Expert: Dean Speir - 10/21/2009

Question
how long did it take to ratify the 2nd amendment the right to bear arms?why is this amendment important to our country?

Answer
If this doesn't sound like a homework question, Brittani!

But thank you for actually asking a question about the Second Amendment rather than the Criminal Justice system.

There is an excellent treatise about the Second Amendment by David E. Vandercoy at http://www.guncite.com/journals/vandhist.html

It goes into detail about why it and other amendments were put in place subsequent to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, and makes clear the intentions of the framers that "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," should be an individual, rather than a collective, right.

The torturous process of ratification took over two years, beginning in the June 1789 when James Madison's draft proposal of a Bill of Rights was submitted to the Congress, and culminating in December 1791 when the Virginia General Assembly ratified the Bill of Rights as we know it today, thereby achieving the necessary three-fourths of the states required to add that Bill of Rights to the Constitution.

For the answer to the second part of your question, "Why is this amendment important to our country?," you need to understand that at the time during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were conceived, drafted and adopted, a very young United States had just freed itself from the rule of a distant monarch, the King of England, who had not only been taxing the "Colonial citizens" at a rate they considered unjust considering the quality and quantity of the services they were receiving in return for those taxes, but the British army was being directed to disarm the citizenry. The Americans wouldn't hear of it, and this quite directly led to the six year (1777-1783) fight against British rule.

Note that while the British thought of it as the "American Revolutionary War," the Colonialists considered it the "American War of Independence." When that was finally resolved, the Founding Fathers were clearly of the opinion that agreed that the ability to bear arms against an oppressor and liberty were inextricably interwoven, and set about to guarantee that individuals acting in concert would have the ability to throw off the yokes of any overbearing government which might arise.

This was manifest in Patrick Henry's earlier statement that arms are required to secure rights and freedoms from those who would take them away.