Guns and Grammar: the Linguistics of the Second ... - English

Dennis Baron, Guns and Grammar, 10
But Nelson Lund argues that if the framers really wanted to make this cause-andeffect
relationship explicit, they should have modeled the Second Amendment on the
Patent and Copyright clause of the Constitution (2007, 14-15). That clause reads,
The Congress shall have Power . . . To promote the Progress of Science
and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and
Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
[Art. 1, sec. 8]
It is almost always possible to point out a better way for the authors of a
proposition to have worded it. But one could respond to Lund that if the framers had
wanted to secure an individual right to gun ownership, they would have written, “Private
possession of arms being necessary to individual freedom” or even, simply, “The right of
the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” without any conditioning
absolute at all. It is worth pointing out, too, that the Second Amendment is the only one
with a conditioning causal phrase, a fact which suggests that the absolute is important,
not just decorative. Lund is aware that the absolute of the Second Amendment is marked;
he actually calls the absolute the amendment’s most significant grammatical feature, and
then proceeds to tell us how insignificant it really is (2007, 12).
The absolute was certainly both familiar and significant to James Madison, who
drafted the Second Amendment: an examination of Madison’s letters and papers shows
that in addition to the Second Amendment’s “militia clause,” he often used absolute
constructions in his correspondence and other writings. A thoughtful writer like Madison
would not have used the construction if he suspected that his readers might find it odd or
unimportant.
The framers and their contemporaries had probably seen their share of absolutes
long before they read the Second Amendment, and it’s also likely that they first
encountered the absolute construction when they studied English or Latin grammar in
school. They might even have been tested on it in some federal version of “No Child Left
Behind.” But even without formal schooling, given normal assumptions about rational
communication, it is safe to assume that readers would have found the absolute phrase in
the Second Amendment noticeable and understandable, as well as intentional and
meaningful.
To keep and bear arms
In addition to the question of the syntax and function of the absolute, the discussion of
the meaning of the Second Amendment focuses on the interpretation of the word militia
and the phrase bear arms.
Bear arms (analogous to, and perhaps initially a translation of, the Latin arma
fero, or arma ferre) typically refers to the act of soldiering and the use of military
weapons. Perhaps the most pertinent American reference to bearing arms before the
Second Amendment is its use in the Declaration of Independence:
The present King of Great Britain . . . has constrained our fellow citizens
. . . to bear arms against their country.
Arms themselves are weapons, and in older uses, armor as well.