Are there any errors/problems/mistakes in the Constitution of the United States?

Yes, the Second Amendment. If the right to bear arms was a God-given or even state-given right, we would have a precedent for it. We don't. Serfs and peasants in Europe were ALWAYS forbidden to own swords and the like. There's literally no reason to own anything other than like a single-shot bolt action hunting rifle or something, and even then you should have to take a mandatory safety and hunter's education course and only be allowed like one kill every season or whatever it takes to feed yourself. I'm guessing a deer lasts like a few months

inb4 a bunch of retarded gun nuts from /k/ try defending a private citizen's right to own a tool whose sole purpose is murdering other human beings

But the language regarding militias is apparently confusing for some people and not actually useful in any way. Everything in the Bill of Rights is a God-given right that's recognized, not granted, by the Constitution.

How about this?
>The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Nice bait. You don't have any rights at all if you can't defend them. Yes, killing is a gun's purpose, but killing isn't always wrong.

>whose sole purpose is murdering other human beings
I know you're trolling here, but guns can be used for hunting and recreational purposes in addition to overthrowing tyrannical governments.

>You don't have any rights if you can't defend them.

Yes, you are your Glock are going to overthrow the US Army with Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters. Retard, if only you could see how delusional you are.

> but guns can be used for hunting and recreational purposes in addition to overthrowing tyrannical governments.
And I could use a nuclear weapon to dig a hole, does that mean I should be able to own one?

inb4 "yes" because you're a psychopathic gun nut, fucking lolbertarians, go REEEEE Somewhere else

Not having it be renewed ever 12 years, like Jefferson wanted

The Second Amendment actually has its roots in English Common Law. Nice try, though.

Modern history has a lot of cases where under equipped insurgents lead a successful guerrilla campaign against a force numerically and technologically superior to them.

Now fuck off.

>I could use a nuclear weapon to dig a hole, does that mean I should be able to own one?
That's a reducto ad absurdum and you know it. By the way, I don't even own any guns.

the electoral colleges are patently undemocratic, its hilarious how American politicians constantly promote democracy abroad but never based on the actual constitution

also at its inception the executive didn't have anywhere near enough power, jackson and lincoln would fix that though

oh yeah and writing an escaped slave law into the constitution was basically fucking stupid

It doesn't matter if you are allowed to own a nuke or not, because you can't afford one. Also
>talking about guns
>immediately goal-post shifts to the greatest extreme he can think of

Ever heard of guerilla warfare? US army can't even handle a bunch of goat herders in the middle of bumfuck nowhere who pose next to no threat to the american homeland and government, what makes you think it'll be able to handle a popular insurrection in its own country?

Oh really? Then how come there aren't dozens of English people with assault rifles shooting up schools? Jackass.
Yes, under equipped insurgents that still have shit like rocket launches and explosives, provided to them by whichever alphabet soup agency is funding them. You, on the other hand, have a disposable income of maybe a few hundred dollars a month and a target pistol.
No, it's not. You talked about the principle of using guns for other purposes, and I'm talking about the principle of using something other than an excavator to dig holes. If you want to hunt, buy a crossbow. If you want to shoot targets, get an air rifle. You don't need an assault rifle to punch holes in paper and you don't need a semi-auto carbine to shoot deer.

Nigga, you can kill people with a crossbow and an air rifle pretty easily. That was your main argument against guns in the first place. Are you arguing against civilian ownership of automatic weapons or strictly guns?

>popular insurrection
>popular

Hahahaha, the delusion of you neckbeards is hilarious. You think that even all gun owners would want to join your autistic campaign against the government. You realize that if there was ever a "revolution" it would be like you and a few other dumb hicks that join those militia things, right? Afghanistan has explosives and military equipment from being supplied by the US and from Soviet spoils of war. They know their country and fought for decades. You have probably never fired a shot in anger and probably are too fat and lazy to even go on a hike, you and your buddies aren't invading shit except the line at Taco Bell

Yes.

It's written down.

>implying explosives can't be cooked up
>implying foreign letter soups wouldn't have an interest in funding/arming a guerrilla campaign in the fucking USA

Yeah, I'm sure we would have school shootings every other weekend if those were the only legal "firearms"
>Hold still please! I have to reload my crossbow, it takes about 30 seconds!
>Hey can you guys stand in a line for me please? This CO2 cartridge only has enough power for like 12 shots

Yeah, it was written my slave-owning white men for starters.

The constitution leaves terms like that vague on purpose, to both promote a judiciary that will necessarily be called in to adjudicate it, and to prevent fossilization. "Arms" of the Second amendment isn't the only term that gets the same treatment. Take a glance at the 4th. What the hell counts as "probable cause"? What's an "unreasonable search and seizure", as opposed to a reasonable one? What's a "Warrant"? None of these terms are defined.

