Quote:
Originally Posted by pj67coll
"A well regulated milita being necessary to the maintenance of a free state," means that there might be some regulations pertaining to the militia itself. It says nothing about guns.
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." means that there are no infringements on the rights of the citizenry to have arms - of any kind - though for obvious reasons the principal ones under consideration are guns.
- Peter.
|
Just an example of the kind of analysis that has gone into interpreting the Constitution - in this case the seemingly unusual use of commas inthe 2nd Amendment.
The first unusual comma --between "Militia" and "being" -- forces the reader to search for a verb for which "Militia" is the subject. That verb does not appear until "shall not be infringed" near the end of the Amendment. The second unusual comma -- between "Arms" and "shall" -- sets off the verb phrase "shall not be infringed" from the preceding language; it suggests that the subject for this verb phrase is not simply "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms." The grammatical effect of these two unusual commas is to link "A well regulated Militia" to "shall not be infringed" to emphasize, in other words, that the goal of the Amendment is to protect the militia against federal interference. The Constitution was drafted with great care, and (unlike much legal writing from the Founding period) its use of punctuation generally conforms to modern conventions, suggesting that the commas in the Second Amendment are not haphazard but rather deserve scrupulous attention.