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To: H-NET/OIEAHC Electronic Association in Early American Studies <H-OIEAHC@H-NET.MSU.EDU> I too signed the Yassky amicus brief and find it to be persuasive without any of its citations to any of the Michael Bellesiles' pieces. The strength of the brief as history and as law (insofar as law is interested in history) was the reading of the primary sources in the brief not the secondary sources (no offense meant to any of the authors of the secondary sources cited in the brief). I have always believed that the modern rules for reading legal texts required that all parts be read in light of the whole. One cannot then discard the "well regulated militia" so cavalierly as the standard model and the proponents of a well armed America have done. But I suggest another path to understanding the draft Amendment. Why was it necessary to propose and pass an Amendment if everyone was already well armed? The point, it seems to me, was to speak to the issue of the state militia rather than to the question of gun ownership. Thus the Second Amendment in and of itself cannot be used as a bar to regulation of gun ownership. A better place to find such a bar would be in the Ninth Amendment. Peter Hoffer, Distinguished Research Professor of History, The University of Georgia
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