Second Amendment Persuasive Speech

The Second Amendment as one of the ten Amendments known as the Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791. The amendment reads in full: “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. The Amendment is obviously quite brief: and it is perhaps the very brevity of the statement that has led to so much confusion on its scope and intention. It is certainly a perverse fact that the very brevity of this Amendment has lent itself to literal volumes of interpretations and voluminous arguments to then oppose those interpretations for literally hundreds of years.

Over the course of history this succinct statement has been construed to both not guarantee

The people which are referenced throughout the language of the Amendments would have been a collective as opposed to an actual individual right. In fact that collective right would have resided only with white, free, men, who were landholders as Alexander Keyssar wrote in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States: “At its birth, the United States was not a democratic nation—far from it. The very word "democracy" had pejorative overtones, summoning up images of disorder, government by the unfit, even mob rule. In practice, moreover, relatively few of the nation's inhabitants were able to participate in elections: among the excluded were most African Americans, Native Americans, women, men who had not attained their majority, and white males who did not own

It is clear that at the time the Amendments words were written no one assumed that all people were actually equal and the generalized people were referenced as a collective for the good of the people who ran the show.

Yet those who advocate for free individual gun ownership point to the language of the Amendment and clearly define “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” portion to mean just that; no infringement of their individual right to own, use and carry arms.

Though many feel that this interpretation has given rise to the rights of the many to a collective sense of well-being and safety the quintessential; “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Declaration of Independence (US 1776) being subjugated to the rights of the few. Because, though millions of Americans support free and unfettered access to any manner of gun, many millions more support increased safeguards and restrictions on weaponry.

In America today it is estimated that there is one gun for every single American yet roughly only a third of the populace owns a weapon. However, clearly the Second Amendment holds no ready relief for either advocating side, as the malleable quality of the language seems to ensure continued interpretational see-sawing far into the