"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
...
In article ,
clifto wrote:

Kurt Ullman wrote:
Just Wondering wrote:
Amendment II

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.


That's right, the right of THE PEOPLE (not the militia) to keep arms
shall
not
be infringed.

But the need for a well-regulated militia is what is stated first and
succinctly. You conveniently ignore that.

What you're ignoring is that the entire first part of that is commentary.
The actual meat of the amendment says simply and eloquently, "the right
of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Nope. The first part of the amendment is a well regulated militia. It
is mentioned first, not as an add on, not as an afterthought, but as the
introductory clause of the piece.

It's not a clause. No predicate. It's a nominative absolute phrase.

It sets out HOW and WHY it must not be
infringed.

See my message to clifto. You can make no such assumptions.

The context of when infringement takes place. It sets limits.

It could just as well set a sufficient but not necessary condition, which,
after decades of studying it, is exactly what I think was intended.

If you want to include the last part, you can't pretend that the first
doesn't exist.

Neither can you draw any conclusions about what relationship it has to the
clause just from the sentence itself.



The grammatical construction of the first part sounds stilted in today's
world, but translating it into modernese, it says "Because a
well-regulated
militia is necessary to the security of a free State..."

Pure guesswork. You can make no such assumption with a nominative absolute
construction. You need to know the context, and there is no context.

--
Ed Huntress