So pretty much you're arguing against automatic and semi-automatic weapons. However, if they were banned, would that prevent criminals from gaining access to them?

Fuck off cuck. I guess wildlife conservation is evil because Adolf Hitler supported it, and he was the ultimate cishit lord

>modern hunting crossbow
>reload time of 30 seconds
Why are anti-gunners so misinformed about everything?

Yes it is, we are humans and this is our burden to stay on the peak of the food chain.

Not him, but let's not be intellectually dishonest here. The legalization of most guns ensures that there are a lot floating around, which makes it easy for someone to get access to them illegally. If we had a hypothetical state where guns were illegal or heavily restricted, it would be harder to access them.

Maybe the USA has a problem with something else than gun availability, since Finland and Switzerland both have a lot of guns floating around and they are easy to get but low number of gun violence.

True, however illegal substances still surface in countries where it is not legal, just at a greater price. If the criminal is dedicated enough, they will buy it. As long as someone is profiting, whether it's the drug runners, gun runners, booze runners, what have you, illegal material is still going to get in unless the country in question has North Korea tier border security.

>Oh really? Then how come there aren't dozens of English people with assault rifles shooting up schools? Jackass

You're moving the goalposts there, slightly, and I suspect inadvertently. I wasn't talking about gun violence, I was talking about the ease of obtaining a gun illegally based on the legal access to guns. I admit, I don't have any statistics on the matter, but I would be interested in seeing the rates of illegal gun access in somewhere like Finland compared to somewhere where arms are controlled much more tightly, say, China.

Finland and Switzerland both have conscription tho, in Switzerland you get your gun after serving your term, so they understand guns in their proper military context. In the USA guns are just not that expensive toy people buy to feel good about themselves.

what about the people who can afford to own nukes?

>muh 2nd amendment is for muskets
"arms" refers to the weapons that wars are fought with
it is designed to allow the people to protect themselves from (tyrannical) governments, and thus should allow civilians to own weapons similar or identical to those used by the government's military

Not him, but I'd sure love to hear your SCOTUS case where your definition of arms is read into the text.

Nobody can. Bill Gates can't. Most countries can't.

killing, not murdering
some homicides are justified, and that's what the right to bear arms is designed to guarantee: personal protection

If nukes weren't internationally restricted he probably could.

I'm pretty sure even now he could have a deal with the North Korea or Pakistan.

Several amendments contain language providing that they shall not be law in the event that they are not ratified after x years (commonly seven years). It is important to stress that this language is /part/ of the amendments themselves, in other words, they are literal federal law, and part of the constitution in the sense that they amend the constitution as per the original document's own language.

Since these amendments were ratified, then there's no problem. But in the event that such an amendment, with such language, were not ratified, then there's a paradox, because: by what authority is the hypothetical, not-yet-ratified amendment now null and void? We had been discussing a not-yet-passed law, this whole time.

In fact, there is absolutely nothing preventing the apparatus from taking up the exact same amendment, all over again. This obviates the "inoperative" language in such amendments as a logical absurdity.

The fourth and final page of the original document, particularly its "eschatocol" (a legalese term describing the ending boilerplate part of a legal document where the involved parties sign their names and generally approve/affirm the binding legal reality of the document) contains a number of mistakes.

"Independence" is misspelled as "Independance". "Pennsylvania" is misspelled as "Pensylvania". And the errata reporting (common in old documents) literally gets at least one (and IIRC two) details wrong, about mistakes made in the writing of the document.

In 1985, the cost of a nuclear warhead was $350,000, adjusted for inflation. A fairly substantial portion of the population could get a loan for that much.

Source: thebulletin.org/more-bucks-bang8015

It was written by Nobel but naive people who were apparently not cognizant of the ramifications of the Jewish Question. So much time and ink wasted over legalistic hairsplitting could have been saved if they had just thought to put in a "No Jews" zeroth amendment.

This. The government should facilitate easier access to heavier weapons

What does the 2nd amendment say about amassing sarin gas? Technically that's an arms.

The presidential veto is one of the reasons why nothing ever gets done. I'd completely remove it.

The opposite is true. The presidential veto is the one of the few ways things actually get accomplished in the federal government.

A puzzling statement. Elaborate.

I would argue that requiring proper storage procedures isn't infringement, but outright banning is.

If the president didn't have veto power we'd be in a perpetual deadlock as no side would risk passing anything.

what goes for bio weapons? does it protect the right to own ebolapox?

Ebolapox probably can't be considered a weapon. Part of being a weapon is that it's targetable. If something is just as likely to kill everyone you like as everyone you dislike, it's not a weapon. Perhaps if ebolapox has an ultrashort incubation period or is only transmissible by specifically weaponized aerosol (so not by sneezing) or something like that, you could call it a weapon. At that point it's just sarin with a less than perfect mortality rate, though.

