Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty made good on his vow to contest the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruling that the city’s 1976 handgun ban is unconstitutional, because the Second Amendment applies to individuals as well as to militias - and the Supreme Court is now considering whether to take up the issue of what the Founding Fathers meant by these words: “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 the high court decide to grant review, Legal Times reports that its ruling may not hinge on the actual words comprising the Second Amendment, but to the commas that separate those words into clauses:
Another suddenly intense debate is enveloping the case - this one over what all those commas in the Second Amendment meant in late 18th-century America.
It may sound way beyond trivial, but it’s not: The grammar war is under way.
You can blame the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for igniting this esoteric debate. It ruled on March 9 that because of the Second Amendment’s second comma, the first half of the amendment - the militia half - is basically a throat-clearing preface that does not qualify the individual right to bear arms that the second half protects.
Judge Laurence Silberman, who wrote the 2-1 decision, went on to conclude that the district’s handgun ban violates that individual right.
Some grammarians believe that commas were often used to signal a breath pause for orators – which means there would be more of them than would be used today, and that they may not necessarily mean anything. Others argue that the commas divide the sentence into dependent and independent clauses – the trouble is there is sharp disagreement over which clause is dependent and which is independent.
Complicating matters even further the Second Amendment is a comma chameleon: The version that Congress approved in 1789 had three commas, while several states ratified a two-comma version.
The Stiletto shudders to think that her Second Amendment rights are dependent on the placement of a comma – especially considering what’s going on in Venezuela these days.
Note: The Stiletto writes about politics and other stuff at The Stiletto Blog.
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3 users commented in " Are Our Second Amendment Rights Hanging On A Comma? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackIt’s not even clear that there IS a third comma. Look at the actual document, and the comma doesn’t seem to be there…just a lead-in of the “s” in “shall”…
Plus, if you go to the source of the amendment, it’s pretty clear that “militia” referred to all the people…as George Mason himself (author of it) was asked, and he stated it clearly! But regardless, with the first clause being dependent, the subject is “the people.”
Plus, back then there was no practical means of distributing arms to the citizenry should a national crisis necessitate formation of militias. It stands to reason, therefore, that militias would be formed from already armed people. I don’t see why this isn’t clear to everyone.
The Senate amended the the text of what was ratified later as the Second Amendment. The original had one comma and was published for over 150 years in textbooks with one comma. The older editions of books, such as the World Book Encyclopedia and the Brittanica printed in the 1950s all use one comma. But somewhere in the 1960s, the government started to use the three comma version.
It is troubling that most of the original copies of the Bill of Rights are “missing” but it my understanding that the New York state’s copy has only one comma.
The wording, “keep and bear arms” was selected because of the events at Boston and Concord. The British Army was confiscating arms and that is why they marched to Concord and Lexington, to collect arms and stores held in centralized locations.
When the original Constitytion was written, Congress had the power to organize, arm and disipline the militia, but that was not seen as adequate protection for the nation. The Bill of Rights was demanded to protect the rights of people.
When the Framers spoke of rights, they always meant individuals people, when speaking of states, they used the powers.
The Second Amendment thus is tied to the proposion that the people must be protected in their right to form a militia and that requires that the people be armed.
“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.”
http://www.geocities.com/ks2ndamendmentsociety/toreadandunderstand.html
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