He went on to say that the amendment was designed to protect the citizens against a potentially oppressive federal government.
Right. The "state militia", which is the National Guard, becomes a part of the army of the potentially oppressive federal government with a single order.
The weapons of the "state militia" are also the property of the potentially oppressive federal government.
This Judge is IGNORANT!!!!!!
So tell me judge if the Bill of rights was ratified on 12-15-1791 and the Militia was formed AFTER that In May of 1792(the Militia Act) how could it be construed that the 2nd was to apply to State Militia?
Sorry, but the "state militia" is NOT the National Guard. The National Guard is a part of the "organized militia" that is stationed in the states and which the Federal Government allows the state governments to exercise some usage of.
There are several states (I forget which ones) that currently maintain a state militia in addition to and apart from the National Guard. That other states currently do NOT maintain such does NOT abrogate their right to organize such at any time they so choose.
You have all expressed some variation on the theme of "nonsense" in reaction to these 2 sentences. It happens that this idiot judge is correct in a sense, but not because he intended to be. DON'T FLAME ME YET! Here's why:
The 2nd Amendment doesn't confer/create ANY individual rights, it protects those pre-existing rights against government infringement. The less-than-honorable Walton obviously intended to write that "The Second Amendment does not protect an individual...." However, he couldn't even state his Constitutionally INcorrect personal views clearly or accurately. The statement is only correct because he's incapable of composing a sentence well.
The 2nd sentence is also correct, and also not because Walton wanted it to come out that way. The intent of the 2nd - clearly stated by various Founding Fathers in the debates surrounding the adoption of the Constitution - is to ensure that the People will have available and in-hand the arms necessary to overthrow a domestic tyranny, should the Constitution fail to prevent the rise of such a tyranny. It is also intended to be a VERY substantial deterrent to the rise of tyrants, as they would know that they faced the entire body of the People, who would be very well armed. Now, the state militias (the REAL ones, composed of ordinary citizens, NOT the stroke-of-a-pen-and-now-it-is-federalized National Guard) need to have members (i.e. all citizens) that are able to show up bearing their own arms, just like in pre-Revolutionary days. THIS is what is meant by ensuring "the vitality of the state militias." Of course, we all know that this is NOT what Walton meant - he meant that the ability of the state National Guards to acquire arms is what is protected, and that is wrong on several counts, both historically and legally speaking. Walton has to know that the SCOTUS ruled unanimously in 1990 against (extremely Left Wing) Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich. Perpich sued the Fed.gov in the mid-1980's to stop President Reagan's use of the Minnesota NG to train the Salvadorian Army how to kill Commies faster, on the theory that the NG was the state's militia and, thereby, outside of Federal control. SCOTUS tore him a new one, indicating that while a state's NG could be considered the state's militia, it ceased to be so at the exact moment that the President signed an order federalizing it. Besides, if the NG is a militia at all, is really a "select militia," not the "ordinary" or "general" militia of the 2nd, which has been better defined in both the 1792 Militia Act and present law - and Walton also must know this.
The problem with Walton is really not that he's stupid (though he could use some lessons in English composition), but that he is willfully blind to the law. In a criminal one expects such things. However, in a Federal judge who is an attorney, who is supposed to be especially knowledgable in the law (or else be particularly able to look it up and understand it), whose very job is to ensure that the Constitution is protected, and who swore an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution," this willful blindness is utterly unacceptable. I won't be the first to say it, but I'll chime in anyway: he's got an agenda, and it is not an agenda in which any party except the fed.gov has a near total monopoly on power.
Which brings us to the issue of what will happen? My belief is that the anti-gun movement (anti-gun for us ordinary citizens, that is) consists of 2 groups of people: 1) useful idiots like the average inner-city or suburban housewife who has never handled a gun, doesn't know the first thing about them, and has been brainwashed into believing that guns are "evil" and that only the police or army should have them and 2) the very small group of politicians, wealthy businessmen and bureaucrats that view gun control as a means of increasing their power. The 2nd group is, by far, the most dangerous. I am unsure of where Walton is, but I suspect that he's a higher level useful idiot. But he really doesn't matter - what matters is that the 2nd group, the power-mongers, are almost at the point of believing that the American public can be disarmed without too much trouble. Like Saddam Hussein, many of these folks seem to be seriously misinformed about the true state of affairs, perhaps because they are surrounded by yes-men. Anyway, these people are greedy for power. They've been whittling away at our rights for a long time now, and at an accelerating rate, but the job still isn't done - not with 80 million gun owners and 250-300 million guns out there. However, they are clearly getting impatient, perhaps because the real power behind the gun grabbing movement - liberal Democrats - are losing power at an accelerating rate as people wise up to the idiocy of lib-Dem positions. At some point in the not-too-distant future, while they still have the judges accumulated over the past 3 decades on the bench (and now you know why the Senate Dems are so desparately filibustering Bush's more conservative nominees), they'll make a grab, possibly under the guise of clamping down on terrorism. Perhaps it will be under a Dem President in 2009, who was elected only because people want a change in leadership. Whenever that happens, and whatever the excuse, there will be civil disobedience on a scale not seen in this country at any time - not during Prohibition, the inane 55 MPH national speed limit, or the current War on Drugs. People won't register guns, and will lie about having them when questioned, just as they have in Canada, California and New Jersey. I'll bet my bottom dollar that some of the disobedience will not be so civil.
I won't recommend any course of action, nor say what I plan to do in such an event, but I'll give my opinion about what is reasonably likely: Travis McGee's 10 million hunters with scoped deer rifles that can reliably hit "deer-sized" targets at 500 yards, plus a whole bunch of non-hunting, liberty loving, gun owners will be hopping mad. If this combined group comprises 20 million people, and only 1 in 1,000 is ticked off enough to initiate action against the enemies of Liberty, then we're looking at 20,000 people. 20,000 highly-motivated, well-trained, well-equipped people. Many of them would almost certainly be ex-Special Forces. Just so that no one forgets, these folks are among the most fervently patriotic people in the nation, sworn to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution, and who also happen to have been trained specifically to gain access to well-guarded, high-value, targets and terminate them with extreme prejudice, to use a wide variety of interesting chemicals so that various vital or expensive things don't ever work as intended by their design engineers, and to organize and train resistance movements - among many other useful skills. They, and those not fortunate enough to have served the country in such a vital way, will blend in with the population because they ARE the population - it won't just be a bunch of rural white males driving around in pickup trucks with the Confederate Flag in the window - and, as such, they will get close enough to their targets to do what is necessary (I'll leave it to each reader to decide for themselves what is "necessary" in any given circumstance). Suffice it to say that I believe that the timeless wisdom of those who proposed and ratified the 2nd Amendment will be vindicated, and that our Republic will be greatly strengthened as the Tree of Liberty is, as Jefferson said, "refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants".
I sincerely hope and pray that I am wrong, along with a lot of those on FR and many other like-minded websites, and that sometime soon those governing us or the people themselves come to their senses and restore our Republic to its former state as a necessary evil, limited in its power and scope - but I fear that I am not wrong. I feel like those in the pre-Civil War era must have felt, hoping against hope that the storm they foresaw coming wouldn't come, but knowing in their bones that it couldn't be stopped.