"Richard The Dreaded Libertarian" wrote in message
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On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 17:51:03 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
In article , clifto
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.

The way I read it is, "Since it is necessary that the militia be
well-regulated, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be
infringed.

What this means that it is the duty of the well-armed citizenry to
keep the militia from turning itself into a police state. In other
words, it's the duty of the citizens to do the actual regulating.

For example, when the militia man shows up with his squad and
says, "We're going to confiscate all of your guns and burn all of
your subversive books", you can lock and load, aim, look him in
the eye, and say, "Guess again, bucko!"

Unfortunately, these days it seems that too many people are willing
to throw away their Liberty in exchange for the illusion of security.

I suppose that's as good an interpretation as any. One of the beauties of
the 2nd, and of many such sentences, is that you can read into it what you
want -- and it's clear that people do just that.

Taking into account what the FFs were trying to accomplish with the Bill of
Rights, I firmly believe that the 2nd was intended to be ambiguous, while,
at the same time, drawing attention to what was then the most uniformly
agreed upon argument in favor of a right to bear arms. After the
Revolutionary War, no state legislature would argue the point, and that was
the desired result.

But the history of the issue over the decades preceding the B of R suggests
that the most common argument (although not, possibly, the most forceful
one) was an individual right to self-defense. Why the FFs didn't seize on
that one, we can only guess. A key point is that there was no debate over
the right itself. It was a no-brainer at the time.

--
Ed Huntress