Grammar and guns

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is one of the most controversial. That controversy will doubtless be fueled by the recent decision of the Supremes to revisit the meaning and extent of this amendment in their upcoming session. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Adam Freedman discusses the role of punctuation in understanding the intent of the amendment, in particular the use of commas. The amendment contains "three of the little blighters," though Freedman concentrates his argument on the second comma.

The actual language of the amendment, however, suggests that all three commas constitute problems in terms of grammatical sense:

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.

At first glance, the first and second commas seem to mark a nonrestrictive phrase modifying "Militia." If we remove that nonrestrictive phrase, which we should be able to do without altering the grammatical sense of the sentence, the sentence, in fact, makes no sense:

A well regulated Militia the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall
not be infringed.

Adding a comma after "Militia" only serves to clarify the nonsensical nature of this construction. "A well regulated Militia" only makes sense if we include "being necessary to the security of a free State."

The full nature of the opening phrase as a conditional is clear when we remove the first comma:

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.

If we remove the opening qualifying phrase (as the NRA so often does, not wishing to deal with the burden of explaining away the beginning of the amendment), "the right of the people" has no condition. That, however, is not the way that the framers intended the language to read.

The whole question of the value of commas in understanding the meaning of the language is completely recontextualized when we look at the third comma. This comma separates the subject of the main clause from the predicate, and thus is completely ungrammatical. Freedman notes that eighteenth century writers did not understand the "rules" of punctuation the way we do today, so we can't put too much weight on "the little blighters." Commas were largely rhetorical in their function rather than grammatical, so commas were placed wherever the writer felt a pause was called for.

Anyone with a smidge of sense should be able to see that the right to own weapons without restriction is entirely dependent upon the need for "a well regulated Militia." The capitalization of "Militia" may not entirely be the era's propensity for capitalizing words for emphasis since that same capital-m Militia occurs elsewhere in the Constitution--Article I, Section 8, and Article II, Section 2. The sense of Militia is clearly tied to state-organized groups that were, before we had a standing military, absolutely necessary to maintaining security. Such groups remained in force until 1903 when the Militia Act created the National Guard, which pulled all state militias together under federal authority. This would seem to render the need for individual citizens to maintain arms without restriction null and void.

And the Supremes have largely upheld this view, most recently in 1939. Despite the NRA's massively funded argument to the contrary, the Constitution, particularly the Second Amendment, does not provide the blanket right to unrestricted gun ownership. In fact, it's questionable that the Second Amendment provides any protection for individual citizens to own guns at this time.

The smart money goes to the Ninth Amendment, that shining gem:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

We've already learned to ignore commas in the framers' language, so we have an amendment that says, essentially, "the people" have any rights that are not expressly forbidden. That includes gun ownership. The question of restriction depends entirely upon laws, and those laws may restrict gun ownership, but those restrictions--from a strictly practical point of view--should not be too restrictive. We have a history of more than two hundred years of gun ownership by individuals, and only a self-destructive legislative or judicial body would attempt to restrict gun ownership entirely.

That does, however, leave room to mandate proper care and storage of firearms (e.g., use of trigger locks) and to outlaw ownership of ordnance with no lawful purpose (e.g., machine guns, bazookas, assault rifles). Pennsylvania is one of the states in which the bar on owning a handgun is pretty low (maybe too low; you can walk out of a store with a handgun in less than an hour--hardly enough time for the blood to cool if you're passionately determined to shoot your cheating spouse), so I own a handgun. I'm a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record and no history of violent instability. Under the Ninth Amendment, I assert my right to own my guns, and I'm not about to give them up--especially not when such well-regulated militia-like organizations like Aryan Nation and Posse Comitatus are running around with theirs.