Until recently, there was a fairly substantial line of thought that guns could be banned from the general public by reading the 2nd Amendment such that the whole "A well regulated Militia..." part meant that only organized groups (and not individuals) were guaranteed guns.  Under this reasoning, a number of laws outright banning guns were passed.

The Supreme Court tossed that out in the rulings that I cited above.

Neither the feds nor lower level governments can ban guns outright, but Heller is a pretty narrow decision, so guns can still be very heavily regulated by the feds (and lower level governments).

true.  That 14th amendment has been tortured in lots of different ways (including the 2000 election).

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Letters of Marque.  Permission for private individuals to attack foreign vessels without being branded as a pirate.  Can you seriously make the argument that they just didn't see the machine gun coming?  Private individuals had the modern equivalent of a missile destroyer and they saw it as important the feds had the power to grant them immunity to piracy charges so they could engage foreign ships in times of war.

You worry about some guy with an automatic today.  When it was written, they thought nothing of letting private citizenry run warships.  There were a few thousand of these privateers at the time, some of them with enough firepower to wipe out small cities.

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.

Reasoning is not restriction.  Shall not be infringed is shall not be infringed, and it has nothing to do with Congress.  You are also misusing the word regulated.  A well regulated militia was just a group of private individuals that knew how to shoot and march.  They were practiced, regular.  They did not have a list of restrictions on their activities.

The reasoning holds true today as well.  In NYC, people have been given cavity searches at the roadside simply for going somewhere.  The price of their relative security in such a heavily restricted environment has been their basic rights.  Meanwhile, places like Dallas have violent crime rates comparable to NYC without the random cavity search.

40s, 14th amendment ... do you make yourself take drug tests, Frogboy?  Federal laws have always superceded state laws, from the very founding of the nation, long before the 40s (presuming you mean the 1940s).  There were fights regarding this throughout the 1700s when we first founded to the 1800s.  Probably one of the most notorious amendments smiting "state rights" was the 13th amendment abolishing slavery, in direct defiance of several states refusing to accede to this "tyranny" perpetuated by the "evil" federal government ... and the 13th Amendment was officially incorporated into the U.S. constitution in 1865; the 14th amendment was related (essentially forcing states, affirmatively, to recognize the citizenship of all Americans including former slaves) and was officially adopted in 1868.  Where in the heck did you get the idea the 14th amendment was adopted in the 1940s?  You are off by a whopping 8 decades.

Your "knowledge" of American politics and history is appalling bad, Frogboy ... while it could be academically laughable, the sad reality is the vast majority of people on the "right," including yourself, operate politically on the same false premises.  You vote for candidates who feed you false information you agree with, and so you perpetuate the false information.  The nation tried to found as a confederacy with little or no central interstate power, but it failed as a fledgeling.  The founding fathers agreed:  the federal government needs to have power, including the power to protect citizens of states from state governments, to keep interstate commerce fair and prevent one state from undermining another economically.  The union of states must operate coherently in international affairs, including war, treaties, trade agreements and the like.

Brad is talking about case law from the 1940s that cited the 14th amendment as basis for expanding federal powers beyond what was commonly accepted as the limit of federal power prior to that decade. Surely someone with such a brilliant understanding of American history that they could tell others that theirs' is "appalling [sic] bad" and "academically laughable" should be able to pick up that nuanced meaning?  

Right? 

But keep up the "you're on the right, so you're dumb and only vote for candidates that feed you your false information".  I'm curious to see how Brad responds.  It should be entertaining.  But I'm also interested because I'm somewhat on the "right" (assuming by 'right' you mean American style conservative or libertarian) and I need more of Brad's false information to nourish my academically laughable sad reality of false pretenses.  

His post is admittedly somewhat awkwardly phrased, but you are off base here.

I suggest that you go plug "Incorporation Doctrine" into wikipedia and give it a read.  Basically, there were a series of court rulings in the first half of the 20th Century that cited the 14th Amendment.  He is referencing those.

Seriously? How you can transpose a 21st century definition into a 18th century document is truly disturbing.

I may be incorrect however I thought that part of the conditions for the Southern states to rejoin the union was ratification.

From Wikipedia: The amendment was bitterly contested, particularly by Southern states, which were forced to ratify it in order for them to regain representation in the Congress.

It's the little things that make life worth living.

I may be in a country filled with idiots that will doom us to an eventual catastrophic collapse and ensuing dictatorship, but at least I'm amused by the willful blindness.

Once again, mostly because it's fucking hilarious.  Cannons, grenades, mortars, all regular parts of post revolutionary life.  Common enough that some places had to pass laws against leaving them lying around primed because of all the fires and explosions happening by accident.

Privateers!  The sublime ass kicker of every liberal twat trying to argue that the Second Amendment only covers hunting rifles.  21st century man quakes in fear at the thought of a private citizen having a machine gun.  18th century man thought nothing of private citizens being capable of coastal bombardment from a hundred gun warship.

Third time the charm maybe?

Why would he need to?  Coastal bombardment could take care of the shore side school just fine from out in the water.  They wouldn't even go into port, it would be suicide to attack from that close since every ship at port would be firing on them after a few rounds, and probably people in the city.

Anyone stupid enough to shoot up a school in the 18th century would have been dead in as messy a fashion as the people that got to them first could manage.  They'd have been in a shooting war with half the people nearby inside a minute.  Today they get to waltz around in a free zone for an hour while our cops stand around outside waiting for them to get bored and come out or kill themselves.  When they're taken alive they spend the next few years getting letters from fans before their show trial starts.  Then they spend the next few decades getting three squares a day in solitary because we wouldn't want the other inmates to do what should have been done to start with.

I don't even have to bother with locking doors around here, anyone stupid enough to run around robbing homes would end up dead fast.  Everyone has guns, and it's understood that cleaning up your own problems and calling the police to come collect the bodies is the only way you're going to get them taken care of.  It's the only thing they'd bother showing up for.  Actually taking someone alive would be a big mistake here.  Your outcome is guaranteed the first time you screw up and rob a place where someone is home.

The reason schools get targeted nowadays is because it is all a psychological operation to garner support and enmity between the two factions/countries at war.

Psy-OP game plan:

1. You kill children and other innocent people, to make the people care about your war.

2. You do a media blitz and blame your enemy, fabricating evidence when needed.

3. You buy up any information discrediting your story and suppress any competing voices with death threats and real force.

4. You watch the numbers and hopefully they will go your way to reach a result in your parliament/congress, greasing the wheels with indirect/direct bribes as you go.

5. You go to war/Get more military funding/Start a secretly approved conflict.

We live in a connected world, making it all the more difficult to go to war.  Why do you think the US/allied forces have been killing any journalists trying to radio their stories out of the war zone? 

Information deprivation is the key to victory, since the people have no actual interest to go to war and must therefore be fooled.

Arming people today with relevant weaponry would only serve to make this warfare cycle break down, as people with guns are generally smarter and more knowledgeable about the world than people without guns, and they have an extra "bullet vote".  

Conflict happens in a world with scarce resources, people with lots of college experience and little life experience have a harder time comprehending this.  It's something of a reality check having a weapon in your hand that can dispatch someone efficiently, you have to take responsibility for your actions and responsibility for what you know and do.  Taking responsibility isn't necessarily taught at university, our litigation society is more focused on evading responsibility and therefore ineffective at teaching people how to maintain their rights(you make more money when there is a complex legal system that can steal people's property too).  After all, look what "Marching on Washington" has done to secure our current liberties...lol

Seeing this thread,  why do I think it's ironic that I had a test on that very same first part of the Constitution the day that I post this...

That was made clear in threads other than this one already.