Two sentences:
i. 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.
ii. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The first sentence is of course the Second Amendment to our Constitution. The question is whether the second sentence is what the first sentence means. Gun-rights advocates, including five of them sitting on the Supreme Court in 2008, the year District of Columbia v Heller was decided, answer that question in the affirmative. But that doesn't seem to me very persuasive. Imagine, say, Wayne LaPierre, of the National Rifle Association, being able to transport himself in time so that he could advise the drafters of the Second Amendment. Would he urge adoption of above version (i.) or (ii.), or would he be indifferent?
Obviously, he'd prefer version (ii.). There then would be no question that the Second Amendment established an individual right that, a couple hundred years hence and forever, may not in any way be limited or "infringed" by, for example, duly elected representatives sitting in legislative bodies who want to address the public safety concerns of their constituents.
But version (ii.) wasn't adopted.
The problem with the adopted version, from the perspective of someone like LaPierre, is that it places the right being established within a military context, and this military context makes it hard to see how the right belongs to all people. Such an interpretation is augmented, I think, by the phrase "bear arms," normally applied to soldiers, who are sometimes said to be "under arms." The most famous English-language translation of The Aeneid commences
Of arms and the man I sing
and no one is under the illusion that the work is going to be about hunting or home defense.
I have to wonder, too, about the opinion of "constitutional originalists" who think the framers enshrined a right to bear weapons, such as the AR-15 rifle, that hadn't yet been invented when the Amendment was proposed, ratified, and, on December 15, 1791, adopted. Mass murder is with difficulty accomplished by someone bearing a muzzle-loading musket.
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