Common History Myths: Historical Inevitability Edition

The_Chieftain:   With respect, that wasn't what he said. "the actual core legal document (The Constitution) in fact does not make the same declaration and instead says that rights are in fact granted and protected by the state."   Legally acknowledged pre-existing rights are not granted by the State per se. They generally are common-law rights which are enumerated by the courts (Granted, a State agent, but the only ones in a position to identify a right) as rights. If they are inalienable or not, I'm not going to go as far as to say. That they exist is good enough. The US, and for that matter Ireland (where I obtained my law degree), both are a little unusual, perhaps, in that they are Constitutional jurisdictions created out of the already extant Constitution-free UK legal system: American legal history and precedent does not start in 1789, nor Irish legal history in 1937, though of course the Constitution does overrule anything in place before then -if- the Constitution happens to bear upon it. I fear that Zinegata is confusing me with someone who is unable to understand legal principles or is blinded by ideology and that I'm attempting to make claims which I am not.  

The_Chieftain:   Even Dredd Scott was a split opinion. If all nine 2008 SCOTUS justices with an acknowledged ideological split are in agreement in their written opinions that the 2nd is a pre-existing right, then it's a reasonable confirmation to the statement that 2A referred to a right which was pre-existing. See Scalia (Majority): "We look to this because it has always been widely under­stood that the Second Amendment, like the First and  Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The  very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it “shall not be infringed.” and Stevens (Dissent) "And the Court’s emphatic reliance on the claim “that the Second Amendment . . . codified a pre-existing right,” ante, at 19, is of course be­side the point because the right to keep and bear arms for service in a state militia was also a pre-existing right"