If an amendment passes Congress—like all amendments but one have—then it can, in fact, have a deadline as that is legally binding

Ebolapox cannot be "reasonable" considered an armament that the Founders intended for a private individual to own.

This is an important legal standard that most everyone ignores, that there be a reasonableness to everything. It is not reasonable to assume that the Founders intended that an individual be able to own a nuclear weapon; nor would it be reasonable to assume that the Internet isn't protected because it's digital. Amateur lawyers want to be able to suspend logic and reason, torturing the language of the Constitution to say whatever they want it to—that shit doesn't fly in a courtroom filled with people who actually understand the document.

You can make this argument, and I'd like to have it.

The real meat of the question is this: what is the legal status of the language of a proposed amendment, at its various stages of existence?

As I see it, and in a theoretical situation, there is absolutely nothing preventing the exact same amendment, with the exact same language (except, perhaps, plus or minus the deadline language/sections), from being tried again immediately following a hypothetical situation where a given amendment fails to be ratified by the states following passage through congress (or whatever requisite first phase has been satisfied while the second phase has yet to be satisfied, again all highly theoretical and never actually tried).

Whatever the legal status of an amendment passed by congress but not yet ratified by the states, whatever word we choose to refer to such a thing, deadline language seems to be to be superfluous in every case.

>serfs weren't allowed to do it
>therefore it isn't a natural right

You're a special kind of retarded

Interestingly enough, the hand-written copy of the Constitution (which most scholars/lawyers take as the authoritative copy) differs from the printed copies of the Constitution (which is how it was presented to the electorate). Thankfully, all the printed copies are identical to one another—if they weren't, that would be another hilarious level of legal hair-pulling.

Were cannons considered legal arms under the 2nd amendment?
In the case that they were why are we not allowed to own mortars and artillery guns if they are the modern equivalent?

>fatty mcOpiate thinks that he and his half town of hicks will be able to take on it's army.

You are you just have to pay a fee.

>Were cannons considered legal arms under the 2nd amendment?
The Surpreme Court has never definitively determined what counts as "arms" for purposes of the second amendment, so there is no real answer to the question until someone makes a case that gets up to that level.

Differs how?

They absolutely were. During 1812 the US Navy was so incredibly underfunded that they had to borrow privately owned warships.

>I have never heard of The Troubles

Not that guy but I made an extremely close, hyper-autistic reading of the Constitution (specifically the original document as represented in hi-res jpgs) a few months back. senate.gov language is literally wrong in a few spots, on actual words.

>They absolutely were. During 1812 the US Navy was so incredibly underfunded that they had to borrow privately owned warships.
Not him, but that does not follow. The mere fact that COngress allowed for the private ownership of cannons does not imply they are constitutionally protected as "arms". To give a hypothetical example to illustrate teh concept, Congress does not currently put a tax on moving lumber from state to state. The fact that they do not do so doesn't imply that moving lumber from state to state isn't "interstate commerce" a la Article 1, and that they could not so tax if they felt like doing it.

There's a difference in degree between "not banned" and "Constitutionally protected".

This is a fair point. The best answer I could give is that "arms" is a shortening of "armaments," meaning "military weapons and equipment." So unless that definition has been changed drastically, a cannon would be protected.

A counterargument to that is that the right is to "keep and bear", conjunctively phrased, which implies that "arms" for purposes of the amendment are things that can be "borne", which most contemporary dictionaries would define as carry around, which would mean that cannons are not protected.

Please tell me you made a corrected transcription to compare.

>There's a difference in degree between "not banned" and "Constitutionally protected".
9th amendment.

One would call it a proposed Amendment, stipulating that it is not yet ratified. Congress is allowed to set an expiration date for Amendment proposals, but not extend them—SCOTUS has given their imprimatur to that effect. But I imagine that it's purpose is to prevent "surprise" amendments, like the 27th; the 27th Amendment was ratified after two-hundred years because some dude in law school read up on it and realized that it had neither expired nor been rescinded. Virginian voters, circa 20th Century, did not have an opportunity to vote on the now-27th Amendment because it was already, technically ratified by VA in 1791. This is not the reason a deadline exists—the deadlines started with the 18th—but it's a pretty fucking convincing reason now, I believe.

I think it's mostly just spelling and maybe some punctuation errors, but punctuation is important and could, theoretically, change the meaning of a clause.

The GPO publishes a "official" version of the Constitution; online records for the government are notoriously trash. There were several different version of Trump's first "mudslime ban" order and no lawyer knew which one was authoritative—I think someone edited the one posted on WhiteHouse.gov to change a few clauses or whatever. Which is just a giant clusterfuck, from a legal perspective.

>he can't bear a cannon
DYEL?

No, the 9th amendment does not apply to a power that Congress does indeed have but is not choosing to exercise at the moment.

