Second Amendment - Bearing Arms

"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"

There are no defintive resoultion in courts of what the Second Amendment exactly protects because sometimes depending on the firearm we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarentees the rights to bear and keep such an instrument like a shotgun that has a barrel of less than 18 inches in length. There were many cases againest other states that dealt with bearing arms and what rights it protects to handling and using guns.

The Second Amendment preserves and guarantees an individual right for a collective purpose. The militia clause was a declaration of purpose, and preserving the people's right to keep and bear arms was the method the framers chose to, in-part, ensure the continuation of a well-regulated militia. There is no contrary evidence from the writings of the Founding Fathers, early American legal commentators, or pre-twentieth century Supreme Court decisions, indicating that the Second Amendment was intended to apply solely to active militia members

In the year of  1803, St. George Tucker, a lawyer,  Revolutionary War militia officer, legal scholar, and later a U.S. District Court judge who had been appointed by James Madison in the year of 1813, wrote of the Second Amendment:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.

In the appendix to the Commentaries, Tucker elaborates further:

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty... The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

Not only are Tucker's remarks solid evidence that the militia clause was not intended to restrict the right to keep arms to active militia members, but he speaks of a broad right – Tucker specifically mentions self-defense.
Tucker has been cited in over 40 cases, you can find one of Tucker's major cases in virtually every Supreme Court era.  (Source: The Second Amendment in the Nineteenth Century)

There are 3 ways the Second Amendment is usually interpreted to deny it was intended to protect an individual right to keep and bear arms:

• It protects a state's right to keep and bear arms.
• The right is individual, but limited to active militia members because the militia clause narrows the right's scope.
• The term "people" refers to the people collectively, rather than the people as individuals

Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/amdt2_user.html#amdt2_hd1

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