The Bill of Rights

Initially I had planned to just do one post on the "Bill of Rights" and then go to some other subject important to our American way of life. If you know me at all, you know that I harp about the 2nd Amendment more than any of the rest. To give a fair treatment to the entire Bill of Rights, I have decided to give a tiny bit of history and then treat each of the amendments in it's own separate post.

What we commonly refer as the Bill of Rights are the first 10 Amendments to the US Constitution. The founding fathers had just written this awesome document (the Constitution) and then realized that it could use a little clarification.

Just a quick "bumper sticker" synopsis of each amendment might go something like this:

1st: Right to Free Speech
2nd: Right to Keep and Bear Arms
3rd: Freedom from Unwillingly Housing a Soldier
4th: Freedom from Unreasonable Search and Seizure
5th: Freedom from Testifying Against Yourself
6th: Right to a Speedy Trial
7th: Right to Trial by Jury
8th: Freedom from Cruel and Unusual Punishments
9th: Just because a right is not specifically excluded from the government does not mean that the government automatically has that right. (i had to read several things just to get this flawed understanding of Amendment Nine and still my explanation is not very clear.)
10th: Rights not specifically given to the central government belong to the states and the people.

Most of us that have grown up in the United States have heard quite a bit about Amendments One, Two and Five. The Left loves One, the Right loves Two and we ALL love to "plead the fifth". We hear less about Amendments Four, Six, Seven and Eight but we still hear about them on "Law and Order", etc.

More later.