Let's Get Started...

Narrowing down my topic about the 2nd Amendment (2A) to a specific or redistricted topic is easier said than done. After some research on various subtopics of the 2A, I am finding it hard to decide what one topic I want to focus on. There are quite a few subtopics I would like to blog about, but the objective is to narrow it down to just one. I ask myself "What do I want my peers to take away from my blog?" but more importantly "What do I, myself, want to take away from my research on the topic of my blog?" The second question to myself is the one I really need to answer. I need to understand that what I have researched is something I believe in and that I can write it down, blog about it, and stand behind it 100%.

Where to begin?... Lets start with the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. We would hope to think that after so many years, almost 223 years after the Bill of Rights and the 2A were introduced, that we would have a definitive understanding of what our founders intended. Surprisingly (NOT), our nation continues to debate over the meaning of the 2A. Everyone from Supreme Court Justices, congressmen, and lawyers down to columnist, bloggers, and the average Joe Schmo have discussed the interpretation of the 2A.  The 27-word, single sentence amendment is broken down word by word, sometimes in fragments, and analyzed over and over again... But who do we believe? What do we believe? This is where it starts to get frustrating. Many more questions come into play: Should we believe one man (or woman) over the another? What are these person qualifications to speak on this issue? What are these persons personal or political beliefs?Why should one person tell me what to believe in? It can go on and on and it really depends on how much, we as individuals, want to believe and/or accept.

If we pay attention to the news, issues surrounding the guns seem to come up every year but more recently it has come up frequently due to firearms used in tragic murders and suicides  throughout the country. Supreme court ruling on the 2A come up infrequently, but when they do come up they cause a big stir in the 2A debate. There have been nine supreme court cases regarding the 2A since 1875, five of those cases involve interpreting the 2A. The most recent was McDonald v. Chicago (2010), in which the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the 2A applies to individual states and that the right to keep and bear arms is protected by the Second Amendment via the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Bringing up these supreme court cases goes back to my point about interpreting the 2A for over 200 years. When will the debate end? Probably NEVER! As our nation changes, so will technology, so will our leaders, and so will the interpretation of not just the 2A, but possibly all of our rights we have in this country and maybe even this world.