Child porn is not protected by the First Amendment, but is protected by the Ninth, right? So also, one must presume, is my right to murder. Or, maybe just maybe, the Ninth Amendment is more complicated that you think.

Really mate, most petty criminals don't have access to guns in EU countries. You, however have so much guns, that even a nigger can obtain one with ease, therefore you need to buy guns to protect yourselves from said niggers.

I am not even rabidly anti-guns, because I get that Bubba and his pals want to shoot some cans by the creek and that your population is educated about it, but shiet. It fucks up a lot of things, making crimes of passion suddenly much easier for example, not to mention school shootings.

Nope.

Only the American's weird tendency to worship what is a legal fucking document.

Yes I did.

I've also collected statistics, compared with certain reputable websites (senate.gov, other history sites, wikisource, making certain corrections along the way) and print copies that I own (almost all of which have defects with respect to the original, somewhere).

For every sentence, I did personal double-checks on word counts, and spellings. That's about as far as one person can take it, but a second, third, fourth pair of eyes would be useful, obviously.

My researches thus far have been one long bean count. I did a similar exercise for the Declaration at one point, and I have some sort of actual disagreement on word count which I forget (I can substantiate this, I have the files from my counts so if I goofed something it'll show up in my work).

My next thing (as you might imagine phase one burned me out a bit, but maybe I'll come back round at some point) is to go through each bit, know in detail which bits are actually pertinent to the others, and wherever possible to annotate at least one meaningful historical instance where the language was directly relevant. In other words, to actually (re)-read the document as opposed to my autistic bean count.

the "disagreement on word count" mentioned in this post, with regard to the Declaration, is with respect to a figure reported by the otherwise excellent Harvard website about the declaration (which catches and identifies many of the little things that I myself noticed in scanning the jpg of the engrossed).

At declaration.fas.harvard.edu/faq/what-word-count-declaration-independence , a grand total word count (on the engrossed copy, it would seem) of exactly 1458 words is reported, with respect to a particular scheme (including signatures). I instead come up with 1457; neither of these includes the eight words on the verso of the document. I totally agree with the 1337 number for the opening language plus document body.

Pic related is a granular drill-down on paragraph, sentence, word etc counts, with various caveats. This is all with respect to original documents (the original documents for the amendments are available in congressional records and as image files on government sites).

>worship

Why are Euros/liberals so retarded? It's the law. It's literally the highest law in the land. Following the law is "worship" now?

>but you never change it!

Except for those 17 times that we did.

Just because the first ten were historically contemporaneous with the original document does not mean that they do not count as changes, user. They do.

Wish list: hi-res pics of the copies of the Bill of Rights which are extant among the original states (these are hard to search!)

>inb4 a bunch of retarded gun nuts from /k/ try defending a private citizen's right to own a tool whose sole purpose is murdering other human beings
if that is true why do the police need firearms?
i thought their jobs were to protect us although a supreme court ruling said otherwise

>if it weren't for the jews we wouldn't need law
Good thing that nazi germany was such a liberal paradise, otherwise your argument would be based on utter horse shit.

I agree, they were changes, but I doubt anyone pissing and moaning about "muh parchment worship" will see it that way.

police are racist marauding murderers which is why we should give up our right to own firearms ok

>image
Pastebin, please.

It's under the umbrella of the First Amendment. Unfortunately, judges are humans and subject to human pressures.

There's no such thing as a right to murder, because that necessarily infringes on another's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

>errors/problems/mistakes
I dunno, depends on whether you're gonna laxly interpret a 200+ year old text according to the current reality, or follow it to the literal word.

I have never used pastebin before, and so I am highly skeptical of corruption issues. But here's the Constitution,

pastebin.com/rJbjZhWn

the Amendments,

pastebin.com/2AfG01pk

And the Declaration.

pastebin.com/MyFSa7me

These are pastes of my .txt files, in which I still have much greater confidence, not having gone closely over these copies. My skepticism of copies goes to the very heart of the purpose of the whole exercise -there /are all these copies of these historical documents floating around, and none of them agree/. It is perfectly valid to assume a copy-pasta job flawed until proven perfect.

everyone is militia, even if you aren't in a militia.

there is one case of third amendment i can think of.

prison guards went on strike. so national guard was brought in to staff the prison. they natguard occuped the prison guard barracks. so the prison guards argued it was a violation of their 3rd amendment rights.

Here we go again, rejecting any standard of reasonableness—which I find to especially heinous considering the Enlightenment-era document that we're talking about. Access to pornography is not a right nor do I have a right to lie—neither of these is pursuant to the intent of the First Amendment which is to promote a marketplace of ideas. Porn is not (yet) a part of the marketplace of ideas.

Robespierre wasn't a humanist, he was more like a loopy Deist especially towards the end.