"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."
Honestly, seriously.....come on?!!??!?!? Does that grammatically make sense?
NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If the "the right of the people" to bear arms - why the comma????
If, "[a] well regulated Militia...shall not be infringed" why the clause 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.'
If there is a 'right of the people to keep and bear Arms', why the two clauses before that?
Goodness gracious, there is absolutely NOTHING we can gain from that grammatical nightmare except the 'right of the militia...to not be infringed.'
Disclaimer - I love guns. So don't give me any shit about being a leftist, a gun-kontrol Nazi, or whatever the f--k you have in mind, because you only prove yourself a grammatically poor biases S-O-B who can't parse English together.
So, what does that mean?
If I were a textual - and I am NOT - it only means one thing....states (and commenwealths) have the right to form militias.
Extrapolating from that - the right of the individual, is to keep a gun for the purpose of forming a state (or commenwealth) militia.
Q. Does this mean the DC handgun ban is constitutional under the 2nd amendment?
Or the hell - would the Founding Fathers intend I build a tank with automatic machine gun?
Or - would the FF's I have any gun at all?
A. Answer. F--k off!!!
That is the logical equivalent of asking - "so, oranges are the colour orange, so what's 22 / 7?"
Exactly.
"Please Alex, I pick biased irrelevant extrapolations for $1,000"
From a Founding-Father intent/ textualist bias - all I can conclude is 'right to bear arms' was for state militias as vice versa.
So...........what the hell do do we do we automatic rifles and handguns?
The honest answer.....well, from a textualist/FF intent bias --- nothing!!!!!!
In fact, I think the incorporation of the "[insert your state] National Guard" into this US Army violated this right years ago.
When was it - Vietnam? World War II? Come on - the Ohio National Guard was sent to Sarajevo - so perhaps Clinton did this monstrosity.
If you believe this logic - I applaud you as the last sane person in America. Because at least, you are intelectually consistent.
If not - well, perhaps the sun circles the earth....or, you are a non-textualist, as myself. Being a non-textualist, the interpretation of the constitution changes as the country changes (kind of like how the interpretation of the Bible changes as the world changes...so why is slavery unChristian now, whereas for 1863 Christian years, it was debatable???? exactly).
In a nutshell...Clinton and Bush are violating the 2nd Amendment by sending our state national guards overseas....or....we are in a living and breathing constitution.
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Yo, yo RoyaleRant. I sent the previous test comment just to make sure I could get past the steenking security validation that has bedeviled me so oft in the past. Please delete the previous and this one, too.
Yo' daddy
Goodness gracious is right. You certainly make a big fuss over one little comma. That sentence makes perfect sense to me, but then I am not trying to make it mean something other than what I believe it obviously means to me today and also meant to the majority of legal minds from 1787 until perhaps the 1960s when it began to mutate and transmogrify, as all living things sometimes do.
Consider the confusing first comma in this sentence: "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." This is the Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as written and published in 1787. According to your non-textual interpretation theory, we must attempt to find the various meanings of the sentence if the clause "in time of peace be quartered in any house" is applied to all the other parts of the sentence and then find the meaning which most people (or is it merely most lawyers?) agree with, since this sentence is alive.
It gets much worse. In the 6th Amendment we see this unintelligible gibberish replete with confusing commas: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” This breathing sentence is so hopelessly convoluted by its commas that it must be on its last gasp of breath. The 7th Amendment is no better: “...the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.” Why did those damned Founding Fathers put a comma after “by a jury”? Were they stoned or what?
Here's another comma written by a contemporaneous writer that precludes grammatical parsing and therefore renders the whole sentence unintelligible: “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” This was written in 1746 by the English statesman and diplomat Lord Chesterfield. And that entire sentence is [sic], meaning exactly as he wrote it. We can know exactly what he wrote, but we can only conjecture at what he really meant because he stupidly put a comma in the middle of his sentence that, without the comma, makes perfectly good sense.
I think you need to allow for more possible uses of a comma in your grammatical parsing than you currently do. Perhaps reading a little more widely in English literature would help. It is my interpretation theory of the Second Amendment, inter alia, that the Founding Fathers added what we today consider superfluous commas, but which were commonly used in their day, in order to PREVENT confusion rather than to engender it.
Goodness gracious is right. You certainly make a big fuss over one comma. That sentence makes perfect sense to me, but then I am not trying to make it mean something other than what I believe it obviously means. Consider the confusing first comma in this sentence: "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." This is the Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as written and published in 1787. According to your non-textual interpretation theory, we must attempt to find the various meanings of the sentence if the clause "in time of peace be quartered in any house" is applied to all the other parts of the sentence and then find the meaning which most people (or is it merely most lawyers?) agree with, since this is a living, breathing sentence.
It gets much worse. In the 6th Amendment we see this unintelligible gibberish replete with confusing commas: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” This living, breathing sentence is so hopelessly convoluted by its commas that it must be on its last gasp of breath. The 7th Amendment is no better: “...the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.” Why did those damned Founding Fathers put a comma after “by a jury”? Were they stoned or what?
Here's another comma from a contemporaneous writer that precludes grammatical parsing and therefore renders the whole sentence unintelligible: “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” This was written in 1746 by the English statesman and diplomat Lord Chesterfield. And that entire sentence is [sic], meaning exactly as he wrote it. We can know exactly what he wrote, but we can only conjecture at what he really meant because he stupidly put a comma in the middle of his sentence that, without the comma, makes perfectly good sense.
I think you need to allow for more possible uses of a comma in your grammatical parsing than you currently do. Perhaps reading a little more widely in English literature would help. It is my interpretation theory of the Second Amendment, inter alia, that the Founding Fathers added what we today consider superfluous commas, but which were commonly used in their day, in order to PREVENT confusion rather than to engender it.
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