Titan6 said:
You are missing the point. Your truth is no more or less verifiable than that of the Hindu's or Islam.You may see it as a great truth but in the end it also just a construct.
I accept that the construct that I embrace is no more or less verifiable than Hindu's or Islam's or Christianity's, etc.
The critical difference - as I see it - is an act of will to give meaning to construct. The meaning is not in the construct itself - but in our choice to embue that construct with meaning. I can (and do) chose a the ethics laid out in the Torah (and subsequent writings of the rabbis) as the ethics by which I want to live my life - as a choice of will.
To bring this back to the original topic
(well closer anyway), with regard to the Bill of Rights, I can embrace the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights as rights I want to support/fight for, etc. That's why I am a member of the NRA and the ACLU. But I don't need or seek any kind of divine imprimatur for those rights.
I think there can be many rational arguments as to what exactly is mean by the 2nd Amendment.
Note that I do not agree with the notion that the only rational way to proceed in understanding what is meant by the Constitution is what was meant the founding fathers when the Constitution was written. That is one method for determining the meaning of a part of the Constitution. Note that it is not without problems.
The first is determining what the group of founding fathers meant - as opposed to one or two or twelve of them.
The second is knowing what an individual really meant. As a quick example, I notice that none of the folks who love to quote Jefferson's address the critical issue of his actions as President - he felt that he had the right under the Constitution to seize goods and property without warrants if he suspected that the owner might have the intention of violating an embargo that he (Jefferson) imposed on the New England states against the will of the people. Which speaks more powerfully to his understanding of the Bill of Rights - his actions or his words? Can you harmonize his actions and his words?
Further, Jefferson and Madison conspired together to extend the power of the Federal government to buy the Louisiana Purchase. Where the heck did either one of them find the federal power to do that in Constitution?
From these examples, I think that determining what even Jefferson and Madison really meant by the Bill of rights requires more than a quick troll through the Federalist papers.
A more fundamental issue with the "it means today what it meant when the founding fathers wrote it" doctrine is that the Constitution itself does not award any more power the the founding fathers in this regard than to any other Americans.
In fact, it may well be that the founding fathers intended the Constitution to be interpreted by three branches of government, with each branch exerting a check and balance on each other. Sound familiar?
Oops - a long compile just finished. Have to go.
Mike