Alito and his supporters looked to the Due Process Clause, Justice Thomas in his concurrence stated that the Privileges and Immunities Clause should justify incorporation.

However, several questions still remain unanswered, such as whether regulations less stringent than the D. As a general note, when analyzing statutes and ordinances , courts use three levels of scrutiny, depending on the issue at hand:. More recently, the Supreme Court reinforced its Heller ruling in its Caetano v. Massachusetts decision.

See constitutional amendment. Throughout much of US history, the amendment was hardly discussed. Passed by Congress in September and ratified in , the Second Amendment was proposed in a political setting markedly different from that of the modern US.

Politics in the newly founded US were shaped by centuries of English tradition. Instead of a standing army, groups of men in localities throughout the US were expected band together to form militia groups, which had their own weapons and received part-time, unpaid military training. However, the US Revolutionary War showed that militias were not adequate to deal with invading forces such as those of the British Empire.

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. Ultimately, a careful study of the Second Amendment would have to treat keep arms and bear arms as two separate linguistic units, and thus two separate rights. We performed another search in COFEA, about the meaning of keep arms , looking for documents in which keep and arms and their variants appear within six words of each other.

The results here were somewhat inconclusive. The remainder of the hits did not support either reading. We could not find a dominant usage for what keep arms meant at the founding. Thus, even if Scalia was wrong about the most common meaning of bear arms , he may still have been right about keep arms. Based on our findings, an average citizen of the founding era would likely have understood the phrase keep arms to refer to possessing arms for both military and personal uses.

Finally, it is not enough to consider keep and bear arms in a vacuum. About 40 percent of the results had a militia sense, about 25 percent used an individual sense, and about 30 percent referred to both militia and individual senses.

The remainder were ambiguous. With respect to rights, there was not a dominant sense for keeping and bearing arms. And the bulk of that historical analysis, based on the history of the common-law right to own a firearm, is undisturbed by our new findings. We hope to publish this research, which also looked at other phrases in the Second Amendment, such as the right of the people , in an academic journal. Read: Where the gun-control movement goes silent.

Even before the U. Constitution was created, its framers understood that it would have to be amended to confront future challenges and adapt and grow alongside the new nation.

In creating the amendment process for what would become the permanent U. Constitution, the framers The 13th Amendment to the U.

Constitution, ratified in in the aftermath of the Civil War, abolished slavery in the United States. The 25th Amendment to the U.

Passed by Congress on July 6, , the 25th Amendment was ratified by the states The 26 Amendment lowered the legal voting age in the United States from 21 to The long debate over lowering the voting age began during World War II and intensified during the Vietnam War, when young men denied the right to vote were being conscripted to fight for their By the late s, prohibition movements had sprung up across the United States, driven by religious groups who considered alcohol, specifically drunkenness, a threat to the nation.

The movement reached its apex in when Congress ratified the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the The 14th Amendment to the U. Freedom of speech—the right to express opinions without government restraint—is a democratic ideal that dates back to ancient Greece.

In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees free speech, though the United States, like all modern democracies, places limits on this The 15th Amendment, which sought to protect the voting rights of African American men after the Civil War, was adopted into the U. Constitution in Despite the amendment, by the late s discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their