District of Columbia v. Heller - 3

I posted a little time ago that there seems to be more to the court's position in answering the relative power argument I talked about in post 2 of this series about the case and here it is.

Based on what I currently see ,and I intend to continue checking on what I could have missed, it seems that the court started by accepting that the " being necessary to the security of a free state" clause as if it could be mainly a description rather than a condition or a qualifying thing. Then before you can argue how that could then fit with the purpose of giving the right to bear and keep arms in the second amendment you see what currently appears to me as some kind of acrobatic reasoning. It seems as if the court accepted the probability that the direct purpose of the second amendment was to prevent the government from dismantling militia creation and that the keeping and bearing of arms was stated as a right as some kind of a higher level attempt to prevent the government from doing that.

First, that understanding seems to be weakened by exchanging what generally understood as the main purpose (Having sufficient power to face a military or army of that time) with what seems to be secondary ( just a way to make it more difficult for the government to dismantle a militia).

Second, that understanding is also weekend by the starting justification of the second amendment. It doesn't seem very reasonable that those who made that amendment accepted the risk on civilian life for just that gain which could have been reasonably satisfied without involving firearms ownership.

Third, because of the relative primitiveness of weapons used at that time, the purpose of just preventing dismantling of the militia by the government also satisfy the creation of a militia with reasonably sufficient power to face a military or army of that time.

In other words, in our current time few persons using military machinery can wipe out entire areas and kill thousands and thousands of people easily (including those with guns or even military machinery that is less developed than the other side ). So, number is not a big thing. At that time, on the other hand, because of the relative primitiveness of the weapons used in battles the number of fighters was a big reasonable factor to win a battle. That means creating a sufficiently big militia imply creating a sufficiently powered militia. Or let me express that using the terms of the argument to which I am trying to respond: at the time of the second amendment preventing the dismantling of a militia implied preventing  weakening the militia. [(Added 11/18/2013) change the last part of the previous sentence from "preventing  weakening the militia"  to  "preventing having a militia with less than the reasonably sufficient power".Therefore it is not reasonable to recognize a separate intention between those two united purposes unless the speaker himself put an effort to declare his intention with regard to that separation. That is even more true when the separator try to flip and use the intended right to carry and bare firearms which is essentially an empowerment thing and use it for his claim separating those two united intention.

Forth, the purpose of the prevention of the dismantling of militia itself is allowing the creation of militia. Since the constitution is not a fairy tale story the "being necessary to the security of a free state" should apply as a condition if not on the current militia then at least on the target future militia. In other words, there should be a reasonable path for the militia to be "necessary to the security of a free state" and therefore arguments I made in post 2 of this series still apply.

Now, consider how that the type of militia to which the court refers would have been powerless in front of even the military machinery of second world war or even earlier. The same militia at our current time would still be powerless in front of the same machinery of the second world war and even much more powerless in front of the modern military machinery. Is that a reasonable path for a militia to have sufficient power satisfying to " being necessary to the security of a free state"? This is dreaming and imagination because the development of weapons between then and now completely changed every thing.

Note that I could be still missing significant things about the related positions of the court in the arguments I am trying to answer. Nevertheless, it is not a bad thing to build a stronger base by responding to other possibilities while zeroing in more closely on the position of the court so that it can be better understood and responded to.

District of Columbia v. Heller