mdwagner73 wrote:
quickie1 wrote:
guido61 wrote:
quickie1 wrote:Try telling that to a gun enthusiast. He/she will twist every writing...even go so far as to say..."Militias are irrelevant".
Being that they were what was being addressed in the constitution....well...
"Heller" does make militias pretty much irrelevant.
Scalia did 3 important things with "Heller", all of which when taken together seem to **bleep** off people on both side.
1) He confirmed the INDIVIDUAL right bear arms for things like self-protection and hunting.
2) By doing so, he divorced the right from the idea that you can only bear arms if you're in a militia.
3) He confirmed there are numerous restrictions and regulations availble to the government that can be imposed on guns and gun ownership that do not conflict with the right to bear arms.
That's where we are with the 2nd amendment today. People on both sides are free to argue that Scalia got it wrong and that the 2nd amendment "actually"
means something else, but it isn't likely we're going to see any great changes to this legal interpretation any time soon.Fair enough....so our Supreme Court has interpreted their own meaning and amended the 2nd. More "freedoms" and changing the original written word of the constitution.
No, the Supreme Court didn't change the original written word of the Constitution.
"Although Judge Silberman reads it otherwise, the Second Amendment’s second
comma tells us that the subsequent clause, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
Dennis Baron, Guns and Grammar, 10
shall not be infringed,” is the logical result of what preceded that comma, “A well
regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” That is because absolute
phrases like the one at the start of the Second Amendment are commonly set off by
commas and signal a cause-and-effect logical relationship.
Judge Silberman doesn’t call the “prefatory” phrase an absolute, but his argument
tracks that of Nelson Lund in his own discussion of the Second Amendment’s
“preambulatory” absolute (Lund 2007). Lund, whose expertise is law, not language,
insists that an absolute is grammatically independent from a sentence’s main clause, and
so can have no impact on the meaning of that sentence. Commenting during oral
arguments, Justice Kennedy, who clearly preferred an individual rights interpretation of
the Second Amendment, similarly disconnected the two halves of the amendment, though
without dismissing the importance of a militia: “[T]here is an interpretation of the Second
Amendment . . . that conforms the two clauses and in effect delinks them. . . . The
amendment says we reaffirm the right to have a militia, we’ve established it, but in
addition, there is a right to bear arms” (Supreme Court 2008, 5-6).
But an examination of absolutes in English shows that they should not be
delinked.
So what’s an absolute when it’s at home?
The phrase a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State is
known in grammar as an absolute construction.
Quirk et al. (1985) specify that “ABSOLUTE clauses [are] so termed because
they are not explicitly bound to the matrix clause [i.e., the main clause] syntactically,”
adding, “the logical connection between the clauses is primarily one of reason” and
Dennis Baron, Guns and Grammar, 11
“logical relationships . . . are generally clear from the context. . . . In –ing clauses, verbs
used dynamically tend to suggest a temporal link, and stative verbs a causal link”:
Reaching the river, we pitched camp for the night. [‘When we reached the
river, . . .’ ]
Being a farmer, he is suspicious of all governmental interference. [‘Since
he is a farmer, . . .’ ]
[Quirk, et al., 1985, 1124]
This latter example is much like the absolute in the Second Amendment, which
accordingly can be read, ‘Since a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a
free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.’
C. T. Onions noted the apparent separation of the absolute clause, while also
affirming its function as “equivalent in meaning to Adverb Clauses of Time, Reason,
Condition, or Concession, or to an Adverbial Phrase expressing Attendant
Circumstance.” Onions further writes, “Such a group is called ‘Absolute’ [Lat., absolutus
= free], because in construction it seems to be free of the rest of the sentence” (Onions
1904, 66; emphasis added).
The absolute seems to be free or independent, in part, because, as Murray notes, it
is “separated by commas from the body of the sentence” (1795, 162-63). But
grammatical independence is not semantic independence. It simply means that the noun
in the absolute phrase occurs in the nominative or “common” case. The opposite of
independence is governance, the situation in which the case of a noun is “governed” by
another structure or by its syntactic function."
You are correct...they did not change the written word....just the original meaning.
That's all.
guido61 wrote:
This is true. But if you've read Heller than you ALSO know that it says:Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
The decision leaves PLENTY of room for "gun grabbing".
It seems to me from the summary I read of the Heller decision, that the USSC decision confirmed both that the militia is composed of any citizen of majority age and status, AND that militia membership or the existence of active militia was not a prerequisite for the right to arms listed in the 2nd Amendment.
So both expanding and firmly defining the militia at the same time they say its not relevant. 
I guess that's helpful. Wouldn't the existing laws for the disabled, and the Civil Rights Act include those other demographics into the now moot militia ? I would say the original interpretation means the insane (not considered of majority status) would be denied the rights under the 2nd, but I suppose an Originalist could debate that either way.
Help Desk