1. Guns and Grammar: Determining what the Second ... - English

Baron, Language and Law, 1. Guns and grammar, 4the meanings of the phrase bear arms and the word militia in ways that support theircause. In contrast, supporters of gun control who focused on its linguistics insistedthat eighteenth-century readers would have seen the Second Amendment not as atwo-part sentence where only the second part counts, but as a balanced and unifiedstatement where militia refers to a select group of citizen soldiers, and bear armsmeans ‘engage in military activity.’In support of the District of Columbia’s appeal to reverse that lower courtruling, the Linguists’ Brief presented historical linguistic evidence arguing,1. that the Second Amendment was intended to be read in its entirety;2. that the first part of the amendment is both syntactically and semantically tiedto the second;3. that the first part of the amendment specifies the reason for the second: theright to keep and bear arms is tied directly to the need for a well-regulatedmilitia;4. that the phrase bear arms in the 18 th century occurs in military contexts, notones that involve hunting or self defense;5. and that the word militia refers in the federal period to an organized andtrained body of citizen-soldiers, not to any and all Americans, many of whomwere ineligible for militia service.The punctuation and syntax of the Second Amendment Reading the Second Amendment as a statement in which every word counts followsfrom Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) that “itcannot be presumed that any clause in the constitution is intended to be withouteffect.” But even without that ruling, it would have been clear to eighteenth-centuryreaders that the first part of the Amendment was bound to the second in a cause-andeffectrelationship, that the right to bear arms was tied by the framers directly to theneed for a well-regulated militia.In his opinion in Parker, Judge Silberman pays particular attention to theSecond Amendment’s punctuation: “The provision’s second comma divides theAmendment into two clauses; the first is prefatory, and the second operative”(Parker, 13; technically, the first part of the Amendment is a phrase, not a clause).Despite the popular myth that punctuation can mean the difference betweenlife and death, or at least it can cost one a lot of money, we should not give theSecond Amendment’s punctuation undue weight. Eighteenth-century punctuationwas variable, not rigid. Here are some examples from the Constitution itself. In Art.I, sec. 10, the framers write it’s for the possessive form of it:No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any impostsor duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutelynecessary for executing it’s inspection laws.This is not a scrivener’s error but a common usage of the time. Modern practicewould require its, and a student writing it’s for its today would be marked wrong.