Meyers: 2nd Amendment Wasn’t Intended for Individuals to Have the Right to Bear Arms

Seth Meyers, host of the NBC's comedy show "Late Night," said Thursday night that the Second Amendment was never meant to ensure Americans' the right to bear arms.

Here's an excerpt: 

MEYERS: "Now, at this point, you might be saying the Second Amendment guarantees the right for individuals to own guns, and that right is absolute. In fact, that's a case conservatives in the gun lobby have made for years. But when you actually look at the history of how the Second Amendment has been interpreted throughout American history, you get a very different impression.

For a long time the courts, politicians, and gun owners just took for granted that the Second Amendment was designed only to allow states to raise militias, which required militia members to procure their own guns. It had nothing to do with home defense or hunting. As one historians put it, 'One does not bear arms against a rabbit.' Well, one does.  And he'd sure as hell be a lot scarier with an AR-15.

So for 200 years the Second Amendment was assumed to pertain specifically to militias. But then, starting around the 1970s conservatives in the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment had actually been misinterpreted and that it wasn't just about the state militias, but about an individual's right to own a gun. And to back up their argument, in 1982, Senate Republicans commissioned a report that claimed to have discovered clear and long lost proof that the Second Amendment was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms. Long lost proof. Did Nicolas Cage find a secret message written on the back of the constitution? 'It was written by Ben Franklin's ghost.'

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